Wth huggablehunks.com is blocked in China.

They're really too free.

I don't particularly like Third World Countries, ergo why I haven't been in one since Penang in 2005.

gladder works better than I thought it would. I'd wager it could be used to bypass Singapore's censorship too, hurr hurr.

Somehow I always thought that when a domain was blocked in China, the page you got would be emblazoned with the words: "The site you have just tried to visit is detrimental to the political, economic, social, moral and/or cultural health of the nation, and has been blocked. Please start a Counter-Revolution to contest this ban", or some such.

Having a blank page is distinctively anti-climatic.

Hurrah for "a more healthy and active Internet environment."

Off to Shanghai today and Hong Kong on the 28th.

Back in Singapore on the evening of 2nd July.

Someone: *** said he just cannot make any sense out of my critical mind existing with my christian faith


MFM: my mother treats the maid like a sub-human, and then wonders why none of them are any good

and she wonders why they're all wilful

my aunt threw away a $50 bottle of luxury honey just because she deduced the maid was consuming some of it. her conversations with my mother almost entirely revolve around their incompetent maids

...

I can't stand living with my parents; I'm so fucked

the noise, the interruptions, the meddling with my belongings, the nagging, the incessant questions

the hypocrisy
the blatant irrationality

seriously considering spending some nights at the office, if possible


Someone: Oh i haven't told you about someone I know who teaches Biology in Hwa Chong Institution.
She asks students to download and bring porn to class. Then she plays the video in class. And this is approved by the school.

The topic is on human sexual reproduction.

She uses the video to debunk their misconceptions about sex.

She tells them their porn videos are too tame.
Not good enough!

Interestingly she's a Christian or Catholic.
No hangups at all. She's pursuing her PhD in Biology at the same time.

And in HCI they conduct RESEARCH.

u r wt u wr Overseas Edition:

- 'Lolita'
- 'I am a disturbing image from your childhood' (seen at Berkeley)
- 'Half naughty half nice'
- 'I can resist anything except temptation' (worn by one of our group)
- 'I give *picture of octopus* great hugs'
- 'Bad girl'
- 'Hustler'

I managed to sneak up on Screwed Up Girl in Borders and wanted to flick my hair in her face. Unfortunately, I forgot that my bag was still on my shoulders so I ended up hitting her in the ribs.

One of my theories about why women go to the toilet more than men is that they have smaller bladders, but this doesn't seem to be the case. Indeed, since they have smaller boddy masses, they have proportionally bigger bladders and so should go less often.

One reason for the haze is that selling wood without a permit is illegal (probably for environmental reasons), even though waste wood can be used for wood chips, plywood and biofuel. Thus, there's a lot of wood to get rid off. Paying someone to clear it mechanically costs $250 per hectare. Setting it on fire only costs $5 per hectare. The choice is clear.

I had to send my laptop in for servicing again since the screen wasn't always turning on and it was back in 5 days (3 1/2 working days). Turns out it was a motherboard problem. They also replaced the wrist guard for free. At least the service is still good.

It seems since May 25th there've been 6-7 rapes in Johor (my friend's been counting). The Straits Times reports the victims as being Chinese girls, while Malaysian sources just call them girls. Neither mentions the race of the assailants.

***

The IPS lifts are the only ones I know of which have buttons you can toggle - pressing a lit one untoggles it.

People at work think I look like or have the impression that I am a PS student. But then as someone commented, he'd rather people think he look like a Political Scientist than an Economist.

Singapore must be the only authoritarian country in the world to fund people to say bad things about it.

Of the limited meal options in my area, the absolute worst is this cafe in PGP called "K Gourmet". The K stands for "Krap", "Kannot Make It" and "Kenna Sai". I ordered calamari and despite a cost of $3.50 the portion was tiny. Meanwhile someone else had carbonara which had chicken ham, thus making it doubly haram. The latter pissed me off so much that I brought Carbonara (made with lots of real bacon) to work for 3 of us the next week.

The Japanese cafe at Capricorn makes their curry with pork. They said it was because many people don't eat beef, so they changed the meat used. Some ask them to change it to chicken, but they think pork tastes better. I totally agree.

***

I saw a group of people walking down from Sheares to Kent Ridge Hall and wearing T-shirts reading: "I am a good looking freshie". I wanted to know which organisation was so shameless to have T-shirts saying that, so as I passed them I turned around - only to see them looking at me. How embarrassing. Another day, I saw a group of people wearing shirts reading: 'The camp your momma warned you about'.

Yes, Orientation season has started (actually it did a while back but I hadn't gotten enough material then yet) earlier this year thanks to Slavery being shortened. Because of the Dragon Girls (the Dragon Guys are delayed for 2 years by Slavery), it seems the gender ratio at Orientation Camps this year varies from 1:3 to 1:5, in favour of the guys. Which means it's a really bad year to do internships or go overseas, though the happy hunting grounds should be open all season.

In other news, SDU can't be very happy this year, nor will they be in 2 years time, thanks to the skewed gender ratios.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 22 (27/5) - Adieu

Americans don't like to carry change around - buses accept exact change on, taxi drivers have signs saying they have $5 in change at most (and that the cash box cannot be opened by the driver) and stores prominently display how much they have in the cashier. This, of course, is because of the threat of petty theft.


Roomies

On the flight, we found that the 2 girls who'd been stranded with us in Yosemite were JAL stewardesses on our flight. I noticed that the non-Japanese stewardesses had their countries of origin on their nametags: subtle discrimination or possible excuse for slightly sub-par Japanese? In fact, I suspect the only reason they hired non-Japanese staff was to make announcements in Chinese (presumably on other flights they will have Koreans etc), and the Singaporean girls who made the announcements all sounded similarly unnatural and like they were reading from a piece of paper (which they probably were, but usually flight attendants manage to make it sound enthusiastic and natural).

The animated characters in the JAL safety video are Ang Mohs. Hah.

JAL's own drink "Sky Time" (yuzu citrus flavor - apparently they used to serve Kiwi) is very nice, like a slightly salty lemon drink.

In Narita I noticed the immigration queues read: "日本人" (Japanese) and "外国人" (Foreigners). Other airports would have written "Japanese Passports" and "Foreign Passports". Tsk.

All the female JAL stewardesses I saw were in skirts but the ground staff seemed to have an option for pants.

Our plane from Narita was very empty - almost as bad as planes were during the first Gulf War, so everyone got a row to themselves.

I tried plum wine. It was interesting, but I still haven't found an alcohol I've liked.

I was telling people I should learn a foreign language after graduation. Someone suggested Chinese.


Quotes:

You're so nice. [Me: I know. So why do I keep getting marginalised?] Because they don't get your GEP humour. [Me: So why don't you get marginalised?] I keep my GEP humour to myself.

[On returning to Singapore] Don't you feel like bursting into song? [Student: What song?] *Sings* Home, truly.


Stanford Trip Private Diaries

"When Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the fact that CNN was basically an American company helped to frame the issue, worldwide, as aggression (analogous to Hitler's actions in the 1930s) rather than as a justified attempt to reverse colonial humiliation (analogous to India's capture of Goa)." - Power and Interdependence in the Information Age, Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye, Jr.

Wth?!

I suppose North Korea's invasion of South Korea was also a justified attempt to reverse colonial humiliation.

This is basically a case of "West bad, everyone else good".

***

Han:

"The vast majority of self-styled political pundits in Singapore are mostly
morons and idiots, who cannot think any original thoughts, and only know how
to espouse the latest ideas in fashion they gleaned from somewhere else."

Quoted in The Political Blog: The Struggle for Hegemony in Singapore's Emerging
Blogosphere; Tan Jie Ying, Dorothy

Quotes:

[On my taking leave] So next week only I am around to service the two of them.

[Me: 'Did' is passive voice]... I thought you were an econs major.

[On carbonara] Actually it's quite healthy, except for the bacon. [Me: Err. Eggs, cream...]

[Me on Orientation: SDU will give you two thousand] For each pair?

[Random girl:] I need to put on some weight.

[On dying her hair black] I'v had enough of the Ah Lian look

What is bacon? Is it the sausage?... [To Muslim:] Bacon. What does bacon look like? [Muslim: Why you ask me? Ask him {me} lah.]

[On taking photos] We do the SMU thing lah - jump.

[On Karen Armstrong's disingenuousness] You must give her credit... Not everyone knows the facts like you.

[On Facebook] It's a limited kind of stalking. [Me: For you to hit on girls at school.] But there are no pretty girls in NUS.

[On me] He was very surprised to find out that I was in NCC for 4 years... [Me: But girls' school NCC is wimpier than boys' school NCC] Fuck you.

Indulge his fattyism (fetishism)

[Muslim:] There're seven pillars. [Me: Of?] That we've to live by. [Non-Muslim: Five.]

[On the 7 Ms] I don't take Marijuana.

[Me: Someone's picking you up?] Yes. [Me: Is it on a motorsikal?] We're not Malay.

[On the JB police not caring about a gang rape] Aren't you glad separation happened?... Apart from the fact that none of us would've gotten educated.

I think driving on the Malaysian expressway is like playing a bumper car ride. (a)

[Me: Once you go black -] You never go back. It's so true!... That's all I'll say, it's so true... They're so hot.

[To me] I want a provocative article, which was why I asked you to write it.

[Indian:] Please don't do a MBA in NUS. There are so many - no offence - Indians.

[To someone saying that girls are a distraction] You think of girls as chores and tasks and assignments. They're not essays to be written and handed up.

I also don't like spicy food... [Me: But you grew up eating it]... Yeah weird huh. I'm Indian.

The whole concept of a liberal arts education is to learn nothing of practical value.

"The thing that impresses me the most about America is the way parents obey their children." - King Edward VIII

***

My favourite periodical:

April 12th:

"Of course, America still tops many league tables by a wide margin. For example, it is the world's biggest debtor nation; it guzzles the most energy; and it has the biggest prison population. But perhaps these are not things to boast about."

"Fossils

SIR – I found your description of the dictatorships in Myanmar and North Korea as “Neanderthal” to be quite unfair (“The great game in Asia”, March 31st). Neanderthal man is famous for his premature extinction, whereas the regimes in Myanmar and North Korea are successful survivors in a rapidly evolving political world. Neanderthals also divided labour between the sexes, as you have noted (“Mrs Adam Smith”, December 9th 2006). But to the best of my knowledge neither Myanmar nor North Korea allocates power with gender in mind.

Moreover, there is no scientific evidence about the socio-political organisation of Neanderthal settlements that points to them being casually dominated by ruthless men happy to oppress and exploit their own people.

Frédéric Laforge
Lausanne, Switzerland"

[On Segolene Royal] "Critical [of 35-hour-week], because too much power for employers (sic)"

"Russia's ability to cause harm to itself and to others in the cause of proving its greatness should never be underestimated."

"Since the dawn of agriculture, man's most enduring relationship with forests has been to cut them down"


"Some Americans fret that there is a double standard. Black comedians such as Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock use the word “ho” all the time, without controversy. And Stevie Wonder refers to himself as “nappy-headed” in his song “I Wish”. Ah yes, but those black comedians are mocking misogynistic rap culture, and Mr Wonder was mocking himself. The more obvious double standard is that Jesse Jackson, a black politician who led a protest against Mr Imus, once referred to New York as “Hymietown”.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a more consequential racially-charged dispute ended this week. The state attorney-general exonerated three white lacrosse players at Duke University who had been accused a year ago of raping and assaulting a black stripper at a party. The media and much of the Duke arts faculty had trumpeted the case as an example of how wealthy white men abuse their power over poor black women. But the accuser kept changing her story. DNA evidence appeared to clear the three, and one had a solid alibi."

"When staff moved into the new Reykjavik headquarters of Actavis last year, the headaches were literal. Unable to tell whether the glass doors were open or closed, executives of the Icelandic generic-drugs firm kept walking into them."


May 10th:

Chronically happy

SIR – Well, nothing is really new. Your article on the unexpected improvement to patients' emotional health after they were injected with a bacterium recalls a similar effect that has been long identified in people suffering from tuberculosis (“Bad is good”, April 7th). Known as Spes phthisica, or the euphoria of the tuberculous consumptive, this partly explains the disease's impact on a long list of aesthetes, including George Orwell, D.H. Lawrence, Franz Kafka, and Amedeo Modigliani. Frédéric Chopin complained that he could not compose unless he was coughing blood. John Keats, “With anguish moist and fever dew”, poured out his ineffable poetry as the disease accelerated.

An interesting aside to this is the aphrodisiac effect of tuberculosis, so familiar to staff working in sanatoriums. As a nursing sister in my hospital once said, “You need a blowtorch to separate them.”

Dr Dermot Kennedy
Glasgow


June 2nd:

"Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell, observed Frank Borman"


June 9th:

"SIR – What a coincidence. The map of abortion laws in your article highlighted those countries that either prohibit abortion altogether or restrict it severely, and is almost identical to regions that are distressed from overpopulation. Nearly all those states are suffering severe social stress, ethnic tensions and civil disorder. They include almost all of the countries that the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation says will need food assistance this year.

John Bermingham
Denver"

"It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail." - Gore Vidal

***

Having been forced to use a Mac for 2 weeks, I was acquainted with many of its failings:

- There's no right mouse button
- You can't resize windows normally, but only from the bottom right
- You cannot press "escape" to close an MSN window
- There is no backspace, only delete
- There are a gazillion modifier keys - function, control, alt/option and the Apple button, and the system is inconsistent: Apple + Tab is the equivalent of Alt + Tab in Windows and Apple + Tilde is the equivalent of Ctrl + Tab, but in Firefox Apple + Tilde doesn't do what Ctrl + Tab does, so manual dexterity is needed in changing fingering positions to switch between tabs and applications in turn; Alt + Left skips a word to the left, but Apple + A selects all text.
- Focus keeps running around in Firefox. Page down doesn't always work. (this may have been a system configuration specific issue)
- When you open (not save) a file in Firefox it isn't saved to the cache but the desktop (this may have been a system configuration specific issue)
- Apple + Tab switches between applications, not windows, so when the MSN messenger icon jumps in the dock showing there're new messages, when you switch over you have no idea which windows the new messages are in. These windows may not even be visible, being hidden behind others, resulting in a frenzy of frantic clicking to find them.
- Of all the laptops, the Mac had the most trouble finding, connecting and staying connected to wireless networks

Of course there're the little touches, like how the power supply plug magnetically snaps into its socket, the cover snaps shut mangetically and the light on the Caps Lock key itself that turns on when it's on, hurr hurr.

"Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye." - Miss Piggy

***

Gene Expression: Physics Envy - "And yet, even then, physicists will be the first to admit that even the most powerful mathematical machinery they are able to bring to bear on a problem can deal successfully with only the very simplest situations, beyond which their equations are useless. Thus, for example, their equations can be solved for the two body problem but not the three body problem in Newtonian mechanics; they can solve the Schrödinger equation when there is only one proton and one electron interacting, but not when there are even two protons and two electrons, let alone anything more complicated than that... Contrast this with the situation in economics. Here the elementary particle, so to speak, is the individual human being, no two of which are alike. What's more, the forces of attraction and repulsion that each individual feels for the goods of this world cannot be measured with any precision at all, much less to an accuracy of 20 decimal places. Furthermore, these forces of attraction and repulsion do not remain constant, even approximately so, over time and place for the same individual, let alone for different individuals, who vary enormously in their likes and dislikes."

The Straight Dope: Hair today, more tomorrow? How effective are treatments for baldness? - "1. Castration. Don't be a wuss. A real man does what it takes to get results. Male pattern baldness is thought to arise from a particular version of an androgen receptor gene. If you've got the wrong one, a testosterone breakdown product, dihydrotestosterone (DHT), gradually reduces hair growth by shrinking the size of the hair follicle, meaning thinner and eventually no hair. No testosterone, no baldness. Whatever other beefs they may have, eunuchs have been famed since the days of Hippocrates for killer hair. Caution: Castration is best thought of as a preventive measure. If DHT has already wasted your follicles, shutting off the tap now won't necessarily bring them back."

zynfandel: why women make bad drivers - "1. They get emotional about driving. 2. Their attention wanders. 3. They make split second decisions but don't have the balls to carry them out. 4. They turn to glare at other drivers. 5. They put on makeup in the car."

YouTube - Famous Sheikh on the Risks of Female Masturbation - "She will bring disgrace upon herself and her family. This will be a disaster, and some relatives might kill her... Obviously, killing her is forbidden and is a grave sin. Even if she did fornicate, she does not deserve to be killed. At the most, she should be flogged."

FaceBookProfile.com - Facebook ASCII, Hacks and Tricks - "The Completely Unofficial Facebook ASCII Art, Photo, Album & Wall Resource"
Ooh, ASCII art for walls.

New lease on life comes with big IOU; British man suing doctors - "The "Last Holiday" scenario has the terminal patient learning to really live for the first time in her life. She tells off her boss, quits her job, empties her bank account and goes on a dream vacation, where she learns all sorts of valuable lessons about embracing life and love. And then she finds out she's not dying after all! It was a big mistake! Talk about your happy ending... Doctors told John Brandrick he had cancer and he had probably less than a year to live. "The 62-year-old council worker quit his job, sold his car, stopped paying his mortgage and dug into his life savings so he could treat himself and his relatives to expensive restaurant meals," reads the story in the Daily Mail... "Turns out Brandrick didn't have a tumor, as originally diagnosed. He had pancreatitis, which is not life-threatening. It's the classic good news/bad news setup. The good news is, you're going to live. The bad news is, you're flat broke.""

A Brief History of Economic Time - "Rising income is only part of the story. One hundred years ago the average American workweek was over 60 hours; today it's under 35. One hundred years ago 6% of manufacturing workers took vacations; today it's over 90%. One hundred years ago the average housekeeper spent 12 hours a day on laundry, cooking, cleaning and sewing; today it's about three hours."

Interracial Marriages Surge Across U.S. - "In some categories of interracial marriage, there are distinct gender- related trends. More than twice as many black men marry white women as vice versa, and about three-fourths of white-Asian marriages involve white men and Asian women. C.N. Le, a Vietnamese-American who teaches sociology at the University of Massachusetts, says the pattern has created some friction in Asian- American communities. "Some of the men view the women marrying whites as sellouts, and a lot of Asian women say, 'Well, we would want to date you more, but a lot of you are sexist or patriarchal,'" said Le, who attributes the friction in part to gender stereotypes of Asians that have been perpetuated by American films and TV shows."

"Women want mediocre men, and men are working hard to become as mediocre as possible." - Margaret Mead

***

I was railing against the injustice of the legal system, that it was unfair, inconsistent and sexist that men have no say at all over the fate of a foetus that they have jointly conceived with the woman (since it is regarded as an issue over the sovereignty of the woman's body), while suddenly bearing prime financial responsibility for the foetus once it is born as a baby (since it then becomes "you banged her. Face the consequences").

This means that if I don't want a woman to have my child, I have no say at all over the foetus's fate but am still obliged to pay for the child once it has been born. Conversely, if I want a woman to have my child, she is free to abort it at any time. The sheer injustice of it all rankles me.

A really strange excuse I was given was that an abortion is a medically invasive procedure and that you cannot force a woman to have it. Meanwhile, if the male doesn't have to pay for the child, the woman may in despair abort the foetus anyway since she may not be able to support it.

This strange structural inequality results, I think, from focusing only on the point of view of the woman and giving it primacy. The Chinese always blamed childlessness on the woman's failure to conceive (as opposed to the man's failure to impregnate her), and here we see that nothing has changed - a woman's being with issue is the "fault" of a man (as opposed to being the choice of the woman). However, the modern twist is that now the man has no rights - only responsibilities, and the woman has no responsibilities - only rights.

An added paradox is that those supporting these sexist laws will almost certainly support the right of women to have late term abortions, so the mere act of birthing a foetus is sufficient to transform it from a parasitic, incomplete lifeform that has no right to life to a living, breathing human being with rights (not least child support) due to it.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 21 (26/5) - Yosemite

Tong Wei liked to change in the closet. It was very strange. Trying to discover the appeal of doing so, I tried changing in the closet too. It was quite cramped but I managed to do it - the main problem was the coat hanger which was in danger of taking out my eye if I was too reckless in my movements.


Female, if found in male toilet, will be handed over to police



The bus driver gave great commentary but I needed to sleep, having had only 4 hours the night before, 4 hours the night before that (at the airport) and 3 the night before the Grand Canyon, so I missed out on some of it.

The reason why there's a bear problem in Yosemite is because people feed them. That is why there's a $250 fine for feeding animals there, and there's a federal magistrate on duty 24/7.

Most injuries in the park are not from bears but deer, because people think they are like Bambi. The only fatality so far caused by an animal has been caused by a deer:

"A 5 year old boy was gored to death by a deer in Wawona in November, 1977. The boy, Colin Robert Neu, was visiting the park with his parents and having a picnic near the Wawona school. The boy was feeding potato chips to a deer, one by one. He then brought the bag of chips down to the creek and the deer pushed the bag out of his hands. When the boy bent over to pick it up, he startled the deer (a buck) and the deer 'stabbed' the boy under his armpit. Unfortunately, the antler nicked an artery and the boy died." (Santa Clarita Guide - High Sierras - Yosemite National Park)

Coyotes in Yosemite are smart. In late winter, there's no food so they stand in the middle of the road looking miserable and wait to be fed by motorists. If you try to take their picture, they run off.

There was a huge fire 17 years ago, the damage from which is still evident. It came about because they liked to put small fires out but this led the underbrush to build up, increasing the risk of big fires. The area damaged by fire had no tall trees and had mostly small bushes and undergrowth, with some short trees.

It was much warmer than I expected, despite the forecast claiming it'd be colder than San Francisco; "Isn't it interesting that the same people who laugh at science fiction listen to weather forecasts and economists?"


Half-dome and El Capitan (? - I think this is what the bus driver said, but I might've gotten confused, especially about the latter)
There was no highway rest point to view these. There was one at Cascade Creek and the Leaning Tower/Cathedral Rocks, and many cars stopped there but there was no space for the bus. At Cascade waterfall there would've been space but there were 10-11 cars parked there, so. Renting a car is really the best way of viewing the place (but Memorial Day Weekend is probably not the best time to go), though you do lose the commentary so maybe the 2-3 day trips in vans are better (they don't cost much more; transport is probably the major cost).

Fern Spring, the smallest waterfall in the park, was cute.

Finally, at Tunnel View, we got to get off, admire the view properly and take pictures.


El Capitan, Cloud's Rest, Bridal Veil Falls




I wondered why the Grayline tours, with big buses, cost the same as the small vans. We'd actually wanted the latter (which had a Sequoia tour also), but by the time everyone decided on what they were doing both the small van tour recommended by the hostel and another company the first had called up were fully booked, so.


Bridal Veil Falls


El Capitan


Yosemite Falls


River


Yosemite Valley

Our bus driver had gotten married to a girl he met who was working at Yosemite at the Yosemite chapel a few years back. They had recently had his 4th child (his oldest is in his 40s) and her 1st.

The bus driver then let us off to walk around for about 2.5 hrs. Most people went to eat lunch but I wasn't hungry (perhaps I was carsick) and anyway decided I would be better off eating later in case I wanted to spend more time walking about, so I only had a scoop of ice cream from the shop at the swimming pool.


You're in the middle of nature and what do you do? You go to the pool. Also, I don't get the funny gym machine beside the pool.


Yosemite Falls, Upper and Lower


Lower Yosemite Falls





Lots of people were clambering beyond the point warning of danger past it. Hurr hurr.


Spray (I was too close to safely point the camera at the falls)


Me
If I come back in 20 years, I'm not sure that I'll be up to clambering on the rocks and hiking, revolutionary advancements in cybernetic technology notwithstanding.






Valley

















Butterflies


Boating

There was an information panel on moonbows (like rainbows except by the light of the moon). Unfortunately the picture of a moonbow was in sepia (!) so it couldn't be seen properly.

Even in Yosemite, a pint of Haagen Dazs cost only $3.95. Meanwhile, the food was only slightly pricey, rather than being hideously expensive, very expensive or just expensive. This was because:


Anti-profiteering regulations for concessionaires. Obviously this didn't apply at the Grand Canyon.

There was a display of tagua nut products - the inside of the nut looks like ivory, so they hope this will save elephants.

I then had lunch (of sorts) which was surprisingly good - a pizza with a great crust (fluffy and chewy at the same time - probably baked with a bit of cheese in it too).


Yosemite Falls


Some rock formation from bus


Opposite El Capitan



Opposite El Capitan


El Capitan - 'the largest granite rockfall in the world'



El Capitan. Yes, I know the stitch is weird.


Me opposite El Capitan


Bridal Veil Falls, Leaning Tower


Sign showing water level in 1997 flood



Valley Point


Me on a log

At this stop point, the bus driver suddenly drove off despite our running after the bus (ie We were only a few seconds late), leaving 5 of us behind (3 in my group and 2 others). At this, my headache immediately became worse.

As the saying goes, "Leave one man behind, shame on him. Leave five people behind, shame on you." Evidently, he hadn't counted the number of people in the bus before driving off, or even done a visual inspection to make sure no one was left behind (then again perhaps he did, but the fact that 4 of us were Singaporean Chinese and 1 Singaporean Indian and there was a group of Japanese tourists there at the same time had something to do with it).

Now, normally I'd accept a modicum of blame for such an untoward occurence, but the fact was that this bus driver never told us what time to return to the bus (not at 5 minute photo stops, anyway). In fact, at the first photo stop of the day I'd asked him when we should come back to the bus and he'd replied unhelpfully, "Just take a few pictures and come back".

And so we were left in the middle of nowhere with no transport, no handphone reception and no passports, with all of us flying the next day. Some of the girls didn't even have their wallets (moral of the story: keep your wallet on you). Coincidentally, none of us remembered the bus's number or the driver's name ("Tom") either. Luckily, the aforementioned Japanese tourists agreed to give us a lift, albeit only to Oakdale.


Fire damage, 17 years on

On the way to Oakdale, I suddenly got mobile phone reception. Coincidentally, my brother-in-law called me so I got him to get me Grayline's number and Tong Wei called them up. However, the lady on the other side ("Mona") was very unhelpful. Their lost and found office closed at 10, but they stopped processing people at 7 (?!), so we would have to go back the next day at 6am. She refused to check which bus it was though they had 1, maybe 2 tours to Yosemite that day at most and refused to call the bus driver for us. When Tong Wei asked to speak to her manager, she said he was on vacation and gave us his email address.

Luckily, just after we got off the bus in Oakdale, our bus pulled into the parking lot. The driver claimed he'd counted but had made a mistake (he missed 5 people?!) To add insult to injury, 2 of the other passengers scolded us for missing the bus. Luckily, the rest were more sympathetic, with some telling us that they'd told the bus driver just after he moved off, pointing out that we were missing. The bus had then gone back but we'd left by then.

As a saving grace, there was an A&W at Oakdale, albeit one combined with a KFC. Neither was labelled as an "Express". Yet, when I walked in, I found that they didn't have Curly Fries either!!! Furthermore, the only way the menu was bigger than in Vegas was with the provision of Onion Rings and a few Kids' options. I asked the counter girl if A&W had stopped selling curly fries, and she said it depended on the outlet. Furthermore, MFTTW has since informed me that she visited 2 A&W outlets on the East Coast and neither had Curly Fries either, so I'll probably have to visit Bolehland for my fix. Although I was very pissed off, I bought an A&W glass mug for $3.99 and a large rootbeer float (which could be refilled! American fast food places rock)

The only "The Golden State" license plates I saw were tourist license plate souvenirs with generic first names on them. Bah.

When we got back to San Francisco we found the fog was even worse than the previous day. When we viewed the city from the Bay Bridge, a giant fog cloud seemed to have descended upon the city.


Fog cloud

We hadn't eaten a proper dinner, so Tong Wei and I went to Chinatown


Chinatown Gate

Some of the shops selling random crap were still open:


'Got rice?'


A family dinner - for one person

Shunning more expensive and tourist-looking places, we went to a crowded, unassuming-looking restaurant whose kitchen greeted our entrance. I had Char Siew Che Cheong Fun. I was expecting something like what we get in dim sum restaurants here, but instead I got a dry version with a lot of stuffing (char siew, cilantro and egg strips).


Effusive sign in Eastern Bakery. We got fried Bow Ties here.
'Eastern Bakery is the oldest bakery in Chinatown! Since 1924! We were here before the Great Depression, the Bay Bridges, World War II, etc... President Bill Clinton came to visit Eastern Bakery on July 23, 1996, from 5:00 PM to 5:30 PM. He shook hands with everybody inside our bakery. All of us, our customers and employees were thrilled, and it was just like a short but big, exciting and memorable party!!!'


Shop windows

We were walking past a shop when we saw a woman sitting in the recessed doorway of a shop with some stuff around her. Presumably she was homeless, but she was in a conversation with an unseen person. Either she was talking on her mobile phone or she'd gone crazy.


Quotes:

[On Jabir and I] Between the diva and the monster, I choose the diva.

"I'm as pure as the driven slush." - Tallulah Bankhead

***

The Life and Works of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179)

"Hildegard's writings are also unique for their generally positive view of sexual relations and her description of pleasure from the point of view of a woman. They might also contain the first description of the female orgasm.

When a woman is making love with a man, a sense of heat in her brain, which brings with it sensual delight, communicates the taste of that delight during the act and summons forth the emission of the man's seed. And when the seed has fallen into its place, that vehement heat descending from her brain draws the seed to itself and holds it, and soon the woman's sexual organs contract, and all the parts that are ready to open up during the time of menstruation now close, in the same way as a strong man can old something enclosed in his fist.

She also wrote that strength of semen determined the sex of the child, while the amount of love and passion determine child's disposition. The worst case, where the seed is weak and parents feel no love, leads to a bitter daughter...

The Most Distinguished Migraine Sufferer
It is now generally agreed that Hildegard suffered from migraine, and that her visions were a result of this condition. The way she describes her visions, the precursors, to visions, to debilitating aftereffects, point to classic symptoms of migraine sufferers. Although a number of visual hallucinations may occur, the more common ones described are the "scotomata" which often follow perceptions of phosphenes in the visual field. Scintillating scotomata are also associated with areas of total blindness in the visual field, something Hildegard might have been describing when she spoke of points of intense light, and also the "extinguished stars." Migraine attacks are usually followed by sickness, paralysis, blindness-all reported by Hildegard, and when they pass, by a period of rebound and feeling better than before, a euphoria also described by her. Also, writes Oliver Sachs

Among the strangest and most intense symptoms of migraine aura, and the most difficult of description and analysis, are the occurrences of feelings of sudden familiarity and certitude... or its opposite. Such states are experienced, momentarily and occasionally,by everyone; their occurrence in migraine auras is marked by their overwhelming intensity and relatively long duration.

It is a tribute to the remarkable spirit and the intellectual powers of this woman that she was able to turn a debilitating illness into the word of god, and create so much with it."


I was reading NUS Philosophy course descriptions (even though I won't be able to do a minor in it due to silly bureaucratic reasons). The course "Women in Philosophy" mentioned her; I only knew her as a composer, so I Googled and found this article which was probably not written by a native speaker.

Two notes about the extract:

1) Why is a nun writing about a personal experience of sex?
2) Why is it a good thing that illness is mistaken for a spiritual condition?

"Truth is beautiful, without doubt; but so are lies." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

***



Star Wars: Spectacular Hi-Res Galaxy Map

"The Star Wars Galaxy Map was first published in Issue One of The Official Star Wars Fact File in 2002; and then later republished in Issue 65 of the Star Wars Insider, which was released in February 2003."

(Courtesy of Tim The Great)

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 20 (25/5) - San Francisco

When we exited Oakland airport after a few hours of sleep snatched in the waiting area, we found that it was hideously, horrendously cold - worse than any other day of the trip (and indeed night). To think that it was almost memorial day.

The AirBART (shuttle between the airport and the BART station) driver had a shaved head, except for a tiny tuft of hair at the front. He said another bus driver had been fired for letting passengers stand in front of the yellow line (drawn on the floor just behind his seat). Vinod left us to join his uncle, so we were left with 5 (Guan Zheng went to join his friends at Stanford at night and the next day).

My 4 year old rechargeable batteries were starting to kaput, but it was okay because Canon had given me 4 new ones when I bought my camera, and it used only 2 at a time.

After checking into the hostel, the rest wanted to explore Chinatown, Fisherman's Wharf and the Golden Gate Bridge (3 of them had not visited San Francisco with the 12 of us). I ran off to Golden Gate Park.

Seen at Market Street Cinema (a strip joint): "See the beauty, touch the magic". They also had loads of promotions: "Swingers Saturdays" (couples got half off), "White Collar Wednesdays" (you got $5 off admission on showing your business card), "Dirty 30 Thursdays" (men above 30 got $5 off admission) and "Recovery Mondays" (free admission day and night!)


Haight-Ashbury

There was a place called "Pork Store Cafe" (which had won an interesting award: 'Best flirtation with grease'). I couldn't resist and had lunch there. Though the menu was not particularly porky, I zeroed in on a BBQ pork loin sandwich.

The BJ in Haight-Ashbury was ridiculous - $4.20 a scoop (doubtless without tax). This was more than a pint at 7-11 ($3.99).


Nice house in Haight-Ashbury

T-shirt design seen in a shop window: "Super design by some underground artist you've never heard of before because you're not cool". In another shop window: "Hair-models wanted. All types of colours and cuts". I wouldn't volunteered if I'd had more time.


Golden Gate Park


Pond


Bowles Rhododendrons


Conservatory of Flowers

I then went to look at flora.


Breadfruit plant. Unfortunately it had no fruit.


Philodendron Liana

There was a display on the Goldman Environmental Prize. Olya Melen from Ukraine said her efforts to save the Danube Delta caused her to be 'denounced by the corrupt and lawless pre-Orange Revolution government'. Such ethnocentrism and presumptuous cultural imperialism was unseemly in a venue ostensibly dedicated to showcasing flora. They need to close the place down for interfering in other countries' internal affairs.


"Miraculous fruit"


"Double Coconut"


Wardian Case - this is a self-sustaining plant life support unit.


Highland Tropics. This was one of several climate-controlled rooms dedicated to plants growing in different habitats. The weather in here was a pleasure to enjoy, especially compared with the Lowland Tropics room.

In the aquatic plants room, they had rice. Hahahahahahaha. One woman asked me, "how does rice grows?". She had to repeat herself before I realised she was talking to me. I was amused that she thought I'd know about rice - maybe I should have asked her if potatoes were tubers.


Aquatic plants: Amazong Water Lillies, Rice


Pitcher plants (I think)


Me at the Highland Tropics


Red Orchids


Plants in a famous pot


Milk tree


Carnivorous plants


Venus Fly Traps


Flypaper plants


Pitfall pitchers


Hanging from the ceiling


Turtle plant


Another plant on the ceiling

I then went to the AIDS memorial grove.









Next was the Shakespeare Garden, where they had plants mentioned by Shakespeare.





I saw some people letting a dog lap water from a saucepan. Ugh.

Then I wandered over to the Conservatory of Music. The finishing touches were being put on the place; a Verdi memorial was being blowtorched (to seal in the varnish, I suppose).


Beethoven memorial


De Young museum opposite



Although the Beethoven memorial was grand, the Verdi one was even more impressive. Thus, when I saw the largest and most elaborate monument, I was left in no doubt that it was to honour the greatest Composer of all time. Who was it, I wondered? Might it be Bach or Mozart? Perhaps they would choose someone more revolutionary like Shostakovich, contemporary like Philip Glass or controversial like John Cage.


Monument to Francis Scott Key, the man who composed the Star Spangled Banner (... it figures)


Some priest

My final destination in the Golden Gate Park was the Japanese Tea Garden. Admission was $4, but what the hell, I went for it anyway, especially since I wouldn't get to visit Alcatraz and didn't have time to visit the Palace of the Legion of Honour (besides which, I'd gotten enough fake sights in Vegas; why see a replica of a Parisian building?!) If I'd had come between 9-10am on Monday, Wednesday or Friday admission would've been free (wth).

[Addendum: It was designed by Makato Hagiwara, inventor of the fortune cookie.]






Pavilion where you could order a pot of tea for $2.95 (or thereabouts). It also offered 3 types of cookies, including fortune cookies. I hung around for a while and realised that the girls in kimonos were talking to each other in Cantonese.





The shop sold a lot of stuff, but much of it was Chinese, not Japanese. For example they had Chinese cookbooks, zodiac posters, dragons (they looked Japanese to me rather than Chinese; I have since discovered that Chinese dragons had five toes and Japanese dragons three, but am unable to cross-reference back with the store's dragons), traditional silk purses and mock license plates with English names in Simplified Chinese characters (eg David is "Da Wei").


There was a bronze peace lantern from 1953, commemmorating the 1951 peace treaty with the US. Japanese school kids donated money to buy the lanten. I couldn't help but think of parallels with the "donation" the Overseas Chinese Association gave Japan in 1942.


Zen Garden




1790 Buddha from Tajima


I was quite surprised to see this Japanese Jacob's Ladder. At first I thought it was just there for kids to have fun on (you need to *climb* it, rather than walk on it), but one of the 46 prints in "Thirty six views of Mount Fuji",Fukagawa Mannen-bashi, shows a bridge which also has a steep angle (though not as steep as this one).

[Addendum: It's a moon bridge.]



I then met the rest at Castro to have dinner with Daniel.


Wth is gay cleaning?!


Gay pride flag.

It was end May but I saw my breath forming mist in front of my face. Wth.


We ate at Cote Sud, which had great food (and a wonderful free flow of bread had been baked with butter, giving it a great fragrance and slight crumbliness, which made up for the small portions). However, I'm still trying to figure out what "solid gay family travel values" are.


Creepy toilet in Cote Sud. I can just imagine Snow White being offered the apple here.

The tram conductor gave me a ticket which expired half an hour before I got on the tram (instead of 1.5 hours after). Gah.


Quotes:

*Brings word document onscreen* Look at that... Don't look leh, very embarrassing.

[On getting a Mac] I'm sick of Windows, and it looks good. I'm superficial. Looking good and dumb. [Student: At least you look good.] But you can't connect to wireless [networks].

[Random comment while bathing: I'm inside] Okay. We're outside.

Karen Armstrong talk (MUIS lecture 2007)
The Role of Religion in the New Millennium
Part 3

If you go to war to make peace, this makes you as bad as the people you fought since you betrayed the values you fought for - Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay are examples. [Ed: Curiously, she had earlier cited World War II as a necessary war. This also invalidated her explanations of the wars Mohammad fought; did they bring him back to the state of "jahilliya" (belligerence, striking first and imposing your values on others)] Don't imprison people who hate in a prison of hate - it destroys you.

Violence can make things worse for your people. Morocco suffered from 9/11 since tourism went down. US Muslims used to say that the US was the best place to be a Muslim and that it was easier to be a good Muslim in the US than in Iraq. Now this is no longer the case.

Christians have always had a problem with money worship. They're not supposed to have any - they should give it to the poor. Don't get a job, don't worry about tomorrow. But this was the religion that gave birth to/endorsed Capitalism through Calvinism - it was a remarkable transition. It is easier for a Muslim to accept democracy and secularism than it was for Christianity to birth capitalism.

Some Muslims seem to hate non-Muslims. People misquote the Koran and always quote lubriciously the parts about slaying unbelievers. This has nothing to do with belief. The instructions were to slay the arrogant, aggressive, chauvinistic people of Mecca - translating 'kafir' into 'infidel' is a wrong translation. Mohammad was telling them this on the eve of battle, during which you don't tell your followers to turn the other cheek. I noted that since she had told us that if you go to war to make peace, this makes you as bad as the people you fought since you betrayed the values you fought for, his followers were then to turn into arrogant, aggressive, chauvinistic people. I also noted that she could be accused of likewise misquoting the Koran. Really, when it comes to the misquoting game, you can get as good as you give.

In Thatcher's time, there was a group called the "Wets". In John Major's time, there was a group called the "Bastards". These were political factions and everyone knew who was being referred to with these terms. Islam does not have an undying hatred of unbelievers. It has a good record of living with other religions, better in fact than Western Christendom. For example, Jews in Spain and Jerusalem (one Byzantine emperor forbade Jews to live in Jerusalem, but Caliph Omar invited them back). I noted that, once again, this applied only to Peoples of the Book - others were forced to convert.

The next qustion was: should humans ignore their religious differences, embrace Universal Brotherhood with homogeneity being a result.

The response was a vehement no. Because of her religious past, she was into syncretism but it's best to remain in the religion you're born in. All religions have what you need: each has its genius and its failings. Appreciate other religions and learn what you all have in common and share tips. Christians can learn from Buddhists to stop being so obsessed with dogma, theology and belief - you need practise not just theology. I noted that she did not say what Muslims could learn.

The word 'toleration' is not good because it's very grudging.

It was then asked: if secularism has its failings, how can it be integrated with religion? What are your comments on Sam Harris/Richard Dawkins.

The reply was the secularism was possible. Secularism is like religion. It fails from time to time but it also has successes. The USA was the first secular republic, but it is also the second most religious country in the world (India is ahead). Yet it is not fundamentalist. The US is moving to pluralism and it has interesting theological questions, but secularism can be unskilful also.

I noted that 2 questions were asked from a mic and 1 from the floor. The rest were all read by the Chairman (the Minister) from pieces of paper. Given how everyone else seemed to be writing in successfully, I thought I should write in too, but then it'd definitely have been censored by the Chairman.

There is violent secularism - the 'wretched people who published the [Danish] cartoons'. They are secular fundamentalists; there are extremists on both sides. 97% of Muslim youths, while disapproving of the cartoons, disagreed with the violence. Similarly, most Danes, though defensive of Free Speech, were upset that they had caused such offence.

At this I recoiled and almost cursed aloud: had we seen the same cartoons? Perhaps she had confused the Akkari-Laban dossier, with the extra images of dubious provenance contributed anonymously by third parties, for the original 12 Jyllands-Posten cartoons. Why did she not then condemn the wretched people going on a Grand Tour to spread FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) and inciting violence by outright lying?

Dawkins is a secular fundamentalist. He is a typical Brit in many ways, sharing the disdain for religion that most of my friends (who think my mad for working and writing on discredited stuff) have. Dawkins is obsessed with discredited religion. I have been on panels with him and when you point out that until the 19th century no Christian or Jew thought Genesis was a literal account, he just looks at you and then continues his tirade.


I noted that I was quite sure although most educated people might not have believed Genesis to be literal truth during the Enlightenment, the hoi polloi certainly did, not having either the capacity or time to ponder how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Furthermore, prior to the Enlightenment project (in the Middle Ages and before), many educated people accepted literalism (or at least a form of it). For example, Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews is certainly not a metaphorical account of Creation (Book I is subtitled: "Containing the interval of three thousand eight hundred and thirty-three years from the Creation to the death of Isaac.").

St Basil wrote: "I know the laws of allegory, though less by myself than from the works of others. There are those truly, who do not admit the common sense of the Scriptures, for whom water is not water, but some other nature, who see in a plant, in a fish, what their fancy wishes, who change the nature of reptiles and of wild beasts to suit their allegories, like the interpreters of dreams who explain visions in sleep to make them serve their own ends. For me grass is grass; plant, fish, wild beast, domestic animal, I take all in the literal sense. 'For I am not ashamed of the Gospel'."

Tribesmen sitting under the night sky (for that is how Genesis started) and looking up at the stars certainly believed in literalism.


Europeans are weary of secularism. You must be serious in your questioning. The Hitchens and Dawkins brand of secularism is a retreat from religion but religion can be good. When you're in a restaurant, after a strong first course you sometimes get a sorbet to clean your palette. Europeans want to rinse their minds.

Dawkins is fanatical. He has a closed mind. Secular fundamentalists can be as bigoted as religious fundamentalists, just as religious fundamentalists can be as bigoted as secular fundamentalists.

The next question was that the person agreed that we needed more compassion. He contested that people were lazy. No one knows about the hereafter because if you stick to the tenets of your religion, it is your best hope for the hereafter. The underlying motivation is a selfish one for salvation.

The answer: I don't want to interfere with beliefs. If you believe the world was created in 6 days I can't share that belief but this doesn't matter to me. I don't care what belief you have if it makes you kind. It's fine as long as you share your wealth and are kind. If you have a closed mind, are unkind, unjust, dismissive - whether you are a liberal secularist or a traditional religionist - it hasn't worked.

The Koran is dismissive of belief, and so am I, about 'self-indulgent guesswork about matters no one can prove one way or the other like the Divinity of Christ' is bad for it makes one belligerent. Ironically I noted that she had precisely and neatly defined religion, adding yet another layer of contradiction and paradox to her thesis.

St John said that faith that can move mountians is useless without charity. It is not correct theology that matters - you must lend compassion. In Buddhism once you achieve Enlightenment you must come down from the mountain and preach to living things. I am not interested in the details (? - transcribing is unclear) of belief.

I noted that to her the ends seem to justify the means (religions are good if they make you compassionate - this seems to justify a Noble Lie). This seemed Machiavellian but I don't have the time/energy to research anti-consequentialism, so. Suffice to say that there's a reason why perjury is an offence in court (even if its end result is good). Process is very important: if I steal a rich man's wallet and give the contents to beggars along Orchard Road who only want to buy something to eat, I am Robin Hood and have a price posted on my head. If the PAP government taxes the top tier of income at 40% and gives the poor unemployment cheques, this is instead called welfare and is a good thing, even if the end result is the same.

The Q&A session then came to an end. The question that I had wanted to ask was this: "Since this is the MUIS lecture, I would like to ask you for your views on Islam and apostasy. Having just come from Malaysia, you might be aware of Lina Joy and her unsuccessful battle spanning almost a decade to be allowed to leave Islam. Even in Singapore, I have a friend who is a murtad (apostate) who is absolutely terrified of coming out to his family. In his words: "I don't want to be blown up". Meanwhile, all 5 schools of Islamic jurisprudence condemn apostasy and prescribe harsh punishments for it. How would you advise Muslims to be more compassionate towards apostates so that they can fully embody the spirit of mercy and compassion of the Prophet (PBUH)?"

The President of the Muslim Converts Association (Darul Arqam) then ended with some platitudes about Singapore and Darul Arqam being a happy and diverse place.


Despite my misgivings about the details of her speech, one might ask if I would agree with her basic messages: religious tolerance is good, secularism can be bad and religion good, 'skilful' religion makes you compassionate to others and good and context is important in religion. Surely only a mean old grinch could disagree. Unfortunately, I am a mean old grinch; basically she was repeating fluffy things people want to hear and believe and that sound good until you critically examine them, upon which they fall apart.

Religious tolerance: I am very much for religious tolerance but her version of religious tolerance seems to be following the modern transcendental syncretic line that all religions are the same, all religions are good (in their 'true' form) and that all of them are true (in a sense, or have elements of truth).

The problem with this that if all religions are the same, good and true, this negates any criteria that we might have in sensibly evaluating religion. If a religion qualifies by virtue of being a religion then there is nothing differentiating (and more importantly, there is nothing that can differentiate) a fly-by-night cult with an established (and presumably more credible) faith.

Respecting the right of other people to have their religion does not mean that everyone is right (and MUST be right), for if everyone is right then everyone is also wrong; "Always remember that you are special. Just like everybody else."

Secularism can be bad and religion good: On the contrary, I'd argue that it is precisely secularism (and liberal democracy) that is needed to protect religion, since it does not privilege any one religion over the others; also when a religion is made dominant it often goes to the dogs so secularism protects dominant religions as well.

Religion can certainly be good, but when people press for religious 'rights', too often they want to impose their version of religion on the unwilling. This is why secular liberal democracy is needed, to protect people from having religion foisted on them.

'Skilful' religion makes you good: She seemed to pull a pre-determined criterion for determining religious worth from out of thin air without justifying it, and relied on the moralistic fallacy (what we want to believe is true is true) to get it by us. I wasn't convinced - it would make more sense (or at least be less insensible) to say that the religion with the highest mindshare was the truest, since its truth managed to convince the most people.

Certainly, if a religion makes you compassionate and such this is a good result, but in evaluating truth claims, proper criteria must be determined: saying that the sun revolves around the earth to escape crucifixion may be wise, but this does not mean that the statement is true.

Of course this is likely why she deftly avoided the issue of religious veracity, preferring to focus on the changes religion resulted in and the nebulous concept of 'skilfulness'. Yet even then she was on shaky ground. The positive values she credited 'skilful' religion with fomenting (primarily compassion) were not inherently religious in nature: secular humanism is eminently capable of promoting them. In fact, in boiling religion down to secular principles she was removing all religious content from it. In that case, we don't need religion (if, as she says, its primary purpose is to teach us to be good) and can dump it for philosophy. After all, this follows the principle of Occam's Razor and anyhow, calling the vacuous shell 'religion' mocks the concept of religion.

Context in religion: Context is surely important in interpreting religion, yet the trouble with context is that many things can be justified with it. Taken to an extreme, one might say that religious precepts were meant for and only for the time in which they were propagated and can thus yield no morals across temporal constraints (ie We shouldn't follow religion today since it wasn't designed for our context).

For example, one could justify Muslims eating pork thus: In ancient times, pork was not always a healthy meat to eat because of the danger of trichinosis but modern rearing and cooking methods mean that this is no longer a problem. Thus, pork is no longer haram. Another example is that polygyny was allowed by Mohammad because there were too many women, the men having died off in wars. Thus, in modern China Muslims should be allowed to practise polyandry, since there are too many men and not enough women (some suggest male homosexuality as another possibility).

It's a good bet that virtually all Muslims would disagree with these two examples. What, then, is the arbiter of context?


A saving grace was that she didn't bring in the tired point about how religion has done lots of good (she talked mostly about how it makes you compassionate, which is in the realm of personal development rather than phenomena-that-change-the-world-for-the-better). For abrogating all responsibility religion has for causing evil while simultaneously claiming for it all the good that can remotely be connected to it is most dishonest, and there's no good reason not to believe the reverse - that religion can only cause harm and never good.

"Skepticism, like chastity, should not be relinquished too readily." - George Santayana

***

Before flying off to the UK for good, my brother-in-law gave me a basket with foreign currency: Indian Rupees, Australian Dollars, Hong Kong Dollars, Chinese Yuan, Vietnamese Dong - and 45 British Pounds Sterling.

"The visionary lies to himself, the liar only to others." - Friedrich Nietzsche

***

S. Rajaratnam:

“Mr. Lee believes in original sin, that man is sinful. Chok Tong believes that man is redeemed…He’s (Lee) a knife, he needs a grindstone. The grindstone must be tough…”

Karen Armstrong talk (MUIS lecture 2007)
The Role of Religion in the New Millennium
Part 2

Arabic tradition was to be belligerent, strike first and impose your values on others. Mohammad tried to promote forbearance and mercy but this was not as popular. He had to fight the people of Mecca because they tried to kill Muslims. The Koran articulates that war is sometimes a necessary evil but must be fought out of self-defense, not belligerence (like World War II). If the enemy asks for peace, no matter how unfavorable the terms are to you, Muslims have to lay down their arms [Ed: This sounds dubious]. As an example, what Mohammad made the Haj with 1000 Muslims, some people tried to slaughter them but they ran into the sanctuary. Mohammad then negotiated with his enemies and accepted their disadvantageous terms though some of his followers were so upset they wanted to mutiny. When they returned to Medina he had a revelation - this was a great victory for Islam because they were filled with the spirit of peace. Violence - even verbal violence - is unreligious.

I wonder if all of her Mohammad stories were from the Koran. Some might be from hadith.

All major World Religions promote compassion and feeling for others. All advocate the Golden Rule. The first to promote it was Confucius in the 5th century BC. Later, a Rabbi living just before Jesus was told by a pagan that he'd convert to Judaism if he could stand on one leg and recite the whole of the Jewish religion. The Rabbi then said: "that which is hurtful to you, do not do to others. All the rest is commentary". Another time, there was a gathering of rabbis and all but one thought that the Golden Rule was the most important part of Judaism; the only dissenter thought "these are the generations of Adam" was more important because is meant the whole human race was one. Benevolence and compassion cannot be confined to your own group; you must love others, even those not of your ethnic group or ideological camp. Buddha said to treat all beings with concern [Ed: Except plants].

I noted that traditionally, the Golden Rule was to apply only to fellow believers and not to those outside the group - this was ascriptive inegalitarianism in action. Even Jesus, commonly cited as an example of open-heartedness, only wanted to preach the Gospel to other Jews; it was St Paul who transmogrified early Christianity into Pauline Christianity with its emphasis on preaching to gentiles. Also, this was not surprising, being a manifestation of a meme promoting reciprocal altruism.

Leviticus talks of how important it is to take care of strangers. You cannot molest strangers, and should love them as you love yourself because you were strangers in Egypt.

I found it extremely bizarre that she chose to quote Leviticus. For someone keen on using "context" to explain away everything people were uncomfortable with, she ignored how Leviticus was chock full of the strangest, most inane and shocking things, and I'm sure she was likewise cherry-picking from many other sources. Furthermore, the Old Testament notion of hospitality includes offering your daughters for the enjoyment of the (male) strangers you host - she conveniently ignored that bit.

"Love" is not a feeling of warm tenderness to strangers. As used in Leviticus, it is a technical, judicial term used in international treatires in the Middle East. 2 Kings who swore to love each other would look out for and support each other, look out for his best interests, be loyal and defend the other.

Jesus said to love your enemies. When Mohammad conquered Mecca he stood at the Kaaba and invited his tribe to enter Islam. He didn't force or compel them. The Koran is absolutely clear about that - there is no compulsion in Islam. All men are from Adam and Adam was from dust.

On the other hand, as Wikipedia writes:

Muhammad and the Jewish tribes of Medina

"After his migration to Medina, Muhammad's attitude towards Christians and Jews changed. Norman Stillman states:

During this fateful time, fraught with tension after the Hidjra [migration to Medina], when Muhammad encountered contradiction, ridicule and rejection from the Jewish scholars in Medina, he came to adopt a radically more negative view of the people of the Book who had received earlier scriptures. This attitude was already evolving in the third Meccan period as the Prophet became more aware of the antipathy between Jews and Christians and the disagreements and strife amongst members of the same religion. The Qur'an at this time claims that it will "relate [correctly] to the Children of Israel most of that about which they differ" ( XXVII, 76).

Jewish opposition "may well have been for political as well as religious reasons". On religious grounds, the Jews were skeptical of the possibility of a non-Jewish prophet, and also had concerns about possible incompatibilities between the Qur'an and their own scriptures. The Qur'an's response regarding the possibility of a non-Jew being a prophet was that Abraham was not a Jew. The Qur'an also claimed that it was "restoring the pure monotheism of Abraham which had been corrupted in various, clearly specified, ways by Jews and Christians". According to Peters, "The Jews also began secretly to connive with Muhammad's enemies in Mecca to overthrow him."

After each major battle with the Medinans, Muhammad accused one of the Jewish tribes of treachery (see Surah 2:100) and attacked it. After Badr and Uhud, the Banu Qaynuqa and Banu Nadir, respectively, were expelled "with their families and possessions" from Medina. After the Battle of the Trench in 627, the Muslims accused the Jews of Banu Qurayza of conspiring with the Meccans, then exterminated the male members of the Banu Qurayza. The females and children were sold as slaves.

Two types of explanations are given for Muhammad's treatment of the Jews of Medina: Theological and Political. The theological explanation given by some Arab historians and biographers is that:"the punishment of the Medina Jews, who were invited to convert and refused, perfectly exemplify the Quran's tales of what happened to those who rejected the prophets of old." Others offered a political explanation. F.E. Peters, a western scholar of Islam, states that Muhammad's treatment of Jews of Medina was essentially political being prompted by what Muhammad read as treasonous and not some transgression of the law of God. Peters adds that Muhammad was possibly emboldened by his military successes and also wanted to push his advantage. Economical motivations according to Peters also existed since the poorness of the Meccan migrants was a source of concern for Muhammad. Peters argues that Muhammad's treatment of the Jews of Medina was "quite extraordinary", "matched by nothing in the Qur'an", and is "quite at odds with Muhammad's treatment of the Jews he encountered outside Medina.""

In case the naive objection is raised that Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and so cannot be trusted, contentious and well-trafficked bits (like the above) are always heavily contested and so backed up with citations. I also note that no compulsion in religion doesnt apply to apostates (murtads) or to people other than People of the Book (Jews or Christians).

The Koran is suited to a world which needs pluralism because it accepts and honours other world religions. The Koran says: "Tell the People of the Book - we believe what you believe. Your god and our god is one and the same". I hope I wasn't the only one who picked up on this referring only to people of the book; after all, Mohammad destroyed allthe idols in Mecca except for the Kaaba when he conquered it.

The Sufis have a tradition of tolerance. When in ecstasy, they will cry out that they are neither a Jew nor a Muslim nor a Christian [Ed: Presumably they say nothing about whether they are a pagan]. Do not press forth exclusively and disregard the rest, because God is not confined to one creed; everywhere you turn you see the face of Allah. Everyone praises only what they know. If you only praise your own religion, you blame the belief of others. Ignorance is bad. [Ed: Presumably she forgot the first and most important pillar of Islam: 'There is no God but Allah and Mohammad is his Prophet']

In the Hebrew Bible there is a story about Abraham. He was sitting outside his tent and saw 3 strangers. He treated them with hospitlaity and found one of them was his god. The Hebrew word for holy means 'separate' / 'other'. The otherness of the stranger is akin to that of God. It brings us out of our comfort zone and allows us to transcend ourselves.

Religion will help us in the new millennium because of the global face of terrorism and unrest. The Golden Rule is essential for survival. The Golden Rule should be a political/religious force. There is disquiet with economic forces.

Then the Q&A session started.

The first question was rubbish, something about the afterlife and how she'd treat it. She said not to dwell so much on the afterlife, because you should look at your current life. I noted that the raison d'etre of much religion is precisely a preoccupation with improving the conditions of the afterlife.

The second question was that if compassion was the core of religion, why were people not set on it? The answer was that people don't want to practise compassion. They want a weakly uplifting faith, like dilettantes in art and music who dabble but don't want to go all the way because it is agonising. People with compassion can change the world, for example Nelson Mandela who invited his jailer to sit with him and his family at an event after his release.

The next question was that there are calls for moderate Islam and that the only way for it to survive is to change and adapt to modern society. But the person disagreed: Islam instead must go back to its roots of compassion. There is no need to modernise to survive. Compassion is the central emphasis of Islam: it can succeed in converting the political situation in the world.

The answer was that compassion is the only thing to succeed in the modern political context. Sages preached compassion because they were pragmatic. If you are compassionate, and it changes you, it works. If you don't practise the Golden Rule, it is folly and you see the results. I noted that there was a reason why most Saints die horrible deaths.

The subsequent questions were all vocalised by Yaacob Ibrahim who had collected a long series of written questions. It was asked if secularism worked in Europe but not the (I presume she meant Muslim) colonies because in the latter it was forced on them. Can Islam and secularism be compatible? For example Malaysia is a weird implementation of a moderate Islamic state.

She replied that secularism was essential in Europe because of Enlightenment ideals. Politics and religion mixing resulted in disaster. So secularism was essential for modernity because it was deep. Secularism was good not for its ideas but for freeing the economy - if a priest looked over your shoulder you couldn't work well.

I had no idea what she was on about about secularism and economics: she seemed to be spinning a just-so story. The only way I can think of how religion impeded the European economy was usury laws, but there was a region Jewish moneylenders existed and I'm confident eventually an analog to Islamic Banking would've emerged.

She continued that in other parts of the world modernity could take a different course - not just in colonised areas, though colonisation could make modernity harder and delay modernisation. Rapid secularisation was bad because it didn't allow the area to follow its own dynamics and forces. It was not likely to put down roots in people, especially if secularism was lethal. In Iraq, they don't want secularism because when you state secularism they associate it with Saddam Hussein.

I noted that it was presumptuous to reject secularism on behalf of a people - why not ask them (eg The referendum after the Islamic Revolution in Iran)? To say on behalf of a people that they were not ready for secularism was deeply insulting - aren't they capable of deciding such things for themselves? Also, religion should not be imposed on people who were unwilling to accept it (eg Apostates, girls who don't want to wear headscarfs) - communitarianism is well and good if and only if there is a voluntary mechanism of exit from its tyranny.

Secularism has produced failured like Hitler and Stalin. I sighed at the use, once again, of this tired, old, discredited example. The examples of Hitler and Stalin should make us even more eager to reject religion and embrace secularism (in the form of liberal democracy) precisely because Fascism and Communism are like religions in having dubious ideology of questionable provenance (and like fundamentalist religion in sanctioning dissenters, discouraging questioning and imposing ideology on people). Indeed, it is precisely secularism that can protect religion, since it does not privilege any one religion over the others; also when a religion is made dominant it often goes to the dogs so secularism protects dominant religions as well.

It is premature to say that everyone must follow the Western secular model. Religion is better off opposing and challenging the state. The Shiites separated religion and politics as a sacred principle for centuries so the idea of separation of religion was rife in the Muslim world. This is why Khomeini's merging of the two was shocking. Politics is dirty business, and religion advocates the loss of the ego. Politicians do not know this, especially in the democratic world, because they have to get votes and see themselves on TV. I noted that in the non-democratic world, politics was even dirtier and bloodier and politicians had even bigger egos (eg Turkmenbashi and Kim Il Sung who is North Korea's Eternal President despite dying in 1994), so once again I had no idea what she was talking about; she liked to say a lot of things which people instinctively agreed with, but on closer examination found to be false.

Yaacob then interjected that politics was practised different in different parts of the world, and that politics was compassionate in Singapore. The audience then laughed (presumably agreeing with him) and someone else noted that Opposition politicians were treated with a great deal of compassion here.

The next questions were that if people kill your people and perpetrate injustice, can you still be compassionate? If you worship money it is not easy to be compassionate. There is a perception that Islam is stuck in enmity with non-Muslims. How can this perception be corrected?

The answers were that it was easy for her to talk about compassion because she had a privileged life. However, violence breeds violence and destroys your soul. Someone has to break the cycle of violence.

Karen Armstrong talk (MUIS lecture 2007)
The Role of Religion in the New Millennium
Part 1

This talk was co-organised by the Muslim Converts' Association of Singapore. I suggested to someone that he start the Murtads' Association of Singapore and he said I was crazy and he didn't want to be blown up.

Response was supposedly overwhelming, but I saw many empty seats.

At least one of Karen Armstrong's critics has been attacked as having "no academic training in Islamic studies whatsoever". Yet, I note that she suffers from the same lack of qualifications, yet has escaped attack. As Dawkins comments (about a study about prayer and recovery from illness), if science refutes religion everyone claims that they work in different realms, yet if science ever supported religion it'd be eagerly seized upon by these very same people as "proof" of its veracity.


The session opened with multiple blessings (I hope any reciprocity would be welcomed, but doubt it) and the obligatory platitudes. Among other things, last year's MUIS lecture had the highest ranking Sunni Mufti in the modern world coming to speak. Perhaps next year they'll invite a Jew (or we can hope, anyway).

There were then some remarks from Yaacob Ibrahim, who claimed that the traditional thinking that religion was good and encouraged good values was being questioned because of terrorism. Of course, this isn't true, for even the Greek philosophers were questioning the veracity, utility and consequences of religion, such Enlightenment luminaries as Voltaire roundly criticised it and many Founding Fathers of the USA had scathing words about it. He then claimed that we were bombarded by misleading images from the media, wondered if the journalists had gotten it wrong and Karen would give us a reality check on religion, ignoring the fact that the Singaporean media overwhelmingly propagates a discourse favorable to a 'desirable' point of view.

Finally, the talk started (and I shall switch to paraphrasing of what she said, with "I noted" or "I thought" to mark my interjections).

Religion is often seen as an absolute claw to progress. London cabbies always tell me that religion is bad, is violent and has caused all the major wars in history; it has also dragged people into the past and is intolerant and unwelcome of change. I would say that it's not religion per se, but it definitely plays a role, depending on the religion involved.

There's a lot of bad religion about, or as the Buddhists put it, there is a lot of 'unskilful' religion. Terrorism is a form of religiously articulated nationalism, like what brought Europe World War I and II. Hamas is an example of a resistance movement finding expression in religious terms, due to an asymmetric world with an unequal distribution of power, and that terrorism is a way of fighting back.

The modern economy had a domino effect - living in proximity to strangers polarises us because we have to live with strangers, but religion can help in smoothing a rocky century.

There is widespread religious disquiet with modernity. Modern, secular Western style governments all separate religion and poltics, and there is thus a reaction by religiosity which feels itself under siege: a turn to fundamentalism (a term she deemed unsatisfactory, especially to Muslims, since it was a term specific to American Protestants in the 1920s and had no easy translation into Arabic but was foisted onto them). Even fundamentalists aren't monolithic.

Fundamentalists drag their gods and religions from the sidelines to centre stage. In the mid-20th century, secularism was thought of as an up and coming philosophy to kill religiosity but this has been proven wrong. Fundamentalism is not an atavistic reaction to modernity, but an attempt ro recast old religious tradition in terms of the 20th and 21st centuries. All fundamentalism is rooted in fear, a conviction that the secular/liberal establishment wants to wipe out religion. When fundamentalists feel threatened and colonised by the ethos of Harvard, Yale and Washington DC they feel they need to fight for survival and push up the barricades.

Religion has a symbiotic relationship with aggressive secularism. For example in the Scopes trial, they won the case but lost the war, since US fundies withdrew from the mainstream, created their own media and educational institutions and planned a counter-offensive, emerging in the late 70s. Before the Scopes trial, US fundies were on the left of the political spectrum, willing to work with socialists and liberal Christians but after Scopes they swung to the right where they remain. When under attack they became more extremist.

I was flabbergasted at this. It is important to note that feeling under siege is not the same as being under siege. Evolution being an 'attack' is bad enough, but religious tolerance (eg Not displaying the Ten Commandments in a public courthouse) is often seen as an attack on religion. Accommodating intolerance, bigotry and condemning generations to wallow in ignorance in the name of tolerance is preposterous. Even in the name of realpolitik (stopping fundies from going on a rampage) its merits are questionable - as Lyndon Johnson said on signing the 1964 civil rights act: "We have lost the south for a generation." (one might also think about the merits of Emancipation)

Muslims feel attacked by modernity and colonisation. Secularism developed slowly in the West over 300 years, but in Muslim countries it is being imposed too fast. The elite accept it, but a large majority are stuck in their primal ethos. Ataturk closed madrasahs, forced Sufis underground and forced people to wear Western dress. The Turks looked modern but didn't grok modernity. Secularism was not liberating but seen as an assault on the faith. Similarly, the Shah of Iran made his soldiers rip veils of women off with bayonets. In 1935 his soldiers shot hundreds of demonstrators in a holy shrine, so Secularism was seen as lethal.

Sunni fundamentalism developed in Nasser's concentration camps. He imprisoned Muslim Brotherhood people in them and they underwent mental and physical torture, so moderate/liberal people became fundies.

There is much talk about a clash of civilisations, and US politicians use this concept to formulate policies [Ed: Wth?! Most of them stick with palatable talk - she is engendering a clash of civilisations herself by creating a false impression of the US]. It is wrong to think the Muslims recoil at the Modern World - when they first encountered it in the early 20th century they recognised it as deeply congenial to their traditions and they liked modernity, European customs and European countries. One religious figure said: "In France, I saw Islam but no Muslims. In Cairo, I see Muslims but no Islam". This was because Europe had social equality/justice and was closer to the spirit of the Koran than the Muslim countries.

Iran Shiite clerics campaigned with secular intellectuals to demand democratic reforms of the Shah. They won concessions in 1906 but in 1908 oil was discovered so the British didn't let Parliament function freely. The top Shiite cleric said that the new constitution was the next best thing to the coming of the Shiite prophet because it curbed the Shah's tyranny. Western hypocrisy in having democracy at home but imposing the Shah on Iranians was bad.

So Muslims are not inherently against progressive politics. With asymmetry, religion is a way of articulating distress. Islamic civilisation does not endemically oppose modernity. I noted that the Middle Ages was a flourishing period of Islamic modernity.

Religiosity turns you from violence, and violent devotees have lost the plot. All world religions began with a recoil against violence. The catalyst for religious change is horror at the violence going on, with societies filled with violence on an unprecedented scale (like the world today). I contest this hotly, but don't have the time or energy to expound on this so interested readers can read up on religious origins on Wikipedia.

Hindu priests in the 9th century BC took the violence out of the Indian liturgy which hitherto was filled with mock battles and sacred raids. It took 2 centuries but the warriors were persuaded to abandon sacred wargames and take up a more anodyne form of religion, to look within for the cause of violence in the human psyche.

In the Classical Period, Yoga needed you to purify yourself and practise ahimsa. You couldn't even swat an insect, get angry or be impatient. You had to persuade your guru of your serenity and affability to all.

Jesus practised ahimsa [Ed: Not all the time] and Mohammad, though depicted in the West as a Warlord, lived in a very violent period with trival violence [Ed: A tacit admission that he didn't either]. Mohammad was against 'ignorance' (more properly translated as 'irascibility' and 'aggression') - the chauvinism of the desert Arabs.

"Why in moments of crisis do we ask God for strength and help? As cognitive beings, why would we ask something that may well be a figment of our imaginations for guidance? Why not search inside ourselves for the power to overcome? After all, we are strong enough to cause most of the catastrophes we need to endure." - Bill Schell

***

When my brother-in-law got to the airport, he found that he was 20kg overweight so he had to offload 12kg and repack 3kg of stuff.

This despite my having a weighing scale at home.

As I told him even before he did his packing: "You must do things the smart way, not the Hwa way."

"Contrary to general belief, I do not believe that friends are necessarily the people you like best, they are merely the people who got there first." - Peter Ustinov

***

"essentially, the best path for an individual in SG to succeed in SG is to be not-Singaporean- to carry a different passport, study from mid-teens onwards, go through disounted tertiary, work, and finally stop at PRship in SG (to own property etc), then retire back home to a cheaper spot"

"This reminds me of a conference I sat through many years ago in Central Asia in which a Chinese scholar was meticulously establishing a claim to the territory of one of the Central Asian states on the basis of archaeological digs which turned up Chinese coins. "I love that analysis," I responded, "because on the basis of it most of the known world would be American due to the global dispersion of American dollar bills.""

***

NUS Alumni Web - The Alumnus: Donors' Wall Project

"We know we can count on your help and support! Join other alumni who have already come forward to build Alumni House for themselves, and for you too. You’ve passed through the hallowed halls of Singapore’s oldest and most popular educational institution, and your days as a student may be a fond memory. But don’t let your ties with your alma mater become ancient history – now is the best opportunity to honour the past, by embracing the future."


Funny, I thought Singapore's oldest educational institution was RI (founded 1823), not NUS (founded as the Straits and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, in 1905). And saying NUS is Singapore's most popular educational institution is a bit like saying that Ong Teng Cheong was our most popular Elected President.


Addendum:

My No 1 Fan:

My brother is graduating in July. Yesterday, he found a piece of mail in that familiar and hated yucky brown NUS envelope, complete with NUS Logo.

Me: "Woohoo! Results out already right!"

Him: "Don't be an idiot."
*Opens envelope*
"Oh maaaaaan..."

Contents:
Appeal to Parents to give their graduating child the BEST! graduating present ever. Donate to *that shitty thing as mentioned in the post* and get your CHILD's name on the wall. For JUST! 100! DOLLARS!

Him: "Can't get money out of the alumnus? Target the parents."

Me: *Glad to no longer be in the institution*

"Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody." - Benjamin Franklin

***

u r wt u wr:

- 'Princess in shirt'
- 'I know what boys want'
- 'Skinny bitch'
- 'Kiss me angel' (this woman was quite old)
- 'I ♥ my boyfriend'
- 'Sweet girl. By no entrance.'
- 'Watch your step... You might fall for me' (worn by a very fat woman)
- 'I borrow this guy from my friend' (contributed)
- 'I left my boyfriend at home' (he was following her) (contributed)
- 'I can only please one person per day' (contributed)

"I think on-stage nudity is disgusting, shameful and damaging to all things American. But if I were 22 with a great body, it would be artistic, tasteful, patriotic and a progressive religious experience." - Shelley Winters

***

MFM on the League: when did you form this idea? it sounds like something a bunch of teenage boys would come up with


Me: Why is Miss Norway from the Philippines?!

Someone: Miss Norway is from the Philippines because the Norwegian girls are built like vikings

Me: viking not chio meh

Someone: no. they are big, chubby with very.... unevolved looking features.

Me: uhh
people say scandinavians are all good looking

well. everybody loves an asian girl

Someone: yeap. Scandinavians are good looking only because of stereotype, i mean they are nice looking in that they are tall, blonde, with boobs and curves but they'd look like giants in Singapore. I was the shortest and smallest there which was ... weird to say the least.

and not just giants, their features are not very nice. But the ones mixed with Korean blood and other races are gorgeous coz they have the height, the asian build, the nice features, shiny hair and curves.

it's like perfect.

Me: height + asian build?!

Someone: the narrow shoulders, small waist, don't put on weight so easily as opposed to broad shoulders and thick waists and big thighs.


Someone else on the Unemployment Theory of Relationships: HAHAHAHA

i like the part where you describe the different types of unemployment

and it's sthg only an econs student can think of


Me: what do you think of the lion of st mark here

HWMNBN: it's a picture of the venetian
in vegas right?

what IS your question? i missed the subtext

Me: "what do you think of the lion of st mark here"
there's no subtext
it's explictly stated

HWMNBN: what, as in naming a hotel in vegas "venetian"?

Me: WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE LION OF ST MARK YOU SEE IN THIS PHOTO

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 19 (24/5) - Las Vegas

Huishan, not wanting to miss her flight (which was earlier than the one the rest of us were on), went exploring Vegas with me, while 5 others went to the Primm Valley factory outlet to shop; for most, it was their second time at a factory outlet in our 3 weeks, but it was quite a good deal, time spent notwithstanding, for they got 'free' transport to the place (a $5 'fuel surcharge' was levied) and a free buffet lunch - this was done to promote their casino (there was supposed to be an age check, but some of them sneaked through).

Even the McDonalds signs in Vegas glitter. Gah.

There're more 6969 mobile billboards at night. The guys are probably lonelier then.


Mandalay Bay


Luxor


Mandalay Bay

We wanted to look at the Shark Reef Aquarium, but at $15.95 it was beyond our reservation prices (mine wasn't very high since after my last aquarium I realised they're all the same - sharks were the only redeeming factor for this one). The handout the hostel gave us claimed it was cheap, but I suppose in comparison to gambling costs it is. Adding insult to injury, the Birds of Mandalay Bay which according to the handout were supposed to be in the lobby had been nixed YEARS ago (probably birdshit problem).



Luxor Atrium. Supposedly the largest indoor space in the world.


Luxor Atrium


There was a Krispy Kreme in Excalibur!


It wasn't fresh off the belt, but it was good enough.

Tap water in the Bay Area was unpleasant, in LA it was bad but in Vegas it was really bad. It could give the Island of Doom a run for its money.


New York New York


Excalibur


MGM

In MGM there was a lion habitat.


MGM Lions. This one very intelligently jumped into the glass.








MGM Lions necking



These are the 8th or 9th generation in a line of lions started by the lion you see in the MGM logo. They're only about a year old.



Unfortunately they didn't have the big lions (like the MGM logo one). Probably when they get that big they start eating people.


They charged $25 to take a picture with the few-month-old cub. Wth.


New York New York


Wth. This place didn't even sell Schnitzel, but just hot dogs. Stupid Americans. The same food court also had a Panda Express, which was a self-proclaimed gourmet Chinese food outlet (right).

I saw an ad advertising a College Girl for $69. This seemed insanely low, so I speculated this didn't include sales tax, gratuity and fuel surcharge (and the condom probably would cost $10).

For lunch, we went to the A&W I'd seen earlier in the day while riding down the Strip in the Deuce. I hadn't eaten A&W since Penang in 2005, and hadn't gotten to eat it in the US in 2005 so I was very pissed off to find out that not only did this outlet not have non-beef items, they had NO CURLY FRIES (at the time I thought this was because it was an A&W Express paired with a KFC express). I had to settle for a coney dog (which sucked), normal fries (which were not bad - they were KFC's crispy fries and had more flavour than normal fries but still paled in comparison to curly fries), Wisconsin Cheese Curds (which were surprisingly good) and a Root beer float (which was, unsurprisingly, good).

Me: I will swallow the indignity. I will suffer the unsufferable and endure the unendurable.
Huishan: It's just bloody curly fries.


'Show us your package' (???)

We then went to Circus Circus where actualy circus acts were performed.






Circus act



The grand finale:


Hair spinning. Ouch. She's probably going to suffer from hair loss when she ages.


Circus Circus


Mirage


The Mirage aquarium had 20,000 gallons of saltwater, but otherwise it was like the Wisma one.




Ad for "Bare pool lounge" in Mirage. Perhaps this is where the adults went, since skinny dipping wasn't allowed in the normal pool.

Entrance to Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat was $15, so at first we didn't want to go in but later we changed our minds (since we hadn't and weren't planning on seeing any other paid attractions that day).








Suri Alpacas


Huacaya Alpacas


Snow Leopard sleeping, looking as it it was dead


White Lions


Striped White Tigers

My theory is that this is where Siegfried and Roy dumped their old circus animals after they closed their act, and sure enough: "their long-running illusion and magic act closed 3 October 2003 after Roy was injured by one of the act's tigers during a performance."


Snow White Tiger


Striped White Tigers


Snow White Tiger


African/Asian leopards


White Lions (? - Don't look at me, I just copy the labels)


Heterozygous Golden Tigers

The management was very smart. They had a sign about tigers and lions being nocturnate, but closed at 5:30.

Huishan says the White Tigers at the Singapore Zoo were very ugly - yellow, even.


Dolphin




This is practice for the sardine-like posture needed to get urine samples.

Interestingly there was only one male dolphin trainer - the rest were girls who all seemed cut from a similar mold.

Dolphin antics:





















The best was a double somersault, but I didn't manage to capture that.

Jelly Belly Jelly Beans come in Jalapeno flavour. Uhh.


Photoshopped fridge magnets in the gift shop

After that, I tried checking out Bare, but I didn't have a prior reservation and wasn't a hotel guest so I couldn't see if people really were Bare inside (it seems they are for private parties).


Rainforest, Mirage


Venetian. The Lion of St Mark looks more like a Winged Monkey from the Wizard of Oz.


Gondolas


Venetian and the Mirage


Ceiling at Venetian entrance. At least this bit was commendable.


Main Street


Indoor Gondola ride

The Venetian had a travellator going over an arch (ie both up and down)

We then went to Flamingo.


Chilean Flamingos


Black necked swan (?)


Assorted fauna


Mandarin Ducks. They really do follow each other.

Sign on the Hooded Merganser: "The females are said to look like Woody Woodpecker."

Most ducks are smart. The males go into eclipse plumage after breeding season is over, so they get the best of both worlds (they get to advertise to potential mates when needed, yet not be an expensive, walking billboard the rest of the year).


Fountain at the pseudo-French hotel

I'd wanted to book Alcatraz tickets the night before but the hostel didn't have a working printer and I was supposed to bring a printout of my booking confirmation to get my ticket. I went looking for an internet cafe so I could print it, but the only one I could find sold internet time in $5 blocks, at 20 cents a minute and printing cost 50 cents so I refused to patronise it. In any case by the evening of the 24th, tickets for the 25th had all been sold out (I realised I also hadn't had a Vegas buffet, so that's one more reason to come back in 20 years).

Even 7-11 and the airport had slot machines. Wth.

The Indian cab driver who took us to the airport also said I looked like a Native American. Gah. He'd immigrated from Madras in 1986 to NYC but had moved to Vegas because the dry air was better for his father's arthritis (another reason to leave Singapore). He said in the first few years you want to become more and more American, but as time goes by you miss your homeland more and more and want to go back.

There were many checkin machines for US Airlines and we were heavily encouraged to use them. Unfortunately they only worked for groups of 4 adults and 1 child or less (we had 6), and there was no 'abort' button, so when Vinod pressed the screen trying to abort the checkin it started printing boarding passes for 4 adults and 1 child (it refused to go through with 4 adults so I'd tried declaring one person as a child). E-checkin became a big mess and we had to go to the counter to sort it out.

The baggage screeners were testy and there were no signs telling us what to do, only verbal instructions shouted from time to time. They also didn't give us plastic bags for our liquids and gels, which was very silly (I'm quite sure Changi gives them out to those who need them).

I needed to do some symbolic gambling, so I tried a slot machine at the airport called 'Cops and Donuts'. It was my lucky night, so I got a whopping return of 455%! Unfortunately, since I only wagered $1 I got only $5.55 (not even enough to cover overpriced dinner), so.


Quotes:

[On an ad for the Excalibur's Chinese restaurant] Chinese cuisine with an modern twist? Both of them are Ang Mohs and she's holding a [piece of] sushi.

It's not a zoo. [Me: It's a Secret Garden. I hope no little girls wander into the Secret Garden. They'll get eaten.] You try lah. [Me: I'm not a little girl.] Really? I didn't know that.

My shoe is a 'training/entertainment' shoe... So if I'm bored I can just wear my shoes. (shoes are labelled, shoes)

Quotes:

[In a Middle Eastern restaurant] I brought cards. [Me: Gambling is...] [Student 2: Haram]

This is a guy who, when I went to a poetry reading with him, he started moaning... 'Mmm'... What the fuck. (started)

I keep forgetting that you're from NUS... you look like you're from an overseas university.

It's such a guy thing. Useless trivia. It impresses the girls.

Do you know about airplanes and aircraft? I assume you do. You're like a walking encyclopedia.

[On Muslim eating] I don't care, as long as there's no pork. And if there is, don't tell me.

A lot of male toilets have no urinals... Like in hall. Don't ask me how I know this.

There was this movie about palm oil. [Me: Was it about deforestation?]... It had Charlie Sheen... There was one scene about the smell... Apocalypse Now.

How many tea packets did you put? [Me: Who puts more than one?] I'm Indian.

All the news about Russia is about energy... Is there anything other than oil in Russia? [Me: Gas.]

I played an instrument commonly known as the la3 ba1, but actually called suo3 na4. [Me: The funeral trumpet] For wedding. (weddings)

[On a Model United Nations Conference] Eh how are the JC girls nowadays?

[On being hit by my ponytail] I feel violated.

This guy is kinky. He reads porn. All of us watches porn. He reads porn. (watch)

I was always under the impression that you had a girlfriend.

I've been to Paris. [Me: All women want to go to Paris.] Yeah, that's true.

Bring a Dutch girl back. [Me: Dutch girls are ugly.] Yay. [Me: But Singaporean girls are worse.] Hey! Are you saying I'm ugly?

[Me on the rain: You're the only one without {an} umbrella ah?] She got tudung okay. Very powerful.

[Me: Apparently you're supposed to shave your armpit and pubic hair for hygiene reasons.] That's why I adopt that principle. [Someone: Okay. Thanks for letting us know that.] You guys were talking about it what.

[Me: Next time I want a job where you don't need to wear office attire.] Well, there's sanitation.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 18 (23/5) - Grand Canyon

We set out at 5am to catch the bus for our tour. As we were leaving the hostel, we saw one guy from my hostel room making out with a girl on a bench beside the basketball court. Apparently they didn't need to sleep and the cold wind of early morning didn't bother them because they were generating plenty of body heat themselves. As I kept telling the others: "When you're on holiday you're going to get screwed, one way or the other."


Stratosphere (pickup point)

Before we left on the tour proper, we were herded into a nondescript building to be briefed, pay and collect our "Continental Breakfast" (a bun and a packet of juice). I saw an A&W sign while enroute to the processing centre and got excited - it was the first I'd seen and I hadn't even seen the drink in stores yet.

The famous skywalk (the glass platform extending out over the canyon) is on the West Rim, but the best views are from the South Rim (which we went to) which also has the National Geographic Center. This is a very cunning trick to make you visit both the West and South rims. Hurr hurr.

I was very pissed off that they charged me a 5% fee for paying by credit card, which likely far exceeded the fee the credit card company charged them. Unfortunately, since not everyone had paid me back (actually some still haven't yet) I was short of cash and decided I had no choice, short of being plunged into penury (I now realise I could've gone to an ATM another day and be charged slightly less in fees).

After we set off we passed by Boulder City - which had an A&W! Unfortunately we didn't stop there.

Apparently Celine Dion owns a house near the Hoover Dam.

We then came up to the Hoover Dam. In about 2 years time a new road will be finished which will let traffic bypass the dam (thus obviating the need for security checks will travelling by there). Hopefully tours will still pass over the dam though, since it is a great engineering feat after all.


Part of the front of the Hoover Dam. Unfortunately I only realised we wouldn't stop for a proper view of the front (which is more impressive IMO than the back) after it was too late to get a proper shot of it.


View going over
The white area you see just above the water is not a photo/processing/upload error - that's the part usually covered by the water, but now it's too dry.


Arizona spillway. When the water level is too high in Lake Mead, they use this and its twin to pump water out of it. It's only been used twice since its construction, and once was during the dam's construction.








Our rest stop was very annoying. Not only was everything except Subway quite expensive, they charged 25 cents for a cup of ice (a small one to boot - a cup the size of the soda cups would cost as much as if filled with soda) and had a cologne spray in the toilet (also for a quarter). Adding insult to injury the manager kept shouting into a mic to tout to us. In disgust I refused to buy anything.

We then dropped off at the National Geographic Center (it's there because one of the society's founders was the first guy to totally explore the Grand Canyon) for lunch and the Imax (for those of us who had chosen to watch). Many of us had been psychoed at the processing centre in the morning to buy our Imax tickets from there for $12 - we'd been told that we wouldn't have time to buy them at the Imax theatre since the queue would be very long. Naturally, there was no queue when we reached there. Worse, at the rest stop I'd discovered coupons entitling the holder to a $6 discount on the Imax show. !@#$%^&*(). Also, at the gift shop the DVD of the Imax movie was selling for $30.95, so if at least 3 people wanted to watch it, it'd have been cheaper to buy the DVD.

The gift shop also sold a "dinosaur bone card" - a piece of rock attached to a card with information on the dinosaur. There was a line featuring the 'Brontosaurus'. What a disgrace - and from National Geographic, no less! There was also: "Hiking pole - this product is not a toy, and is not meant to be used as a sword, speak or baton"

Lunch was included - fortunately, for it was horrendously expensive. I had an Orange Chicken which tasted strange. As I kept telling the others: "When you're on holiday you're going to get screwed, one way or the other."

There's a 'Zoroaster Temple', 'Vishnu Temple', 'Buddha Temple', 'Brahma Temple' and 'Isis Temple' (names of geological formations) at the Grand Canyon. Tsk, Orientalism!

Despite paying $12 we were still subjected to an ad for a power bar. It was the famous 1984 movie, touted as the most popular Imax movie ever (and which I'd probably watched in Singapore before). It was also very irritating, with its romanticisation, anthropomorphising of the Grand Canyon and dished out lots of patronising guilt about the American Indians. The last was particularly ironic, given that their Indian re-enactments were presumptuous and so insulting to the Indians. All in all, we agreed that it'd be a better film if we turned off the narrator.

The temperature forecast fior the rim varied from 71 to 38 degrees. Wah. The floor was warmer.

There was a small exhibtion of stuff at the visitors' centre - one was 'Ancient Chewing Gum' - fiber Indians chewed to clean the teeth and sweeten the breath.

Later in the bus, it was revealed that the bus driver had the Imax video, which he'd screen for tours to other places. Gah.


View at Bright Angel Lodge




Lookout Studio



The rim trail was about 12.8km.









I think my photography skills have deproved since returning from Europe. Or maybe the camera is lousier, hurr hurr.


I wonder which poor guy lives there.


From Lookout Studio





From this distance, the background looked like a matte painting, not least because there a whitish filter seemed to have been applied on the real life view.

Christine popped up here, on a $82 tour. She said there was also a $50+ one.


Squirrel


All my condor pictures looked like they were of UFOs. This was the best.

One of the gift shops had compressed T-shirts which would expand on washing.



Mather Point

















There was a rock where people had thrown coins. There were many coins on the rocks below it - perhaps evidence of poor aim (or a process analogous to the transport of sediment down a river [I know there's a geographical term for it but I can't find or recall it]).


Coin throwing. blip.tv
I didn't think I'd find N!ieshi here, so I settled for throwing only one coin and coming back again (maybe in another 20 years). I also didn't want to throw three - when I tried that at the Trevi fountain I'd lost some of my Rome photos. However, Darren gave me another penny and Huishan wanted me to fall in love with an American Indian, so I humoured her by aiming for a further rock. It skipped once and then disappeared, perhaps plummeting down below. Hopefully no newspaper had, as a headline the next day, "Man killed by falling penny".













Deer. Darren: "They both know how to pose for pictures... They're used to being photographed so they know what angle to pose [at]"

There was a sign about not feeding ravens - they were crowding out the hawks. They should then encourage people to reduce the population of ravens one way or another (eg By shooting them!)

[MFM: sigh, all grand canyon photos look the same

my grand canyon photos, if you want to know how it is from the inside: http://wowbagger.multiply.com/photos/album/10]

On reflection we got a bad deal. Not only did we waste a lot of time in processing and lunch (with the silly Imax), we only spent 2 hours at the Grand Canyon, at only 2 points, and we didn't even get a short hike. This is what happens when people go for the cheapest tour (there was a small tour which'd have picked us up from the hostel, only costing $15 more and saving us much time).

When we got back to the hostel we wanted to explore the Strip a bit more, and see more night attractions (I wanted to look at the manmade Volcano at the Mirage) since we'd be flying off the next night. The Deuce was supposed to leave every 6 minutes, but from 10:22 to 11pm no buses came at all (perhaps they were on strike), so we gave up.

Jabir tried to break a $100 bill at a shop with a $0.99 purchase, but was rebuffed. Aww.

As we walked back to the hostel after exiting the shop, naturally enough, the Deuces all started coming.

Sign on a parking space in the carpark of a bar: "Reserved for Jessica. Drunk of the Month." (the name of the DOTM could be changed by changing the piece of paper pasted on the sign)

One guy accosted us asking for $1 for food. I gave him a 30 cent pack of cheese crackers I'd bought earlier. Later I told Darren that he should've given him the chocolate milk that he'd complained was too sweet so he'd have something to drink (though probably not the "drink" he had in mind).

In LA I'd picked up a tabloid-sized newspaper titled: "X... personals" - a directory of adult service providers masquerading as personals and classifieds. In Vegas, not only were these publications very clear about their purpose (with girls "delivered to your room for free in 30 minutes or less" and pictures in full-colour with black boxes covering strategic areas), there were also more of them than normal newspapers (at least in the tourist area, in which there were virtually no normal newspapers in the dispensers at the side of the street).

I saw an ad for "Lanafuchs.com". At first I thought it was another sex service, but it turns out to (only) be a silly lame joke.


Quotes:

[To Huishan] I shall waltz into the toilet and laugh at you.

Where're we going now? [Me: A place that starts with an M.] That's helpful. Are we going to Mcdonalds?

[Me: I forgot what this place is called.] Grand Canyon?

An email I got:

"Hey there, do u have some pics of sexy rgs or rjc girls? Saw your blog. Fantastic man!"

Wth.

Ezra Klein: Backs Patted, Arms Tired

"[Blogs]'re a flawed and problematic medium. They encourage polarization and extremism rather than debate and understanding. They turn on snark and mockery more often than facts and agile argument. They've not become a space for muckraking so much as hackery, where each side touts their independent credentials each time they deliver another blow to their traditional enemies. We don't take on sacred cows nor unexamined institutions, we hit the long-hated "Mainstream Media", the other side's propaganda outlets, or opposing politicians. We boast a combination of people who can write, people who can report, people who can crack jokes, and people who can do none of the above. If we've democratized some information -- poll results being the type I can think of -- we've done so without context or education, leaving readers more informed but, in many case, less knowledgeable. We fire off missives without time to think, desperate to fill our internal quotas. At the same time, the few worthwhile writings that do emerge from our caffeinated rips are quickly pushed down the page by useless quoting and snarky pointing, forever denied the chance to make a difference or change some minds. We link to funny stats, to easy facts, to things we can talk about, but rarely to the thoughtful and worthwhile writings of our peers. I'm glad we donate some money, do some activism, and talk some politics, but I'm far from convinced that we've helped a too-polarized country become any better of a place.

I've not yet -- and not for lack of trying -- found the blog where smart and engaged partisans are respectfully speaking to each other, where naturally skilled reporters are unearthing the crucial issues of the day, where the point is to inform and enrich rather than enrage and destroy. And until I do, I can't stand talking about this transformative and enlightened medium. Because until that day, all we've really got is a couple of technogurus proselytizing for us because it advances their careers and puts their breathless exclamations into the (mainstream) media, a couple of gems whose readers are lucky to have found them, and an endless army of critics well equipped to carp and stab at minute flaws in their betters, but rarely able to excel in the skill they find so easy to judge. We've got a medium where the editor rejects nothing, where our articles achieve an acceptance rate of 100%, and we suffer for it. We're the D&D players in the back of the class who mock both the math whizzes and the jocks, simultaneously jealous and contemptuous of what they do better than us and delighted whenever we can nail them for a misstep. And then, through the transcendent and healing power of mockery, we convince ourselves of their incompetence and our transformative achievements through the use of snark. Congratulations us."


(After a partial quote from the above):

"And according to C. W. Nevius of the San Francisco Chronicle, "That’s what makes those who are going to live in this brave new world of [blog-enhanced] politics a little nervous. [Bloggers are] talk radio without the FCC, opinion columnists without the editors." Adds West Texas A&M University professor Leigh Browning, "Blogs are inevitably going to have more impact on the extreme left and extreme right."

Pay attention to the word "extreme." For although it is certainly true that bloggers did not invent extremist politics—indeed, the deepening divisions within America are the long-simmering outgrowth of myriad and complex forces having to do with the growing sense of alienation and powerlessness in society—there can be no doubt that blogging has given new voice and new reach to the extremist strain in American society.

This extremism has lain at the periphery of American politics throughout our long history. More than forty years ago, in fact, the historian Richard Hofstadter published a famous article in Harper’s Magazine entitled "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." In it, he described the key features of the extremist conspiracy theories that have played such a dark role in American political life since even before the Revolution. Hofstadter wrote:

The paranoid [extremist] sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms. As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet unaroused public, the paranoid is a militant. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. This demand for total triumph leads to the formulation of hopelessly unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid’s sense of frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same feeling of powerlessness with which he began, [which] only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

Doesn’t that sound a bit too much like the two bloggers quoted at the be ginning of this essay? Multiply them by many thousands more—and instead of an audience of thousands, as such people spoke to in bygone eras, give them now an audience of millions—and you begin to grasp the heightened danger. Right now, today, they are preaching to us that the government is ruled by a conspiracy of the right (or the left), that the 9/11 catastrophe was knowingly aided and abetted by Big Business (or the Jews) anxious to give the American people an external enemy to focus on instead of the disastrous economic situation that has resulted from their own perfidy and greed, that Osama Bin Laden has (depending on their political stance) either already been captured and is waiting to be trotted out at the appropriate time or else could have been captured were it not for the machinations of America’s hidden traitors. No matter how preposterous the claim, I guarantee that you can find it argued eloquently and vociferously somewhere in the blogosphere, supported by an encyclopedia of "facts."

But lest we all have a good laugh at the absurdities often found on the Internet, we would do well to heed Hofstadter’s principal point: “The idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” And what makes it especially dangerous today, of course, is that they are attempting to fill the vacuum left by an enfeebled mainstream media.

Still, as a blogger who goes by the name "Scottxyz" noted, "The polarization that blogs have produced is problematic, but the alternative—a homogenized media—is worse." His point is well taken. As William Powers wrote recently in the Atlantic magazine, "The fractious, disunited, politically partisan media of the nineteenth century heightened public awareness of politics, and taught the denizens of a new democracy how to he citizens. Maybe [they were] on to something.""

--- Blog! : how the newest media revolution is changing politics, business, and culture

"Yet, although getting to know other cultures is a good thing, it is doubtful that it will initiate a more peaceful world. In many cases, citizens of rival nations get to know each other better only after their countries have settled their political differences, not before. How many international conflicts really stem from the sorts of misunderstandings that can be overcome if only people knew each other better? We sincerely hope that events in the next century will show our informed skepticism to have been mere baseless cynicism. For now, we remain skeptical...

It is not likely that increased international contacts and exchanges will so intertwine nations as to significantly reduce the possibility of war. History simply affords too many counterexamples. In the past, nations that traded with each other also went to war with each other. There is no reason to expect the future will be different (Grieco, 1988)"

--- Politics As Usual, The Cyberspace "Revolution", Michael Margolis and David Resnick

A prominent notice stuck at the start of The Political Blog: The Struggle for Hegemony in Singapore's Emerging Blogosphere; Tan Jie Ying, Dorothy (2006/2007 Political Science Thesis):

"WARNING

This dissertation/thesis/academic exercise may be used only for private study or research purposes. No part of this work may be reproduced without permission, quoted without acknowledgement and no information derived from it may be published without the copyright owner's written consent."

Meanwhile, the form for photocopying reads:

"I declare that I require the copy for:
- My own private study
- My own research
and that I will not use it for any other purposes...

I recognise that the copyright... rests with the author... and that no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without the prior written consent of the author or university (as may be appropriate)."

Looks like the doctrine of Fair Use doesn't apply to NUS theses.

Then again it's probably to prevent all the students (and their supervisors) for being incarcerated for sedition, and the University being shut down for fomenting dissent.

An Irishman named O'Malley went to his doctor after a long illness.

The doctor, after a lengthy examination, sighed and looked O'Malley in the eye, and said, "I've some bad news for you. You have cancer, and it can't be cured. I'd give you two weeks to a month to live."

O'Malley was shocked and saddened by the news, but of solid character. He managed to compose himself and walk from the doctor's office into the waiting room. There, he saw his son who had been waiting. O'Malley said, "Well son, we Irish celebrate when things are good, and we celebrate when things don't go so well. In this case, things aren't so well. I have cancer, and I've been given a short time to live. Let's head for the pub and have a few pints."

After three or four pints, the two were feeling a little less somber. There were some laughs and more beers. They were eventually approached by some of O'Malley's old friends who asked what the two were celebrating. O'Malley told them that the Irish celebrate the good and the bad. He went on to tell them that they were drinking to his impending end. He told his friends, "I've only got a few weeks to live as I have been diagnosed with AIDS."

The friends gave O'Malley their condolences, and they had a couple more beers.

After his friends left, O'Malley's son leaned over and whispered his confusion. "Dad. I though you said that you were dying from cancer??? You just told your friends that you were dying from AIDS!"

O'Malley said, "I am dying of cancer, son. I just don't want any of them sleeping with your mother after I'm gone."

Translation of the instructions for an anti-Japanese protest in China, from The Internet in China, Zixue Tai (original text here):

"Precautions

If you bring your own food and drink, don't choose Japanese brands;...
Cameras, video cameras, cell phones, tape recorders and other electronic products that are made in Japan should be avoided in order to prevent any unexpected accidents;...
Don't hurl hard objects such as rocks and metal ware. Instead, we suggest that you bring tomatoes, eggs, Koizumi's head portrait, a cigarette lighter, or Japanese national flags, etc...

Please cooperate with Uncle Cops, especially in front of the Japanese consulate - do not throw anything as Uncle Cop is looking at you, and throw an egg or tomato if he is not looking at you; however, if you throw an egg or tomato and Uncle Cop sees it, just smile at him.

When passing by Japanese-funded stores or companies, don't strike with the intention to damage, because if you do, the Japanese are going to ask our government for compensation. So act wisely.

Show caution when burning Japanese flag or Koizumi's head portrait so that you don't set you (sic) clothes ablaze and burn yourself."

USP pimped the Karen Armstrong talk to us via email this morning:

"Darul Arqam Singapore, in collaboration with Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS), is organizing a Public Lecture tilted “What is Religion?” by visiting scholar, Ms. Karen Armstrong from the United Kingdom. The speaker's knowledge and experience in the study of contemporary issues and the religious field promises to make the session an interesting a learning venture.

The speaker will address and examine the roots of the world's major spiritual traditions, especially the Abrahamic Faiths and what role will religion play in the new millennium. She would further deliberate on the need to have common understanding as to acknowledge the differences these religions have. The ultimate goal would be for these groups of followers to live cohesively side-by-side in unison.

Attached is the speaker's profile for you your reference & perusal.

Please fill in the attached response form by 12.00 noon on Thursday, 14 June 2007 and fax it to 62534789 or email to harmony@muis.gov.sg"

Someone deleted the Asian Prince article on Wikipedia :( It now redirects to "Tuan Anh" and has no mention of Asian Prince at all!

Luckily, Answers.com still has the old version:


Asian Prince

Asian Prince is a parody website revolving around an Asian rock star named Wo-Hen Nankan searching for a girlfriend—"a Prince in search of a Princess". The website first appeared in 1999 and may be responsible for coining the phrase, "Am I not hot?". Throughout the website Wo-Hen brags about his long hair styled into a mullet which, as he puts it, is "soft, thick and easy to style", his moustache, expensive European suits, cars and money, as well as his ability to attract "chicks".

The images are of a real person - Tuan Anh, a Vietnamese glam rock singer from the late 1970s based in California. In fact, "Wo-Hen Nankan" means "I am very ugly" in Mandarin (我很难看). The original website was taken down, but multiple mirrors now exist. Originally, the site's pictures were hosted on a Vietnamese student's UMass
Amherst account, so it is likely that he was responsible for creating the website.

External links

• Asian Prince Website (mirror)

• Tuan Anh
  CD
• Tuan Anh
  Biography (Vietnamese)

• Six degrees of "Asian Prince"



• Real life Tuan Anh sighting
• Article on a Tuan Anh
  performance in California

I prefer the version describing him as pathologically self-absorbed better...

An older version:

Asian Prince was one of the first internet phenomenon, revolving around an Asian rock star named Wo-Hen Nankan who apparently set up a website on Geocities to look for a girlfriend - a Prince in search of a Princess, as he put it. The website first appeared in 1999 and may be responsible for coining such popular internet phrases as Hello ladies... and Am I not hot . Throughout the website Wo-Hen brags about his long hair styled into a mullet which, as he puts it, is soft, thick and easy to style, his moustache, expensive European suits, cars and money, as well as his ability to attract chicks. As a result it became (and still is) a magnet for flames on the guestbook.

The website is actually a hoax, and contrary to popular belief, the images are of a real person - Tuan Anh, a Vietnam glam rock singer from the late 1970s based in California. In fact, Wo-Hen Nankan means I am very ugly in Mandarin (linguistics). The original website was taken down, but multiple mirrors now exist. Originally, the site s pictures were hosted on a Vietnamese student s UMass Amherst account, so it is likely that he was responsible for creating the website.

=External links=
# [http://www.thenoel.org/asianprince Asian Prince Website (mirror)]
# [http://www.geocities.com/asianprince_213 Asian Prince Website (outdated mirror)]

# [http://www.xanga.com/AsianPrince213 Asian Prince s Xanga diary]
# [http://www.friendster.com/user.phpuid=921657 Wo-hen Nankan on Friendster]

# [http://www.rangdong.com/scripts/showalbumdetail.phpalbumID=CD18389 Tuan Anh CD]
# [http://music.vnunited.com/viet_singer_bio/index.phploi=139 Tuan Anh Biography] (Vietnamese)
# [http://www.jhvu.com/month=6&year=2003 Six degrees of Asian Prince ]
# [http://www.bobofett.com/fameatfoxwoods.html Real life Tuan Anh sighting]
# [http://www.ocweekly.com/ink/00/08/music-nguyen.php Article on a Tuan Anh performance in California]

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 17 (22/5) - Las Vegas

The only entities to use the $1 coin seemed to be vending machines.

Leggings were not the fashion on the West Coast. Lots of women in Tokyo were wearing them though.

The LA Metro ticket is only valid on the line it's bought on. Wth. What's the point of a Metro network if you have to pay to transfer to other lines?!


Urinal which doesn't use water, LA Greyhound station

I didn't care for the hostel breakfast (if nothing else, the eating area was quite dirty) so I ate breakfast at the Greyhound station. Unfortunately the guy before me bought up the last biscuits, and I didn't want toast and gravy, so I had a breakfast burrito (hah).

One of the shops in the station sold Maruchan Instant Noodles, but the pork flavour had no pork in it, instead having beef fat. Gah.

Seen in LA's Little Tokyo: "Little Tokyo Show Girls". Hurr hurr.

At the rest stop I had lunch from "BJ's Barbeque Express". Unfortunately, unlike the other 2 (3) BJs, it sucked.

In Vegas I saw a car I suspected might have a "The Golden State" license plate, since it had a sun and palm tree on it, but it was framed by a metal border which might have blocked the slogan.

You can't go to clubs in Vegas in sneakers.

We stayed in Sin City hostel, which had air conditioning in the rooms. Unfortunately the air conditioning turned off at erratic times, probably to save power, and at night I suspected it was turned on rarely if at all.

One of the hostel staff was wearing a Real Doll ("The World's finest love doll") T-shirt, so since sartorial choices are meaningful (the principle behind my "u r wt u wr" project) I, naturally enough, asked him if he had a Real Doll. He didn't seem very happy, asking me "what kind of question is that?", until another staff member pointed out that he was wearing a Real Doll T-shirt, whereupon he evaded the question with a grunt.

It was suggested to me that what happened next was because of my question, whereupon I will relate this anecdote I found about the meaning inherent in sartorial choices: "My dad once honked at someone who had a "Honk if you love Jesus" bumper sticker. It was one of those "hey buddy the light's green are you gonna go?" honks. The guy gave my dad the finger! We weren't sure if that meant that the guy was an atheist who wanted Christians to honk so he could give them all the finger, or if he was just an asshole who forgot he had a bumper sticker urging fellow Jesus lovers to honk at him." (dooce: When I say Jesus, you say Jesus, say Jesus. JESUS!)

Later on, I was trying to contact Tong Wei and Huishan (despite my booking us into 2 rooms, there was a screwup so our group of 7 was split into 3 groups - 3 in one room, 2 in another and the 2 girls in a third), but not only had they been put in a girls' dorm, they were inside the private room - there was another door inside the dorm leading to another room. If they'd been in the dorm itself, I would've been able to knock on the door and/or yell to them to get their attention, but with their being in a private room, this option was not available to me. So, when I saw the black guy from the previous paragraph showing one girl to the dorm in which their private room was, I made sure that not only was no occupant of the dorm in a compromising position but that it was empty (except for the new occupant). I then quickly popped into the room and banged on the inner door to get their attention. For my pains, I got scolded by the receptionist, was given a warning and even had a threat of eviction waved in front of me.

This blatant proof of the sexism that pervades modern society appalled me. In the field of vacation housing, the doctrine of "separate but equal" has no place. Separate housing facilities are inherently unequal. Gender segregation reinforces sexist stereotypes which are self-perpetuating and reinforcing - if women are always oppressed, they will always be oppressed.

Vinod and Guan Zheng didn't want to go to the Grand Canyon because it was too expensive. What a waste. But I think the former will be in the area in the future, so. No one wanted to go to a revue, either from lack of interest or money. Perhaps I will return once more in 20 years time.

We then went down to see the Strip. There was a bus running up and down the strip called The Deuce, but we had the misfortune of getting a very anal bus driver who refused to drive off when people were on the staircases or sitting on each other's laps because there weren't enough seats.


Siegfried and Roy


Strip, looking south from Treasure Island


Treasure Island Casino

5 of us had Pho at Treasure Island. Their fish sauce was Thai, not Vietnamese. Tsk. At least it was quite good.

We then watched "The Sirens of Treasure Island".


Empty ship


You can see why the guidebook dubbed them "The Strippers of Treasure Island".



[Ed: YouTube was refussing to process any videos taken this day, so I moved them to blip.tv. For good measure, here's a video of us running after Tom Kosnik that YouTube also refused to process. The next day they finally got processed though. Wth.]


or blip.tv video: The Strippers of Treasure Island, Part 1


Some pirates come along in their ship (which actually sailed down the waterway)




or blip.tv video: The Strippers of Treasure Island, Part 2


or blip.tv video: The Strippers of Treasure Island, Part 3

The pyrotechnics were quite impressive, with fireworks, simulated explosions, smoke and other assorted pyrotechnics.

blip.tv video: The Strippers of Treasure Island, Part 4
The Sirens' song causes the ship to explode and sink.


The Pirates swim aboard, lured by the song. Unfortunately none of the women got in the water.




Mirage


The Strip


"Hot babes direct to you. 24 hrs 7 days. Girls that want to meet you. 696-9696" (yes, the word hidden by the car is MEET). Vehicles like this would cruise down the Strip every few minutes, sometimes one behind the other.


Harrah's


Forum shops


My image stabiliser didn't always work, which is why a few images, including this one, are slightly blur.
Interestingly enough, this aside, a few people have told me that my photos are very good. The only one to say they are bad are my brother-in-law, so he's probably jealous.


Caesar's Palace


I can only assume this is an imitation of the Trevi fountain. After Rome, this is very vulgar.


Eiffel Tower and the brightest beam of light in the world from the top of Luxor.


Caesar's Palace with a Winged Victory of Samothrace




People playing Blackjack.
This was my second attempt since the first was blur. For my pains I was asked to cease and desist. Meanwhile Huishan who only took one snap, got nothing.
Me: "This is where the pursuit of excellence gets you - trouble"

LA felt a little fake but Vegas felt very very fake.


or blip.tv video: Musical Fountain at Bellagio

When we were meeting new people, I suddenly found out that the members of my party had hitherto concealed names like "Alex", "Robert" and "Aprilene". "Robert" was annoyed when I called him Bob, and didn't believe that that was the pet form of his "name".


Quotes:

[On bunk beds] I'm a top guy... As in, I always sleep on top.

I thought I'm not allowed to go into your room. [Me: {You can,} this is a sexist country]

[On who is taller] Let's stand back to back... Nevermind, I don't want to know. Let's preserve our friendship. [Student 2: It's quite a fragile friendship.]

"Bolshevik theory does not disregard public opinion. Its emphasis, however, more or less completely rejects following public opinion and stresses the prime need to shape and mold it. This implies that one studies public opinion primarily to determine the pace and speed of his own actions. The goal is not to cater to public opinion but to move it along with you as rapidly as possible without undermining your popular support."

--- Public Opinion in Soviet Russia : A Study in Mass Persuasion, Alex Inkeles


[On SARS in China] "Contrary to what many have believed, local officals were rather quick in taking action... The team turned in a completed report labeled 'top secret' that detailed the highly contagious virus to the Guangdong provincial health department on January 27. But the report sat sealed for three days because officials with sufficient security clearance to open it were away on vacation." - The Internet in China, Zixue Tai

Thus Spake Zarathustra
XVIII. Old and Young Women.

"Why stealest thou along so furtively in the twilight, Zarathustra? And what hidest thou so carefully under thy mantle?

Is it a treasure that hath been given thee? Or a child that hath been born thee? Or goest thou thyself on a thief's errand, thou friend of the evil?"--

Verily, my brother, said Zarathustra, it is a treasure that hath been given me: it is a little truth which I carry.

But it is naughty, like a young child; and if I hold not its mouth, it screameth too loudly.

As I went on my way alone to-day, at the hour when the sun declineth, there met me an old woman, and she spake thus unto my soul:

"Much hath Zarathustra spoken also to us women, but never spake he unto us concerning woman."

And I answered her: "Concerning woman, one should only talk unto men."

"Talk also unto me of woman," said she; "I am old enough to forget it presently."

And I obliged the old woman and spake thus unto her:

Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution --it is called pregnancy.

Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child. But what is woman for man?

Two different things wanteth the true man: danger and diversion. Therefore wanteth he woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

Man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly.

Too sweet fruits--these the warrior liketh not. Therefore liketh he woman;--bitter is even the sweetest woman.

Better than man doth woman understand children, but man is more childish than woman.

In the true man there is a child hidden: it wanteth to play. Up then, ye women, and discover the child in man!

A plaything let woman be, pure and fine like the precious stone, illumined with the virtues of a world not yet come.

Let the beam of a star shine in your love! Let your hope say: "May I bear the Superman!"

In your love let there be valour! With your love shall ye assail him who inspireth you with fear!

In your love be your honour! Little doth woman understand otherwise about honour. But let this be your honour: always to love more than ye are loved, and never be the second.

Let man fear woman when she loveth: then maketh she every sacrifice, and everything else she regardeth as worthless.

Let man fear woman when she hateth: for man in his innermost soul is merely evil; woman, however, is mean.

Whom hateth woman most?--Thus spake the iron to the loadstone: "I hate thee most, because thou attractest, but art too weak to draw unto thee."

The happiness of man is, "I will." The happiness of woman is, "He will."

"Lo! now hath the world become perfect!"--thus thinketh every woman when she obeyeth with all her love.

Obey, must the woman, and find a depth for her surface. Surface, is woman's soul, a mobile, stormy film on shallow water.

Man's soul, however, is deep, its current gusheth in subterranean caverns: woman surmiseth its force, but comprehendeth it not.--

Then answered me the old woman: "Many fine things hath Zarathustra said, especially for those who are young enough for them.

Strange! Zarathustra knoweth little about woman, and yet he is right about them! Doth this happen, because with women nothing is impossible?

And now accept a little truth by way of thanks! I am old enough for it!

Swaddle it up and hold its mouth: otherwise it will scream too loudly, the little truth."

"Give me, woman, thy little truth!" said I. And thus spake the old woman:

"Thou goest to women? Do not forget thy whip!"--

Thus spake Zarathustra.


Someone: took a glance and i cannot help but wonder, what are you doing doing econs man. seriously!

Karen Armstrong is coming to Singapore!


Darul Arqam Official Website (The Muslim Converts' Association of Singapore)

In collaboration with MUIS

Topic: "What is Religion?"
Date: 18th June 2007
Time: 1930 hr
Venue: The Ritz Carlton (Ballroom)

By Invitation Only

Dress Code: Office Attire with Tie

This Public Lecture is by registration only. Please fill in the response form here by 13 June 2007 and fax it to 63591129 or email to mdvp@muis.gov.sg

For further details, please contact Bro Junaidi or Sis Haryanti @ ext 35/33


It says "By Invitation Only", then "by registration only". Wth. I'll just assume it's the latter. Maybe they mean that you can't show up on the day itself without registering beforehand. In any case, it says that "All registrations... will be taken as confirmed unless otherwise notified."

I was wondering if MUIS would be able to protect her against charges of sedition (we might even get to see some members of the floor arrested if there were a Q&A session), but it seems there is no need, since she takes a view that is deemed acceptable, criticised by Robert Spencer, another religious scholar:

"Armstrong says that “our priority must be to stem the flow of young people into organisations such as al-Qaida, instead of alienating them by routinely coupling their religion with immoral violence. Incorrect statements about Islam have convinced too many in the Muslim world that the west is an implacable enemy.” Armstrong here seems to be saying that if we ignore the elements of Islam that give rise to terror, they will stop giving rise to terror. I contend on the contrary that if we are to have any hope of stemming “the flow of young people into organisations such as al-Qaida,” it can only come from speaking forthrightly about what it is in Islam that makes them flow into such organizations, and calling upon Muslims who call themselves moderate to renounce those Islamic teachings -- while alerting non-Muslims to the existence of such teachings, so that they can take realistic actions against the threat in its true dimensions. No problem can be fixed by denying that it is a problem.

But of course, Armstrong would not accept that it is a problem in the first place. She declares that “these acts may be committed by people who call themselves Muslims, but they violate essential Islamic principles. The Qur’an prohibits aggressive warfare, permits war only in self-defence and insists that the true Islamic values are peace, reconciliation and forgiveness.” Yet it is not enough any longer, if it ever was, simply to assert that the terrorists “violate essential Islamic principles” and talk about self-defense and peace. The jihadists have again and again characterized their struggle as defensive. Let Ms. Armstrong demonstrate, if she can, from the Qur’an or Islamic tradition, why their characterization is in this case inaccurate, and how moderate Muslims today can refute it. If she cannot, then moderate Muslim leaders should do so, or risk giving their very professions of moderation a hollow ring."

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 16 (21/5) - Los Angeles

The previous night we encountered a most scummy beggar. He dropped something (a piece of broken glass) on the floor and asked if we could help him look for a coin. We looked but only found broken glass. He then asked if we could give him a $1. Someone did (probably just to shut him up), and this attracted another beggar, albeit one with a slightly more believable story (he had some bandages covering his neck - he claimed it was a surgery wound and had one crutch, claiming he'd just been discharged but had missed his only means of transport home, and surprise surprise had no money). This got the rest to give him some money.


I left early without the others.


Morongo - a most unfortunately titled casino, resort and spa


Masonic Temple


El Capitan Theatre


View of the Hollywood Sign from the Hollywood and Highland center




Pseudo-Assyrian decorations there


Assorted bodyprints at Grauman's Chinese Theater, including Donald Duck (wth)
I seem to have missed Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson's wand prints. Damn.


Frontage

On the recommendation of the hostel receptionist, I then climbed up to Yamashiro (a Calasian restaurant) for a view of the city (though he recommended going at night).




A singularly ugly city view

I decided to look at the garden instead.




Yamashiro restaurant, with a parking lot just in front for the employee of the month. This beats stupid plaques.

I saw a 'Sunshine State' (Florida) license plate, but still hadn't seen a 'Golden State' one!

Rolbeca Bakeshop produced products that looked and smelled like Rotiboy.

At a tourist information kiosk, I enquired about Wicked (I'd seen the ad the night before). It was a sold out show but anyhow I wouldn't be able to get tickets for the night since it didn't play on Mondays. Perhaps I'll get another shot at it in another 2 years! At the kiosk I also saw a brochure for Medieval Times (you get to see Knights jousting) - they have 9 outlets now, 1 in Canada!


Street Performers at Chinese Theater. Catwoman (whose fan you can see at the left of the second image) was disgusting - not only was her costume quite off, she was also shameless and brazen, flaunting her tip pouch (which presumably was not part of her costume) and kept saying "we work on tips". She was very adept at wielding her fan, covering her face when I tried to record just how awful her costume was.

Violating public transport rules can get you 48 hrs public service as well as the $250 fine.

I then went to the Farmers' Market for brunch.


Cajun Hush Puppies. Mmm, hearty goodness.

The Farmers' Market had a lot more cooked food and souvenir stalls than those selling fresh produce (ie what you'd find in a real Farmers' Market). A local I talked to while sitting on a bench agreed but said locals do actually come, but just on weekdays or on weekend mornings before the tourists are awake.


Huishan and Darren eating. I had a buttermilk donut. I had to explain what buttermilk was to the former and she didn't believe the process of making butter was so simple.




I don't know why there's a German sign.

There was a place called "Singapore's banana leaf" selling egg rolls. Wth.


Pies which are perfect to smash in people's faces. It's so hard to find plain pies nowadays.


Natural fragrances. The lavender didn't smell very good. Extract's much better.


Funnel cake and Big Bear Root Beer
The woman forgot I wanted Cinammon Funnel Cake so she lightly dusted it with cinammon sugar a second time. Apparently Funnel Cake is Dutch.
A good root beer needs to have an acidic twang - but just a twang, complemented by a rich, smooth flavour. Big Bear Root Beer was very smooth but had a flat, simplistic taste which failed to tantalise and excite the tastebuds and was lacking in richness. Topping it off, it wasn't frothy enough. Once again, A&W is better.

I then returned to the hostel to drop off my things and we went for the taping of the Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. Some people think that there's no point watching concerts - you might as well listen to recordings. I wonder if they'd go for TV show tapings, then.

Some people tried to sneak in cameras in their pockets or bags, but sneakily they made us deposit our phones and cameras at the 'security' counter after going through a metal detector. Everyone wants to shoot Craig. Right.

They warmed us up with a fluffer who was very brutal about the instructions:

"If you don't get the joke, if you don't think the joke is funny, who are you to judge?" (emphasis his)

This was accompanied by more psychoing about how each of us had to clap for 30,000 viewers (or something like that), since the studio audience was small (113 people despite CBS having big studios - Jay Leno has 200+ and David Letterman has 300+ - they claim this is so because he likes to keep it intimate). I humoured them by laughing hysterically often enough, but sometimes I was laughing at them rather than with them.

I'd asked Liquid Nitrogen why she liked Craig, and she said it was because he didn't make personal attacks, but someone pointed out that all talk show hosts make personal attacks. Indeed, the fluffer admitted that he made fun of himself, politicians, "show enhancers" (the fluffers) and more, and later Craig was mocking this Latino assistant on a bingo game show who kept going: "No Bingos!".

[Addendum: "haha i meant that craig doesn't poke fun at people with malicious intent and does feel guilty about hurting people.^^"]

Since I had nothing else to do and didn't have my camera or camera phone with me, I noted down some of the worse (better) jokes:

"What did one butt cheek say to the other? If we stick together we can stop this shit." (Huishan, with her scatalogical obsession, loved this one)

"You can always tell when our stage manager, Doug, has just had sex. His eyes are red. From the pepper spray."

"How many of you watched our show Friday night?... We're in Hollywood, and in Hollywood we lie for a living. How many of you watched our show Friday night?"

We were entertained before, in between and after segments with pre-recorded music videos of a band playing on the stage (it was quite surreal with the same stage in front of us - only empty) and banter between Craig, the Stage Manager, the Producer and the fluffer, as well as normal fluffing (the fluffer and audience).

They refilled Craig's mug from a green bottle. As far as I could tell it was mineral water.

Unfortunately, although the recording was for and on the start of "Magic Week", we didn't see any magic since it'd been taped beforehand. We did, however, get to watch segments from 3 shows (he changed his tie twice - maybe this is why women don't host talk shows).

What was taped:
- The monologue for the start of "Magic Week"
- An interview with their "Cannes correspondent" (this was filmed in the same studio so we could see that they used a blue [yes, not green!] screen)
- Some girl playing the piano and singing (but who was not interviewed)
- An interview with a Brit girl who'd moved over to the UK. She claimed guys in the US are more chivalrous than in the UK and Craig said they were gay, hurr hurr.
- An interview with Matt Serra (a boxer)
- An interview with this black guy who'll be on "Pushing Daisies" - a show about someone who can resurrect dead bodies for a minute by touching them

The only segment I can find on YouTube: Matt Serra on Late Late Show

There was this security guy with a horribly long trenchcoat. He must've needed it to hide a taser inside.

Filming took about 1 hr 15 mins. Given the 1 hr wait before, that wasn't bad.

When we left we saw a long queue of people in chairs, tents and sleeping bags, waiting for The Price is Right.


Hollywood Highland

When we got back we went to have a look at an American Idol event. Fortunately or otherwise, there was no singing, just some old idols and current finalists prancing around for press publicity. Also, someone noted that there were very few Blacks and Latinos there, just like at the TV show taping.




Stupid 'Assyrian' decor


This didn't look like a dress but more like an overly long top (... fashion). I couldn't help imagining leggings on her.

3 of us got fed up of waiting, so we left Guan Zheng to his vigil and went to California Pizza Kitchen.

Vinod had enthused about watching Pirates in California, the land of Hollywood (it was the propriety of it, he said). I said there was no difference - you'd pay for the same overpriced ticket, the same overpriced popcorn and sit in the same cramped theatre with the same obnoxious people and the same annoying ads and trailers. Eating CPK in California was slightly different, since even after taxes, tips and conversion it was still slightly cheaper than Singapore (an Original BBQ Chicken was $11.49). The pizza menu was similar, with only a few more pizzas. There were many more appetisers though.

They sold frozen pizza (presumably to go), which was advertised together with their equity (wth) in the menu. They also gave us bread and butter (they don't do that here, but it was quite odd considering we were going to have pizza).

"The CPK menu adventure guarantee: be adventurous - try something new! If it doesn't thrill you, we'll replace it with your usual favourite". Too bad they'll never do that in Singapore.


Since there were 3 of us we got a bowl of Adobo Chicken Chowder rather than a cup of soup. I had a Greek Pizza and they shared a Mushroom with Pepperoni. Both weren't that good - no wonder they aren't available here (they may have fringe appeal over there). Maybe we should have utilised the adventure guarantee. Or Mango Tandoori might have been a better choice.


A friendly reminder on tipping


Quotes:

[On bags not being allowed into the taping of the Late Late show] You're right. Women always carry bags. [Me: Be thankful that you're not a woman.] I know. I am, every day.

Don't you just love looking at Gabriel? [Student 2: Not rally. I've had enough of him after a semester.] ... Not listening to him. Looking at him at a distance. [Me: What's so interesting about looking at me?] Nothing. You're beautiful.

I'm looking for a deep (dip)

They f'lear'm everything (film)

[On American Idol] The more I wait, the more I want to wait. [Me: You're irrational] [Student 2: I used to be like that too... Then I became enlightened.]

Another 5 minutes and I'm leaving. My patience for tolerance... (waiting for the event)

Letters from the Moon: coaster

"Hope was the very worst thing in Pandora's box. Hope is the root of all the other ills in there. Hope causes men and women to try when trying is in vain, hope is the source of the tyrant's power, the reason the criminal takes what isn't his, hope is the magnifier of sorrow, the sustainer of the tortured, the thing that imprisons the terminally ill in their suffering. Hope masquerades as goodness, but it is unforgiving and irresistible and utterly without scruple or principle. Hope, Mr. Dietz, it's with each of us all the time -- from the moment of our birth until the moment of our death -- and we are it's slaves, forever in bondage to the remorseless grip of Hope."


Interestingly, it turns out "Hope" may be a mistranslation:

"C.H. Moore, p.37: the word for "hope" in Greek, Ελπις, "elpis", and its context in Hesiod's Works and Days, line 96, Moore claims is better translated as "anticipation of misfortune" rather than simply "hope". It is presumed that Moore is saying that mankind could avert some misfortunes by anticipating them with what was left on the rim of Pandora's jar. Some Greek lexicons yield some support to Moore's observation. Moore's exact words on the subject, on page 37, are: "She [Pandora] opened a jar containing every kind of evil, which straightaway flew out among mankind. Only Ελπις [elpis] remained therein --- a word hardly equivalent to our Hope, but rather meaning 'anticipation of misfortune'. It is then the only plague to which man is not subjected. He is obliged to suffer, having been involved in the original sin of Prometheus, who wished to cheat Zeus of the sacrifice due him. Such is the sacred tale offered as an explanation of the presence of evils on earth". M.L. West also has an exposition and commentary on the word used, on p.169 of his Works & Days / Hesiod, edited with prolegomena and commentary. Pietro Pucci, in his Hesiod and the Language of Poetry, also addresses the full meaning of Ελπις, p.124, ff.51 and says "Ελπις properly means a larger set of expectations than our 'hope', for it implies hope, expectation, and even fear as in Homer's Iliad 13:309, 17:23, etc." Pucci goes on to write on p.104, that Hope was not always considered simply good for mankind, citing Works and Days by Hesiod, line 498 [500], "Hope [Ελπις] is a bad companion for the man in need who sits in an idle place, when he has no sufficient livelihood"."

(Aside: No doubt the Greek version of Original Sin is evidence of Hesiod or even his predecessors copying their myths from a small, insignificant Middle Eastern tribe [or even of borrowing their myths all the way from Babylon!])

someone (sent last week):

Subject: race and class

Message: just reading your latest blog entry and want to tell you what happened when i brought *** to chapel at king's college on wednesday.

after the service, instead of exiting the college, i wanted to go to the toilet so we made a detour into the college. as i was heading towards the college bar (with toilets), one of the fellows of the college (he was walking towards us on the grass) came up to me and barricaded my way with his umbrella. he then rudely asked me 'are you a member of kings'. i said no, but i am a member of the university (ie 2nd class but still with more privileges than a member of the public, 3rd class). he then asked me 'where are you going', at that point i should have asked him, 'why,where are YOU going' but i was so shocked at his rudeness that i just told him i was going to the bar. whereupon he let me proceed.

i can tell you with 100% certainty that this only happened because it was 2 yellow people. if i had been with a white person, a black person, a green or purple person, it would not have happened.

so race does matter. in this case, i was of the right class (ie a member of the university) but all this man could see was race and that superseded everything else.

i should add that kings probably suffers the most from tourists, out of which, yellow (predominantly PRC) tourists are the most irritating and badly behaved. i go to king's for chapel quite often and am only treated with courtesy and respect by the chapel staff but it's a different matter for some of the other staff in the college. in a way you cannot blame them because a high percentage of the tourists who misbehave are yellow (PRC) so all yellow people get tarred by association.

another reason to hate and despise PRCs

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 15 (20/5) - Los Angeles

Another interesting sales tax puzzle: At the "build your own sandwich" place in Berkeley, my expensive sandwich got taxed but others' cheaper sandwiches didn't. Wth.

The San Francisco Palace of Fine Art was very very very pretentious.



Hollywood Boulevard

After walking down Hollywood Boulevard for 20 minutes looking for breakfast possibilities, we'd only found a Starbucks, a McDonalds and a Mexican place. This was because it was Sunday morning.

Seen on a Cosmo cover: "Sex 'facts' you shouldn't believe". What, everything in Cosmo?

McDonalds had a 'Swamp Sludge' McFlurry flavour (Shrek promotion) - brownies and green M&Ms. On a previous occasion I'd been told the latter was mint. Bah.

The others wanted to go to Santa Monica but I wasn't interested, so I considered the places I could go by myself. The Getty Villa Malibu needed advance tickets, which were sold out. I considered the Gerry Museum, but I'd seen better. So I decided to try the Tar Pits, but their stupid website didn't have any information on public transport, and the guidebook recommended driving a car since the public transit system sucked (thus also saving them the bother of printing public transport information). The hostel people knew though, so I left just before noon (I probably could've done one more thing if I'd left on my own after arriving at the hostel, oh well).

Working without a map sucks. The hostel said the tourist information (or whoever) used to give out maps, but not anymore. At first I believed them but later I saw people walking around with maps, and saw maps at the tourist information at the Chinese Theatre. !@#$

There were lots of people dressed up outside the Chinese Theatre - Spiderman, Jack Sparrow (whom we'd seem outside Starbucks in the morning), Darth Vader, Gandalf, a Stormtrooper, Superman, Supergirl and Homer Simpson. I saw fewer on Monday, so probably many of them were part-timers with day jobs.

In LA buses you can get a $250 fine and a citation if you 'act loud or unruly' or 'play a radio' Gah.

Beside the Tar Pits, there was also the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. I figured I'd miss it since it wouldn't be very impressive (size notwithstanding) but I've since discovered it is "the largest encyclopedic museum west of Chicago" and has, among other things, René Magritte's La trahison des images (The Treachery Of Images; probably the only thing in the Modern Art collection I could've withstood),
Katsushika Hokusai's Thirty-six Views of Mt. Fuji, an Iranian depiction of the Prophet Muhammad which I would've been compelled to smash and some South and Southeast Asian Art that's probably better than what you can find there, at least in Southeast Asia. Hah. In any case I doubt I'd have had time to do more than see highlights, so.

______        ___
/xxxx |      /xx/
|xxxx |     /xx/
|xxxx |____/xx/
|xxxxxxxxxx  /
|xxxxxxxxxx /
|__________/

Ceci n'est pas une pipe
(Adapted from Facebook; Facebook walls don't like normal ASCII art)


Fiberglass Columbian Mammoths


Harlan's Ground Sloth


Sabertoothed Cat tooth development
Apparently you can't call them Sabertoothed Tigers, and they're in a different group from true cats. There was one part where they imposed a hologram of a sabertoothed cat on a fossil. Cool.

Modern cats attack the neck or throat of prey, but mammoths and mastodons had thick neck muscles protecting the throat. The sabers would've broken if the cats had struck there, and it is rare to find damaged sabers in the tar pits, so they probably attacked the animals' undersides.


Extinct Camel, with American Mastodon behind.

One of the advantages of coming so late in the day was that I got to go on the day's only guided tour of the tar pits outside.

The place is called the Tar Pits ("La Brea" in Spanish), but there's no tar there, since tar is manmade; asphalt is what seeps out of the ground. The reason it's called the Tar Pits is there's no Spanish word for asphalt. Hah.

Hancock Park (outside the museum) was built over oil deposits several miles wide, but the owner wanted to build a park for families to enjoy. No wonder America's not the world's most competitve economy, hurr hurr. The park being above asphalt, the plants die when it reaches their roots. Maintenance must be a bitch.

Bird fossils are very rare normally because they are hollow and light, but the asphalt preserved a lot of them.

They found a 9000 year old woman who was probably murdered (her skull was impacted by a blunt object), and was buried in a ceremonial burial (ie with items), but her actual bones are no longer on display (a cast of her head can be found at the Natural History museum next door). This is because of laws against the display of Native American remains. Bah.


Whiteboard hung above Pit 91. I love the FAQ about no dinosaurs.
They excavate in June to early September. I bet it's because they get cheap student labour then.

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of Pit 91 while inside, thinking it'd be open after the tour. Ah well. It looked like lots of black goo with coloured flags marking bones which were sticking out of the goo, and there were many planks laid out above the asphalt to walk/work on.

The bones don't all sink to the bottom because an animal may get trapped, and then the ground level will rise around it (asphalt solidifes when mixed with dirt etc), forming another layer of asphalt mix.


Lump of asphalt with bones in observation pit.

They had mass entrapment events. A bison, say, would walk onto the asphalt, thinking it was solid land (if dirt had formed a layer on top) or water and get stuck. Carnivores would come, and get stuck too. Then scavengers would come and get stuck. And then insects would come, and also get stuck. So they have 3.5 million fossils so far (the most Ice Age fossils of anywhere in the world), even though a major entrapment like this would happen just once in 10 years.


Pit 9 - Elephant Pit, since they found many mammoth and mastodon bones inside.


Man with dogs


Pleistocene garden - so called because the plants you see were those that flourished in the area during the last Ice Age.
If you see black marks on the tree, this is because people use asphalt to write on it


Mural of animals


American Mastodon + 6 year old child


Columbian Mammoth

There were fossils of a 'Fragile Eagle' and an 'Errant Eagle'. Wth. Where do they get these names from.


California Turkey, Ancestral Californian Condor, American Neophron


Dire Wolves


Californian Sabertooth, with American lion behind.


Paleontologists at work in the fishbowl laboratory


Picture of Pit 91 excavations

There used to be horses in the New World, but they went extinct 8000 years before the Europeans came.

The asphalt is not always in the same place - hot/cold variations will cause it to liquefy and solidify, and new deathtraps will be created.


Turtles chilling

The shop had 'soap rocks' (self-explanatory), which were 'tested on human beings'. Gah.


Venus fly traps - $9.99 each!


Pit 91 from outside the fence

On the way out I took the 212 in the wrong direction - I thought I was taking it back to Hollywood, and kept hearing the PA system announce "La Brea and XXX road", but when I opened my eyes (Greyhound overnight isn't the best form of accommodation) I was in the hills above LA. Gah.

People in LA are larger than in the Bay Area.

Only 2 people wanted to go to Universal Studios the next day, so we decided not to. Instead, we planned to watch the taping of the Late Late Show, featuring Frigid Girl and Liquid Nitrogen's hero - Craig Ferguson.

Sign: "Feng Shui. Love Spells." Wth.


Santa Monica Beach. Gloriously full on a beautiful Sunday. The rest of the beach was similarly packed.


Continuing the tradition of 'Muscle Beach'


Santa Monica Beach


Weird bicycle


Venice Beach at 6:30


POW Memorial


Filming near Venice Beach (taken from the bus)

I've never been so pissed off with public transport in a city before. The buses in LA are infrequent, routes and connections are weird (usually I can grok them quite easily), there aren't maps at the bus stops (San Francisco helpfully had maps at most) and the Metro doesn't go to many places. No wonder the daypass is so cheap ($3, and one way is $1.25) - you get what you pay for.


"America's best"
Yet, they claim to be America's best. My theory is that those who proclaim that they are the best are bad, like this random fried chicken place I saw in Malaysia in the middle of nowhere which claimed to be 'America's Favourite Chicken'.


Minute Maid is very proud of their lemonade with no lemons (seen at a Mexican place we had dinner at).

Mexican food is all variations on the same thing - a flour covering with rice, beans, salsa and meat inside. At first I considered the possibility of inauthenticity (my J2 Chinese teacher claimed Western food was either fried or grilled, and one visiting Professor used to think Chinese food in the US was authentic and all greasy) but then there are so many Mexicans in California, so this is a powerful countervailing force.

There were 4 very noisy girls on the Metro ignoring the threat of a $250 fine (3 Blacks and 1 Asian). 2 were dressed very skankily, like hos (they weren't even nice hos - they were in shorts but had fat legs; their ample cleavage far dwarfed mine, but their tummies also bulged. Ironically the other 2 loud girls who were less aesthetically unappealing weren't dressed so skankily). All the while, they were shouting and shrieking at each other at the top of their voices, calling each other bitches and engaging in general nigger talk, as well as clapping constantly. They also did things like sitting on each other's laps (after which one shouted "we get $5000 per hour") and unzipping another's shorts. Naturally, other people were looking at them.

Meanwhile 1 quiet guy with a bicycle was with them. I commented on the hos bit to Huishan and she said the pimp was following them, a comment which made me hoot loudly.

I saw 6 Korean churches in LA this day. Wth.

I'd forgotten to bring a towel and by the time I returned to the hostel the drug store the receptionist had directed me to in the morning had closed. I looked at some souvenir shops, but the cheapest towel I could find was $10 (the most expensive was $24.99 though the guy immediately cut his price to $19.99 when he saw my reaction), and had 3 girls in thongs showing their butts off, so I bathed without a towel (I tried using tissue paper to dry off but it disintegrated). Surprisingly, it was an acceptable experience - it must've been the dry weather.


Quotes:

I hate Mexican food.

Originally I was going to make some Bourbon Chicken to eat at work since my brother in law gave me some whisky, but I saw miso paste in the fridge and so decided to make Miso Braised Pork. Unfortunately, it didn't turn out very well - it's definitely worse than my cream overload Carbonara and my first anaemic curry.

It didn't start off very well - I didn't tell my mother what cut of pork I was going to use, and then bought it at 1.5x the price she'd bought it for at Shop and Save. Later, I was supposed to cover the pot and simmer for 3 hours. Maybe it was using a pot instead of a Dutch Oven, or maybe the recipe doesn't scale down well (I divided by 6) but after 45 minutes everything was a burnt mess.

After cutting away the burnt bits I found the one serving left to be edible, if a bit flavourless. I tried to salvage it by dissolving miso paste in chicken stock (I'd also used stock initially instead of water) and throwing in the pork, skipping the soy sauce (who cares if the sauce is yellow instead of black?) so hopefully it's alright now.

I'm going to grill some peppers to go with the meat later. Hopefully they'll turn out alright. Cheese (proper cheese, not Kraft Singles) is horrendously expensive.

[Addendum: I should've gone all the way for the sauce: soy sauce, ginger, garlic, which would make it like the original stock. Oh well, the miso's the most important bit.

The peppers looked alright - I'm only going to eat them on Monday. No jalapenos of course, and I didn't have Oregano so I used thyme, since the bottle said it was good for cheese.]

"What some call health, if purchased by perpetual anxiety about diet, isn't much better than tedious disease." - George Dennison Prentice

***

It keeps getting better...


Shrek 3 not suitable for children

"I TOOK my six-year-old daughter to watch Shrek 3, thinking it was another wholesome animation for children.

But both I and my wife (who has a master's in Early Childhood Studies) feel that it is not suitable for children.

There are some good values to be learnt from the movie. However, I find several aspects of the movie make it not suitable for children.

One of the scenes portray one of the main characters 'Arthur' feigning extreme sadness to fool an old and pitiful magician.

He succeeded in getting his way, and was not at all apologetic that he had used emotional manipulation to do so. Children watching this would obviously pick up the message that it is all right to manipulate others to benefit oneself.

The other objectionable scene was towards the end where an angry 'Prince Charming' starts cutting off the heads of animals/mannequins on stage.

No doubt, he was 'acting' in a drama production, but his characterisation makes it totally believable that he would do the same to actual people or animals.

If the visual images of the beheadings and its irreverent portrayal could leave an impression on an adult like me, what impact can it have on young children?

Another objectionable portion is the negative portrayal of traditional fairy tale heroines.

Characters like Snow White and Rapunzel were portrayed in a negative light - as demanding, unreasonable, impatient and manipulative characters, totally different from the virtuous, pure, sacrificial and long-suffering characters that we know them to be in the original fairy tales.

To innocent young children, this may put confusion in their minds as to what their fairy tale heroines are truly like. Should they continue to admire them and embrace the virtues they portray?

My last point has to do with mismatch of the modern American English spoken with the traditional costumes and setting of the movie. The gentlemen and ladies of that era gone by certainly do not speak in such rude and over-the-top manner. So this represents another historical misrepresentation.

The movie has a good ending and some good lessons but overall its irreverent tone, historical misrepresentations and violent images will not leave many positive nor wholesome impressions on our children and young people.

Brian Tan Cheow Eng"


Obviously he's never deconstructed fairy tales.

Democracy and the internet in Singapore: The supply of alternative political content during general elections

"When elections were called for in November 2001, the new legislations were put into use and were directed at the Think Centre. In the first instance, the Centre received a fax from the Elections Department at 5 pm on Friday the 19th of October. The fax was an order to remove all materials from their website that could be construed as elections advertising. The fax was received at 5.11pm and the order was to be executed by 11pm the same day, giving the Centre less than six hours to act (Gomez 2002, p. 89). The Centre received a second notice from the Elections Department on the 23rd of October 2001. This time, they wanted the removal of an article entitled “Young Singaporeans, can the PAP safeguard your future” which was written by a youth member of the Singapore Democratic Party. This time the Centre was asked to notify the Elections Department in writing the exact time and date of the article’s removal, failing which the Centre would be prosecuted under the Parliamentary Elections Act (Gomez 2002, p. 92). What is ironic is that these threats were directed at the Centre even though the Centre had written to the Elections Department on 10th of October 2001, asking what contents from the Centre’s website should be removed in order not to infringe the Parliamentary Elections Act. However the Centre obtained no response, but received these two threats of prosecution instead (Gomez 2002, p. 91).

In another online and election-related incident, the police chose to apply the Penal Code against Robert Ho, a retired ex-journalist who posted an allegedly “inflammatory” article on the Singaporeans For Democracy (SFD) website and soc.culture.singapore newsgroup on 19 October 2001. The article posted on both sites was the same but with slightly different headlines: “Break the Law - Like Your PAP leaders” and “Break the Law and get away with it, Like PAP”, respectively. The Straits Times reported that “The document allegedly encouraged electors to enter polling stations without authority on Polling Day”, after the Attorney-General declared that four senior PAP ministers were innocent of breaking any laws that disallowed unauthorised persons waiting and loitering outside polling stations on Polling Day in the previous elections in 1997. Instead, Mr. Ho was arrested for attempting to “incite violence and disobedience to the law which is likely to lead to a breach of the peace” (Gomez 2002, p. 99). He was then forced to undergo psychiatric tests. He was acquitted by the courts on 14 December that viiyear after a courtordered psychiatric evaluation found that he had a “long history of psychiatric illness” (Gomez 2002, pp. 99-104)."

"Life is full of misery, loneliness, and suffering - and it's all over much too soon." - Woody Allen

***


I ate at an atrocious Zi Cha place ("Sew An Seafood Cze Cha") recently. Shockingly, it was at Glutton's Bay beside the Esplanade, where all the food is *supposed* to be good. There were no ingredients in the rice and they threw in frozen mixed vegetables, resulting in it having hardly any taste (it didn't help that it wasn't salty enough either); it was the worst fried rice I'd ever had. This 'crab meat fried rice' didn't have crab, but flavoured flour packed around crab claws. Wth.

There is a 'Delilah Pub'. Gah.

A Malaysian businessman had a project in Istanbul and wanted to send an underling there to set up an office. The next day his mother called and asked: "Why are you sending my son there? Is there Halal food in Istanbul?"

I was commenting that black jokes were the funniest racial jokes, and my brother in law commented that most black jokes were written by black people.

My brother in law says the "speak bad French to get the French to speak English" trick works with everyone, even old aunties.

I now have all 6 Fabled Lands books. Yay.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 14 (19/5) - Adieu

This was the final day of the program, and we had a Forum with the Stanford students.


Walking in for the final time

On the way in, I plunged my face into a fountain (not only was the fountain water colder in the morning, I figured no dogs would've bathed inside yet). The chill was invigorating.

We didn't know they were providing us breakfast, which was nice (Strawberry Cream Cheese is weird). Unfortunately it wasn't nice enough to tempt more than 6 (?) of the Stanford students to come; various parties the night before (one had fireworks) might have had something to do with that.

During the forum we were supposed to talk about puzzles we found in America and our paper topics. I realised I could've done the thing about Asian men and non-Asian women, but in the process of doing research for it I would've been beaten up (since I'm not an Asian girl).

Someone commented on faux diversity in Stanford - in a picture they had promoting the school there was a picture of one White, one Black, one Asian. OTOH, NUS is even worse - on a similar picture we had promoting our centennial, almost all of the students were foreign exchange students.

Ady observed that the Chinese and Indians in the US want to get a Green Card and stay there. Meanwhile, those in Singapore still identify with their home countries, have a mercenary attitude and want to get out as soon as possible. I interjected that this was because those in the US are there because they want to be there, while those in Singapore had to be bribed and imported.

Despite Jag's perception that hiphop treats women as sex objects and are the lesser gender, he found that most organisers of hiphop events there were white women.

Someone overhead a black woman talking to another black woman on the train that she'd moved to a new neighborhood and it was nice, but that the best thing about it was that it was an all white neighborhood. But then as a Chris Rock routine went, "I love black people, but I hate Niggers".

When they came to Singapore, the Stanford students went to Malacca. On returning, a couple were glad to return to Singapore because affirmative action is in the Malaysian Constitution and Singapore is meritocratic. Wth. As someone pointed out: it's more likely because Singapore represents civilization, with aircon and safe drinking water.

After the forum was only the second time I saw a girl in a bikini on campus, and the second time I saw someone in a fountain.

The girls said I looked like a minah. Uhh.

For lunch we went to an Italian place where the names of the foods were in Italian and there was no English translation. My theory was that the waiter could laugh at how we mangled the Italian names. I had Spaghetti alla Vodka. It had bacon too. Mmm.

I found that 2 more batteries dropped out, including 1 rechargeable (but it was 4 years old). Gah. I then wrapped the rest in a ziploc bag to wedge them into the case.


Little Red Riding Hood (she says she looks like an Indonesian Maid, because only they take pictures alone)


Roomies

After some farewells, the 7 of us set out for San Francisco to catch our bus for LA. While waiting almost an hour for the Caltrain I got a cheap thrill out of standing on train tracks for the first time (Vinod and the other Indian guys had gotten their fill of it on earlier days).

Backpacking with 6 people using wheeled baggage was interesting. At times (eg just before turning left in front of a steep hill in San Francisco) I was almost tempted to walk a longer, steeper route than strictly necessary.

The overnight bus wasn't too bad. There was more legroom than the Eurolines bus I took.


Quotes:

They try to be colour-blinded (blind)

air'm'br'air'ce race's (embrace races)

core'noy'sear (connoisseur)

We're from Singapore. We speak English, but we have a lot of people who speak Chinese, Malay and Indian. (Tamil)

[Female student on guys not talking: They're just standing still and keeping quiet.] They're communicating with their minds. [Female student 2: Guys like to make girls talk about them.] [Male student 2: Let them talk about us.]

VietPundit: Racist America?

"I get angry when I hear some leftist idiots claim that America is a “racist” country. Sure some Americans are racist. But you know what? I’ll let you in on a little secret, ok? Some Vietnamese are racist, too. Yup, that’s shocking, ain’t it?

The truth is that there’s less racism in America than anywhere else on earth. Just from the little corner of Asia where I came from: the Vietnamese hate the Chinese, who can’t stand the Japanese, who despise the Koreans, who of course loath the Japanese, and you can complete the circle yourself. Even amongst Vietnamese, Southerners hate Northerners, and vice versa. Even in my tiny hometown of Da Nang, people from District One consider those in District Three (on the other side of the Han River) backward and stupid.

Am I making too broad a generalization here? Of course I am. And that’s the point. There’s prejudice everywhere you go. There are good people everywhere you go, too, and there are plenty of them in America. Just go to any American embassy abroad and look at the long lines of people waiting to apply for a Visa, and tell them that America is a racist country."

Google Language tools translates "台式比薩" as "Desktop Pisa".

Babelfish goes one up and renders it as "Table model ratio".


"而小印度一帶，除了清潔程度的差別之外，看起來就和印度的某些街道一模一樣。"

"An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations." - Charles de Montesquieu

***

Channeling my inner misandrist:


Men who don't want to get married have commitment issues.
Women who don't want to get married are modern, empowered women who don't need to depend on men.

Men who use sex aids are sad, perverted and can't get laid.
Women who use sex aids are liberated from patriarchy and adventurous.

Men who use computers a lot are geeks.
Women who use computers a lot are technologically savvy empowered women who don't need to depend on men.

Men who skip PE are lazy.
Women who skip PE have cramps.

Men who don't make the first move are cowards.
Women who don't make the first move are testing fickle and unreliable men.

Men who flirt are thinking with their penises.
Women who flirt are just having fun.

Men who are found in female toilets are peeping toms.
Women who are found in male toilets are escaping the queue.

Women who wear men's clothing are getting rid of impractical, outdated and sexist garb.
Men who wear women's clothing are gay.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 13 (18/5) - San Francisco

After about a week, the ends of my hair were starting to stick together a lot. Someone's theory was that it was because of the static, which is discharged in Singapore due to the humidity.

While hiking the previous Saturday, I was not the only one to damage my shoes - Tong Wei's got a hole.


We were supposed to go to Monterey today, but it fell through because we couldn't get a bus in time. Originally, Aileen, Weiwei and I were going to go to San Francisco, but the first was tempted by free lunch and so stayed behind with the rest, who did things like laundry, going for more talks in Stanford and watching a hiphop (?) concert.


Mission Dolores, the oldest building in San Francisco (founded 1776)


Chapel


Altar


One of the side carvings


Basilica


Altar


Water


Madonna and Child


Madonna mosaic


Guillermo Granzio. Mural about the Spanish arrival


Early 19th c. Spanish Colonial picture on paper with silk embroidery showing the 3 persons of the Holy Trinity


Indian hunting stuff


Cemetery








Mission

We wanted to get down to Fisherman's Wharf, and I asked one bus driver if his bus went to the sea (the bus didn't quite go to the wharf). He claimed it didn't. Later we found out, after trying the bus in the other direction, that his bus did. Mexican
busboys should learn to speak goddamn English.

We wanted to go to Alcatraz, but it was fully booked for the next 21 hours. Nearby, a scalper was hawking tickets for $30 (original price: $21.75). He claimed he was selling them on behalf of a timeshare. Right. My companion was inclined to buy tickets, but I wasn't hot about the idea - maybe I should've gone for it.


Pier 39

After lunch we went to Lombard Street, specifically the stretch dubbed "the world's crookedest street" (supposedly it's only the crookedest in the US, but I can't find information on which is the crookedest in the world).


Steep road in vicinity. It's so steep they have 90 degree parking, and tour buses and vans with a capacity of more than 8 people are banned from the vicinity.




View from top


Cable Car



Pizza ad: "Pizza Orgasmica. 'We never fake it.'" Seems they had pizzas like "ménage a trois," "doggie style," and "Latin Lover."

After that we proceeded to the Golden Gate Bridge, to walk it.







Sign on the bridge: "No U-turn". What moron would make a U-turn there?!

At one point, some of my batteries fell out from my camera pouch. Though I picked up what I could find, 1 disposable battery seemed to have rolled into the water.


Bay


Anti-suicide signs. My favourite is: "Crisis Counselling: There is hope. Make the call. The consequences of jumping from this bridge are fatal and tragic."











Rough halfway mark


Near the end


Cove on the other side


Heading back

The BART is convenient (if expensive) but the annoying thing is that it misses out large chunks of San Francisco - you need to transfer to the metro, which is annoying.

Ad at a bus stop about human trafficking: "Is someone you know being FORCED to work?" The bus driver was very amused and said: "Yeah, me!"

I don't know how people can get so upset about other people using cell phones, say, in the train. Carrying on a conversation on a cell phone really isn't very different from talking to someone beside you. Hell, since the other person isn't there it's even better since you get half the noise. If you want to ban cell phone usage, you might as well ban conversation.

I can't figure out how sales tax works. Some suggested that items below a certain price wouldn't get sales tax, but it doesn't work that way, as in these examples: $1 for 4 small chocolates (sales tax levied), $1.99 for cashew nuts at Safeway (no sales tax), $2 for 6 stink bombs in Chinatonw (sales tax levied), $4.99 + $1 for a sandwich plus a meal deal at Safeway (sales tax levied on the meal deal bit, not the sandwich, for $6.08 overall). It's seems arbitrary and bizarre.

[Someone: Sales tax probably works by classification. Basic food and non basic or non essentials. Just like Australia's GST.

The government or some 'independant body', of course, is the sole arbitrator of what is a basic food and what is not.]

The Safeway in San Francisco we went to had a coin dispenser at the end of the checkout counter which shot out the coins part of your change. This was very smart, not only because it saved labour but because some people would inevitably forget to collect their change or not bother, and they would be able to pocket it.

When I got back, I found that the guys didn't do laundry for me - they forgot, though I'd lent them my soap. Boo hoo. This messed up my clothes schedule for the week ahead.

"The last time somebody said, 'I find I can write much better with a word processor.', I replied, 'They used to say the same thing about drugs.'" - Roy Blount Jr.

***

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USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 12 (17/5) - CDI

In the morning we visited the Community Development Institute in East Palo Alto.

One of the community leaders said that gentrification (the influx of rich, white people) was a problem, and they were trying to defend against this because they liked the ethnic mix of their community (95% minority) as it as. How racist. If it were a white guy saying such things, he'd surely be lynched, but coming from him it might even be seen by many of the same people who'd lynch 'racists' as laudable.


You can't discriminate based on language limitations. So if someone cannot speak English (or even Spanish), you must till hire him. Excellent. Next time we won't be able to discriminate against the lazy and the stupid.

There was a sign: "War is not the answer. fcnl.org". It seems FCNL stands for "Friends Committee on National Legislation", a Quaker group founded in 1943. At first I thought that they didn't think war was the answer to British oppression of the 13 colonies, Slavery in the South and Nazism, Fascism and Japanese Imperialism, but now it seems that campaign was against the Iraq war.

In the afternoon some of us went to the Great Mall, a conglomeration of factory outlets. We took a 1 hr 30 min bus ride to Sana Clara and transferred to a tram for about 1 hr. Just before that, I shared a pork taco from a taqueria billed as having "the best tacos and burritos in the whole world". It was the worst I'd ever had (I didn't have time to record its name since the tram came).

There were many bail bonds shops in Santa Clara, eg "Bad Boy's Bail Bonds".

When we finally reached the place at 3, most of us ate at a Cajun place in the food court. That it was run by a Chinese woman was evident just by looking at the sides - 4/7 were Chinese (eg Chow Mein). They were giving out samples of Bourbon Chicken which was good (primarily because it was sweet), so 5 of us had it. Unfortunately not all the sides were as palatable - I had Cajun Fried Potatoes which were okay (not very crispy but well spiced) and Fried Plantains (dismissed by the rest as 'Goreng Pisang'), but someone had black bean rice which was the worst I'd ever tasted - even SMM made better rice. (Aside: recipe for Bourbon Chicken... without any Bourbon in it!)

There was a shop selling a rubber chicken. It made a noise when you squeezed it. Yay.

At the door of one outlet, there was a picture advertising smock tops. I was about to note that the picture made her look fat, then someone remarked that it was an outlet selling maternity dresses.

At one point there were some massage chairs. This being a litigious country, there was a list of safety precautions on them, and one of them was that menstruating women should not use them. Wth. I thought we'd been over supserstitions about menstruating women for at least a century. Maybe they're scared they'll leak and dirty the chairs.

After countless examples of the reverse, I finally saw an Asian man with a White woman! Jabir claimed he'd seen 1-2 before this, but he never pointed it out to me. This one was a bit taller than her, even in her heels which were quite high, and he had a lot of facial stubble (so, yes, Yellow Fever was right - it's the hair). If so many Asian women go with non-Asian men, I wonder what will happen in a generation's time - there'll be no more Asian women for the non-Asians to date. But then again maybe they marry Asian men in the end after having some fun. Later I saw another such pair who were probably together (Huishan said the guy was cute).

I didn't have energy to process all the outlets, so I only did 3/4. Which was still a lot of outlets, though I didn't spend much.

Two of the girls shared Cold Stone Creamery ice cream, which was hideously expensive. The concept is you start with some plain ice cream and toppings are thrown on and spatula-ed into the ice cream on top of a black stone surface (hence, the name).

We left at 8 and took just over 1.5 hrs to return (excluding dinner) since we took a shorter route involving 1km of walking.

There was a nightclub called 'Buddha lounge' in Mountain View. Seditious!

For dinner we ate at a KFC near Mountain View. Using the toilet was really inconvenient - we had to exit the restaurant, go to the back door and request access through it. What made it worse was that while the 2 front counter staff could speak English, all of the back counter staff seemed to understand Spanish only, so they had to call one front counter staff member over to understand my hollering. Indeed, the Latinos have reached a critical mass and can exist (in California at least) without speaking English.


Quotes:

I wanted to turn to my friend and say, 'Lim Yu Beng is damn hot' but just behind us was Tan Kheng Hwa.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 11 (16/5) - A Day with Tom Kosnik

Today was dedicated to entrepreneurship (doubtless a sop to the NUS administration), curious given that our program was about multiculturalism. More than once, I asked the Golden Question: "What is the relationship between entrepreneurship and multiculturalism?", but never got a satisfactory reply.

I was wondering if I should buy a Stanford shirt, and my roommates said it was very poser to do so. I asked if it was not then poser to buy a Berkeley shirt, as I had, and they said it was less so.

While we were waiting for the bus, Jaga (who was wearing a Stanford shirt) and I (wearing a Berkeley shirt) engaged in some stupid posing. The photos will be put up together with others from other people once I finish my travelogue (presumably everyone will have uploaded their photos to Facebook by then).

Interestingly, Stanford has engineering societies formed along racial lines - there's one for Chicanos/Latinos, one 'American Indian Engineering and Science Society' and doubtless many more.

I don't know why grass in Singapore is so shitty - lying on the grass was great here, but no one would think of doing likewise in Singapore. Partially it's because the grass in Singapore seems a different species from that in temperate countries, but it's also due to the frequent rain making the ground soggy and muddy and the insects of the tropics.


Huge wall-mounted screen - 'This is not a chalkboard'. If you look closely you can see chalk marks.

One Stanford student thought one big motivation for volunteerism there was CV-building. Sounds familiar.

In Stanford there were quite a few students zipping around on skateboards and there were even more in Berkeley. It must be a Californian thing.

The salt in salt water taffy is surprisingly interesting. It gives it an added dimension of flavour.

Click To Play

Running after Tom Kosnik (reuploaded uploaded onto blip.tv)
NB: This video doesn't seem to be processable by YouTube, unfortunately.

In one entrepreneurship talk, one entrepreneur talked about the importance of finding a local partner in China. I pointed out that they'd steal your technology and violate your contract. The reply was that contracts are violated elsewhere in the world as well, and that the modus operandi of Chinese companies was becoming more sophisticated; technology could be reverse engineered even though the architecture was kept from the Chinese, but they hoped to caputre the market by that time ('a few years'). I was a bit skeptical. If they can do it with cars, why not wireless technology? (I was told that while I was asking this question, the female class instructor turned around and looked at me [since I was the only NUS student to say anything], and her eyes widened on seeing my Berkeley shirt)

Cloth belts are good because they can be adjusted.

There was a noticeboard advertising tuition for maths, physics, chemistry and more besides (basically, everything pakka liao) from a Stanford PhD student. Hah. Another notice asked if you were "interested in learning about neuroscience research and motor learning studies"; I only realised its true nature upon seeing the $20/hr remuneration.

We then went to a seminar ("Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders"), where industry figures came to speak. We were a week too early to catch Mitchell Baker from Mozilla, damn. Instead we got the guy behind Ooma who annoyingly refused to say what the hell Ooma was (at press time it still had not been revealed), and a venture capitalist from DFJ (they bankrolled Hotmail, and pushed through initial opposition from the founder for the little ad at the bottom of each email message, thus innovating viral marketing).

The speakers said that failure was important (not just preferred) on your CV so you'd know what gravity felt like. They also said the problem with letting engineering lead product development was that you'd pour in $300 million over 4 years to make a supercool product no one would buy, because they'd keep changing the specs.

I pointed out to people that if I was a girl being marginalised by guys, the narrative would be very different, and was told to shut up. Bah.


Everyone loves Yoda




Explaining GLEAN - Global Leaders, Entrepreneurs and Altruists Network

When we were going back at night there was a manhole outside the Terman Engineering Building covered by a grille. Below it there was a ladder and a passage leading to an opening from which a light source was shining. Much warmth was also coming out of the manhole. I thought this sort of thing only existed in science fiction movies.

Besides my clapping, my laugh was also imitated. Bah.


Quotes:

In Singapore we are quite ignore'rernt (ignorant)

[On buying prom dresses to return them the next day] How de'speckable they are (despicable)

[On his band on in-head advisers ('what would xxx do?')] Mom, Dad, Mickey Mouse, Robin Hood, Maid Marian, Jimmy Cricket, Yoda.

[Me on a 'Situational Leadership' graph: Business is bullshit. They just pull this shit out of their ass] I agree with you. There's no such thing as learning business.

[Me on a 'Situational Leadership' graph: What do you think of the graph thing?] Bullshit... [Student 2: I am generally skeptical of all business models.]

[Me on a string below the bust line: What's that string for?] For decoration... I feel uncomfortable now.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 10 (15/5) - Stanford

On the BART, Jabir and I were having a discussion on the utility of taxonomy and categorisation, as opposed to embracing the fragmentation of knowledge beyond palpable categories. I was accused of being simplistic, but this was ridiculous really, since cognition is categorization: "The essence of memory organization is classification, relating new experiences to the old." - William Estes; just because we recognise that we live in and interact with the world using categories does not mean that we ignore the subtleties of particular instances. This caused a woman to laugh because, really, philosophy (and epistemology in particular) is not something you discuss in polite company.


In the morning we had a talk at APARC and the afternoon was free.

We took a zero emissions fuel cell bus to the transit center; an interesting thing about many US buses is that they are kneeling - the front of the bus can be lowered to make it easier for people to get on, or wheelchair users to wheel themselves up the ramp.

Unfortunately no girls chose to do a paper on shopping and multiculturalism. Then they could've gone shopping to do 'research'. Though one is doing the touristification of Chinatown.

The US officially has a melting pot policy (homogeneity), but people are very enthusiastic about their heritage and identity. They know where their grandparents are from; Asian-Americans say they want to visit their hometown in China to find their roots. Meanwhile in Singapore we officially have a salad bowl policy (heterogeneity) with CMIO (with PAP as the sauce), but people are blase about their roots, not wanting or liking to talk about their heritage and not knowing where their grandparents were from.

For lunch someone allergic to beef ate a 100% beef hot dog. Luckily she brought her creams and pills.

After lunch, I went for Political Economics (the use of mathematical models to examine politics). The blasted room was so hard to find I walked in 15 minutes late, with Jabir and Guanzheng (who wanted to see what Applied Maths was like) falling out before I found it. The lecture/seminar was 1 hr 50 mins without a break - quite xiong.

The students had read a paper before class and were discussing it semi-enthusiastically. They had no lecture notes (just some paragraphs of discussion blurbs) and the structure of the class was less obvious than I expected.

There were some interesting bits. The poor were modelled as imposing costs on the elite by revolting, and democracy was modelled as a promise of future redistribution (it was claimed that Singapore was a stable autocracy because inequality was low and so there was no benefit from revolution. Wth). Political dynamics were modelled as a game between the rich and the poor about tax rates and the threat revolution, and the conditions for revolution were also modelled. In earlier weeks, there'd been size of government models, public goods and preferred tax rates.

Cute models aside, the maths was just used to come up with fancy expressions where the symbols had no real meaning or relevance to reality and we learnt nothing new we didn't already know before starting the mathematical footwork. What a sham of a discipline.

Indeed, there was extension discussion of the realism of the model, its assumptions and its interaction with reality; one student objected, saying that using rational theory to explain the actions of irrational agents was flawed, and we should use sociological theories instead. It was also said that what should be modelled was not decisions but 'pseudo-evolutionary' models should be used. It was also pointed out that the coordination was suspect - the elites might but the poor were too numerous to coordinate revolution. One girl pointed out that no one sits around calculating probabilities in their heads. I think economics doesn't even explain economics that well, let alone real life.

Later a Singaporean student told me that this was an atypical lesson (weird modelling) of an atypical class. Going through the paper and discussing it was not normal - usually it was more like a lecture, where they'd go through models without papers. Usually the class was more interesting. I replied that it was already more interesting than NUS, hurr hurr.

Stanford has a social dance class carrying 1 credit.

India is a good counterexample to the theory that most people cannot speak more than one language very fluently.

I was feeling masochistic and needed to work my brain cells to burn the basket of cheese fries I had in addition to my other food at lunch (they were weird - a very mild, almost tasteless cheese was melted over them), so I went for a graduate class in 'Multiperson Decision Theory'.

That day, there was a presentation on 'A continuous-time version of the principal-agent problem' (the instructor called it one of the best papers he'd ever seen, but it was rejected by Econometrica). I was doing okay until 'argmax' appeared. Then 'HJB equation', boundary conditions and Ito's Formula overwhelmed me and very soon I felt like gouging out my eyeballs. The presentation was almost all maths, and had very little economics - clear proof that the more economics you learn, the less economics you know; they called some models intractable - I don't want to look at those.

There were 12 students in the class. 11 were guys, and the sole girl looked quite nerdy.

Running out as soon as was polite (when the Q&A started), I decided I needed to walk off my migraine so I walked to Stanford Shopping Center (I considered the hotel but decided it too far). My psyche had been so damaged that loud hysterical laughs were coming from me at irregular intervals for a while after I left.


Palm Drive




Entrance - perhaps the most pretentious part of Stanford


Wth rules for the Shopping Center

The shops were quite expensive, but Stanford kids are rich, so it's okay.

There was a grocer selling exotic fruit like strawberry papaya and cherimoya.

Some Asian noodle joint had a vegetarian option called 'Buddha's Bliss', and a fusion dish called 'Cultural Harmony'.

I walked to the 22 bus stop (there was a free Stanford shuttle down the El Camino Real but it had a confusing route [Guan Zheng and I got on at the wrong stop during the night we watched the movie and had to get off at the transit center and take the public bus] and came only every half hour), but just missed the bus. The next one was taking forever to come, seemingly in violation of the schedule, so I walked in the direction of the next bus stop, hoping it had a seat. Naturally, a bus came when I was too far to run to either the new or old bus stops. When the bus finally came, I realised that not only were the raspberries I'd bought partially squashed by their own weight, I was at the wrong stop - I was on the stretch where the bus came only ever half hour, as opposed to the stretch where it came every 12 minutes. Gah.

Everyone had gone to dinner already, so I ta pao-ed so-called Hawaiian food. Grilled spam musubi (like sushi) sounded disgusting so I went for a seafood set with chicken. I noticed that they'd won a Hawaiian award in 2003 and 2004 (there was also an award for best Chinese food - wth). 2005 onwards was curiously missing and the quality of the food showed why - suffice to say that the 'BBQ chicken' was grilled.


Quotes:

preceed'duh'nce (precedence)

I'm not dying for men. [Student 2: You're dying for a lot of things you will not say.] Yah, like sex. [Student 2: It came from your own mouth] (mention)

"My factories may end war sooner than your peace congresses. The day two army corps can destroy each other in one second, all civilised nations will recoil from war and disband their armies." - Alfred Nobel

"The more destructive war becomes, the more fascinating we find it." - Andrew Undershaft (George Bernard Shaw)

***

Steven Lim's latest antic:

Models & Talents

"Our freelance models are available for hire immediately for any events, commercials, all photo shoots including bikini, lingerie & legal artistic nude (for private collections, not for sales & publication), fashion shows, all dancing including bar top, hosting, videos or any acting scenes."

Extracts from the descriptions:

- *All models' shots, videos, poses, acting directed by Steven Lim
- Wgt: 45cm. Linda got the sad sad cute puppy look eyes n demure n pretty
- adorable girl that is quick on poses
- Du Du has a very gorgeous face but rather big but envious body
- Like a Japanese, tall with good figure
- Jennifer got what all women wants for assets, good looks n larger than life female assets, plus good natured character
- A small body compared to her head with 25 inches waist
- Special Note: Ming Quan aspired to become a model very much but some agencies rejected him on the spot. For me, i think he is really special n cute. He can really try comedy n funny bar top dancing. Congrats, Ming Quan, u are model now!
- Willing to do Bikini & All Events including acting (note: she got good female assets)
- Boyish Girl Role. Various events/ acting except wearing skirt roles.


This is very dodgy, and he has jailbait on the payroll too.

At least I now know the weight of someone I know of. Hurr hurr.


Someone: he gave up on his eyebrow business ah? wah liao! some of them are younger than my sister! not yet 18!

sorry lor i think the best among them is only qualified to be PC show girl

Someone else: OH MY GOD
WHY IS SHE [mutual sorta acquaintance] IN THIS

OHHH
the eyebrow man

argh
tts damn stupid

are u sure this is legal?

Someone: cb

Someone else: the description of the first two make them sound like they're willing to do lesbian scenes

Someone: some hor..
........

he anyhow grab ppl off the streets is it
no qc one

if i saw anyone i knew, i'd suan them with NO mercy man
­hahahahaha

god.
u have to ask her what possessed her to allow her picthre to be put up there
knea drugged arh

Someone else: uhoh
I tink its a scam

cos I know 1 of the girls there
and I highly doubt she would put herself on the page like that


Someone: haha i see ***

i wonder how's business going for them

Me: ask if she'll do legal artistic nude hahahaha

Someone: i was going to suggest that

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 9 (14/5) - OICW

Today we left Berkeley and returned to Palo Alto.

The stupid vending machine at the YMCA swallowed my $1.50. I complained to the receptionist, but he said he had no access, and did the next best thing - he helped me to tilt the vending machine (my first time - woo!), so I got a $1 bottle of mineral water (not the $1.50 grape juice I wanted).

Another facet of my marginalisation: sometimes when I laugh I clap. This was seized upon and replicated. The most claps recorded so far are 6 - 4 from one girl and 2 from another - on seeing a picture of Huishan and I reading the book I bought for USP.


Caltrain - "There is Help. 1 800 SUICIDE". We need such signs at MRT stations.

Someone made the mistake of asking me why I grew my hair out. I used to tell people why, but they never believed me so nowadays I just demonstrate the reason why. So I tied my hair up and flipped it in her face. This got me hit many times, with me yelping on each hit.


'This is not a seat'


Housing discrimination bus ad

After returning to the Comfort Inn, we were to go down to the OICW (Opportunities Industrialization Center West) to have a look. To get there we needed to use buses from two companies - the daypass we bought from VTA was supposedly valid only on Samtrans buses in the direction leaving the Palo Alto transit center but not on the way back. Really strange system (later the Samtrans bus driver let us use our daypass to go back to the transit center, hurr hurr).

Darren said I was provoking others into marginalising me. This was a horrible and insensitive observation to make - it is really awful to blame the victim, like claiming that rape victims ask for it when they walk down the street in a bad neighbourhood at 3am, dressed in skimpy clothing, or claiming that someone who got his car stolen should have locked it (even if he didn't use a steering wheel lock).

There are no traffic signals or signs in Phnom Penh even though they have a million people.


Kalamu Chache's poem

I commented that one of the people who spoke to us had a very anecdotal way of answering our questions which didn't answer them and the answers bordered on the irrelevant. I was told that the anecdotes were relevant because she lived through the events. This is like explaining how a Boeing 777 flies by explaining the Navier-Stokes equations - it is related to the question but doesn't answer it at all.

I'd forgotten to bring my belt, but Darren lent me his, making me feel immediately more secure. Yay.

Huishan went to MSN and typed "Google" in the search box. Hehe.

For dinner some of us went to a Mexican restaurant. They had a bottomless glass of watermelon juice for $2.50, so I jumped at it and had 4 glasses. They also served freshly fried nachos with salsa, and I noticed that when we asked for a refill of salsa, the next batch was hotter than the first; my theory was that each refill would be hotter than the last until customers had had enough chips.


2 pork and 1 chicken enchilada, beans and rice
I'd forgotten that we were in America. Shit. After all the nachos and juice, I hardly touched the beans and almost didn't touch the rice, and left just under 1/2 an enchilada behind.

The Americans don't seem to be very fond of the 24 hour clock. Then again I didn't notice this in 2005, so it must be a Californian thing.


Quotes:

People carry guns at church in Texas, like a Western movie.

I think all of my children are beautiful. They're probably not, but I think they are.

"Winning may not be everything, but losing has little to recommend it." - Dianne Feinstein

***

A reader on this post:


"I believe that was "ochazuke" with tonkatsu set.

ochazuke is basically broth with rice, comes in many variations such as salmon ochazuke, plum ochazuke, etc.

you were most probably supposed to put the ingredients from the smaller bowls into the rice and then pour the broth into it.
it is very tasty. try it again if you can :D"


Thanks! I wonder if I can find ochazuke in Singapore...

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 8 (13/5) - San Francisco

This was our first (and technically only) real free day, so 12 of us went to San Francisco, while 4 went to Oakland. This being a huge group, we didn't manage to do much, but it was still fun.

The BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) ticket is so cute. It's a stored value card which you can topup, and the value to add can be gradated in $1 and $0.05 increments.


'Cute at one. Not so cute at 21'
Some of the girls suggested that they redo this ad with me. Boo hoo.


Monument to workers (?) outside the BART station. San Francisco Financial District


Malaysian Mannikins :(


Montgomery Street, very steep stretch in the distance


Entering into Chinatown

The sheer amount of junk on sale was amazing. I paid $2.17 (with tax) for 6 stink bombs.


Phone booth with activist stickers. Note also the Orientalism inherent in the booth.


Chinatown


Where there're Chinese there're bootleg Sentai toys

Unfortunately we lost one of our number in Chinatown, so we were down to 11.


North border of Chinatown with Little Italy


Little Italy didn't look very Italian, except for the Italian cafes and restaurants. Perhaps in overcompensation, every lamppost had a painting of the Italian flag.

We went into a nice candy shop, which was the shit. With Screaming Flying Monkeys (see below), friendly staff and free samples, it's no wonder it was the #1 candy shop.


T-shirts


Taffy shopping with Chris. There was another group of taffey barrels opposite us.
There's a picture of me with my basket looking like an 'oompa-loompa'. Once I finish my travelogue (hopefully before going to Shanghai/Hong Kong) I will post it and thus contribute to my marginalisation.


New Wife Voodoo Doll


My new girlfriend. Someone asked if it grew big enough to be used as a sex doll. !@#$


Fat cats


B Movie Victims

Maybe the best item was the Screaming Flying Monkeys - you launch them using their rubberised arms, like a slingshot, and when they hit their target they scream. Unfortunately my attempts to get a video were unsuccessfully.


Vinod bought some sex cards with positions and methods. These girls are intrigued by it. Purely for academic purposes, of course.


Huishan is happy with Vinod's sex cards from the candy shop


Outside the candy shop


Washington Square


Pullups from a tree in the park. Deforestation. If he does this everyday maybe the tree will break.


Cute car ad


Fisherman's Wharf


Retro car


Seagull


Cat man

Scoma's was way too expensive and we had to wait too, so we went to Tarantino's, also along the Wharf.

While waiting for our food to come, we saw this:

Scaring passers-by by hiding vegetation. This isn't a bad idea for busking.


The best Boston (hurr hurr) Clam Chowder I've ever had. Too bad there were no oyster crackers. The sourdough bread we got was nice but it didn't quite substitute for crackers.


Sauteed scallops and prawns in garlic, lemon butter and white wine sauce. The scallops were huge. Unfortunately this means they weren't seared enough - it didn't go all the way through. Other than that it was good. Most of the rest had Fish and Chips, which cost less than half of this. Hah.


Crabs


Fisherman's Wharf sign.

Other bits of my soles started coming out on this day as well as many other subsequent days of the trip. As the saying goes, when it rains, it pours. Luckily I had my glue already.


Seagull


Alcatraz from shore

We decided to go on a $21 cruise which would bring us past Alcatraz and under the Golden Gate Bridge. There were portable sound units providing narration in 8 (?) different languages. However, English language speakers were marginalised since the channel for English did not work, so we had to listen to the indistinct sound coming out from the loudspeakers.



Port from ship




The wind was painful to the eyes.


Windsurfing
Some of them had parachutes attached to their surfboards and in the air above them catching the wind. I wonder what that's called - parasurfing?


Rainbow in the spray from the boat






















Alcatraz




Bay Bridge


Shore. The needle building is the San Francisco pyramid. It is the tallest building in the city, with a narrow top so it wouldn't cast a big shadow on the street. Uhh.


Seals


Fake cigarettes. These are chocolate sticks rolled in paper. Amusingly, it doesn't say 'chocolate' anywhere, since these are made in the Land of Pot, Hookers and Euthanasia which has that rule that anything with fat other than cocoa butter cannot be called 'chocolate' (meaning you can't find Malaysian chocolate anywhere); the second ingredient is 'hardened vegetable oil'.


Breakdancing. The Malay kids at Esplanade need to go for intensive remedial.
I didn't know it was possible to spin on your head with your legs perpendicular to your body so many times.

Unfortunately the breakdancing was evidence of a systematic and racist framework of exclusion - only blacks and Cambodians (not even Asians in general) were taking part, and the latter had to shave their heads and pierce their ears, thus losing their Asian-ness, before they were allowed to take part.




Some passer-by was trying to get the performance artists to laugh/move. She succeeded.

There's Menopause the Musical. Hah.


Sea lions








Bubba Gump, at Fisherman's Wharf


EZ-Link in a tram

We went up the tram to go back to the BART and no one paid. When in Rome, do as the Romans do (I doubt all of them had a valid transfer ticket). So only Vinod paid. The tram was from Milan and so had Italian signs (there's another from Birmingham - with so many trams from around the world, it must've been a bitch to fix them all to run on the same tracks and power lines).

Incidentally, the most retarded argument I've heard for inflexible tram services: ""The street car solution is like a marriage," says Dr. Dave Fritze, a member of a group trying to bring street cars back to Cincinnati. "When you put down rails through a neighborhood you indicate you intend to stay there. A bus can be on one route today and leave the neighborhood behind tomorrow.. The difference is commitment.""

It costs $4.65 to leave the same BART station you entered. They call it 'excursion fare'. If anyone is daft enough to do that, he deserves to pay $4.65.

There was a woman running in a bra and pink shirts with many badges pinned on them. She was wearing gloves, listening to music and moaning as she ran. Uhh. California is such a weird place.

Just before dinner, the one who'd gotten lost in Chinatown reappeared and the other girls went to hug her. I passed a comment about how she wouldn't get any hugs if she were a guy, but one girl disagreed with me. Seeking to illustrate a related point by attempting to shatter another convention got me another scream. Boo hoo.

We had dinner at Jayakarta, a supposedly Halal Singaporean-Indonesian (just about the only Singaporean thing was roti prata, though) place so the Muslim girls could choose to eat meat. Unfortunately it was not really Halal since it served beer (tsk) so one ate a bit of chicken and the other stuck to fish. Maybe I should've ordered loempia since I haven't had it since last June or July. Oh well.

Over dinner, the plan to exploit and marginalise me continued. It was suggested that I be dressed up as Obelix. Gah.

Jayakarta had savory desserts. Wth.


Pranking Daniel with the 'cigarettes'. Their giggling gave the game away.


Free unsold books (thrown away, with the covers torn off; unfortunately sometimes some pages had been ripped off with the covers)


Quotes:

[When surrounded by Chinese people, signs and stuff] Are we in Chinatown?

"Devotees of grammatical studies have not been distinguished for any very remarkable felicities of expression." - Amos Bronson Alcott

***

Found through a Google ad:


Physics.com.sg - First Class in Physics Tuition (Singapore)

"Mediocrity is indeed not an option, especially under the new M.O.E. examination style that emphasizes creative thinking abilities.

Welcome to Physics.com.sg - First Class in Physics Tuition^®.

This website belongs to Phang Yu Hon - Physics tuition teacher with 16 years' experience in private tuition...

You are welcomed to print out the following Tuition Teacher Comparison Sheet for reference.

Tuition Teacher Comparison Sheet

	Mr. Phang	Other Tuition Teacher
What Academic Prizes or Awards has the tuition teacher won?	Innovation Award for Honours Project Thesis (2nd Prize from NUS Faculty of Engineering) Technology Award for Inter-Varsity Science Project Competition (3rd Prize from Singapore Science Centre)	_____________ Award
Which Class of Honours did the tuition teacher get in the University?	Award-Winning First Class Honours from NUS	Award-Winning First Class? Normal First Class Honours? Second Class Upper? Second Class Lower? Third Class? Pass With Merit? General Pass Degree?
Which Secondary School did the tuition teacher study at?	Raffles Institution	_________ Secondary School
Which Junior College did the tuition teacher study at?	Raffles Junior College	________ Junior College
What Grade did the tuition teacher get for his "O" Level Physics?	A1	A1, A2, B3, B4, C5, C6, D7, E8, F9?
What Grade did the tuition teacher get for his "A" Level Physics?	A	A, B, C, D, E, AO, F?
What Grade did the tuition teacher get for his University Physics?	A	A, B, C, D, E, F?
What publications has the tuition teacher authored?	'A' Level Physics Special Paper Worked Solutions 'A' Level H1 / H2 Physics Worked Solutions	_____________
Is tuition teacher able to guide students all the way from secondary school to junior college, including top students taking Special Paper?	Yes.  All the way. Including Integrated Programme (Through-Train) students H1/H2/H3.	Yes. All the way? Only up to normal 'A' levels? Only up to 'O' levels?
How many years' tutoring experience does the tuition teacher have?	16 years (Since 1991)	_______ years

The above certificates, awards and grades can be verified with original copies, as well as the NUS University's Honours Roll (Archived copies available at the NUS Central Library and Hon Sui Sen Memorial Library under NUS Convocation List (LG399 NUS.CO 1991).

Scanned copies of Mr. Phang's academic certificates can be viewed  by clicking the "Certificates" button on the left panel."


One of the questions that comes to mind is: why take Physics tuition from an Engineering graduate instead of a Physics graduate?

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 7 (12/5) - Berkeley, Strawberry Canyon hike

NB: A note to those who complain my photos are too small - try *clicking* on them; they're thumbnails.

In the morning we went for a Berkeley campus tour. The Stanford campus was pretentious, but this would've been mostly unremarkable, but for the expertise of our tour guide; the Stanford guide was good, but he was great, conveying as much of the culture and history of the place as was possible on a one hour tour. There was also quite a bit of Stanford bashing on the tour (eg their Campanile is taller than the Hoover Tower), when there'd been none of the reverse at Stanford.


Life Science building. Largest academic space West of the Mississippi.


California Hall, the administration building. The reason the 2 doors have only one handle is because during the Free Speech Movement in the 60s, students chained the door shut.

In the 60s, when they tried to stop tabling (students setting up tables on campus to advance one issue or another), there was a protest and the police arrested one student. However, thousands of students then surrounded the police car, preventing it from moving off. Some even got on top to make speeches (but not before removing their shoes). Tsk, they should all have been charged with illegal assembly and obstruction of justice and blacklisted hereafter. Maybe a few future Nobel Laureates might've been in the crowd and had their careers destroyed.


Free Speech Movement Cafe. it's open whenever the library is open. When we were there this was 24/7 because of finals.


Athena over the library. When you pass under her on the way in, you're supposed to be blessed with knowledge. Unfortunately you lose this when you pass back out so students can either leave by the back door or the underground passage.


Library entrance. The 2 skylights light the underground library.


Memorial Glade (for World War II). It's not supposed to be built on, ever. The as-yet-unopened East Asian library is visible in the background.


Evans Hall. Appropriatel it houses the Pure Maths, Statistical Maths and Applied Maths (Economics) department, and is just across the road from the Physics department - both facts are highly appropriate. It is loathed because: 1) It's gray and ugly, 2) It blocks the view of the students in the hosing behind, 3) It houses the Maths, Statistics and Economics departments

In the early 1900s military service was compulsory for male students. Ugh.


Le Conte hall, Physics. Here the first atom was split and it still is involved in military and nuclear research.

Ooh, Bancroft library has a Christian book of prayers dating from the Spanish Inquisition bound in human skin (the pages aren't human skin though).


NL Parking Lot. One Nobel Laureate said the best thing about winning a Nobel Prize was getting parking at Berkeley.


Hearst mining circle/Memorial hall

The George C. Pimentel hall (Chemistry) has a rotating stage with 3 sections - one to teach on, one to clean up and one for preparation.

The Chemistry department here discovered 16 elements (? - this seems to be wrong), and it's the only university in the world with 4 elements named after them (a loose definition of 'named after them' is needed): Berkelium, Californium, Lawrencium and Seaborgium. Seaborg, for whom the last is named, is an acronym for their cheer: "Go Bears", so they say he naturally belongs to them, hurr hurr.


Some arch


Lynn Waldorf, the football coach who won them every football game against Stanford from 1947-57.

The guide gave us a summary of the story of the Stanford Axe, the best part of which is: "On April 3, 1930, a group of twenty-one residents of Stanford's Sequoia Hall, four of whom posed as photographers and reporters, stole the Axe as it was being transported back to the bank after the annual Baseball rally at the Greek. The phony photographers claimed that they wanted to take some photos of the Axe. When they set off the flash powder for the phototgraphs, one man grabbed the Axe while his well-organized accomplices set off a smoke bomb (or a tear gas bomb, depending on the account of the story). The Axe was taken to three cars which sped off in different directions. Several of the thieves were caught, but the Axe had made it back to Stanford." What is not on that summary is another amusing bit about a bridge operator who was a Stanford graduate raising it to prevent the flight of some Berkeley students, lovingly documented by Stanford's Axe Committee (sans the jibe about what a Stanford degree qualifies you to do).


The oldest building on campus. It also has the smallest bear statue on campus.

Can't find the bear? Well, neither could we.



There were more people in Berkeley attire here than Stanford attire in campus. Probably has something to do with the incommensurate bashing.

There was one guy teaching the same class for 40 years, from the late 60s on, on US history and the civil rights movement, and for his pains he was put on the FBI list for subversion.

Jimi Hendrix held one of his last concerts at Berkeley before commiting suicide. A poster advertising it was stuck on a pillar for many years, and when they tried to remove it, a miracle occured:


Despite their trying to scrape or bleach it off, his face remained. This is incontrovertible proof that Jimi Hendrix is God!



They used to have a squirrel fishing club - they tied food to a string and threw it out of the window.


Gate


Ludwig's fountain. From 1961-5 a dog named Ludwig used to play with students in here. When his owner moved away the students petitioned the administration to rename the fountain.

We then went to International House (established to promote cross-cultural understanding and interaction - for example one Iraqi, while there, met an Iranian for the first time), where besides having an atrocious brunch, we learned about the place. Right now it has 40-50 couples in there. This was advanced as a natural consequence of their mission, but I have a simpler explanation: put young people of both genders in close proximity in an enclosed space for extended periods of time and something is sure to happen (see: NUS halls). Interestingly, Galbraith stayed there too.

We then went to see the Tree People. They had been living in trees outside the Berkeley Stadium since December 2006 because the university administration wanted to cut them down. By law, they can't cut down mature oak trees, but then most of those trees were planted by students in the 20s.

There was a police raid during winter break when the students (the tree people weren't students) weren't around, and they expected a raid during finals too when they'd be busy studying. They're vulnerable only if they come down from the trees, since while in there no one touches them due to safety concerns.


Sidewalk support


'Home is where the trees live'






Redwood - bottom view



We then talked to some hippies, who talked about love and how America was evil. They are typically parodied as having an light, airy, dreamy voice, but the one on the left really had one.


We should've asked if they had any pot.

The next item on our program was "'Field research' at various ethnic neighbourhoods in San Francisco: Chinatown, Mission District, The Tenderloin, Oakland" but Jaime offered to lead us to a good view of the bay, so we decided to hike.


Co-op - student housing. It's student managed, and they decide the rules.


Tibetan themed house


Hiking

It was pretty steep, and I had to grab on to rocks, tree branches and tree roots to make my way up.


View from an interim point


Resting


Path up


Flat ground for once




This hawk was, I swear, hovering in the same spot for at least 10 seconds.


Intrepid vanguard













Finally near the top

First it was my sandals and now it was my shoes - I just had no luck with footwear, my a part of my sole came out.




Start of the descent




View on the way down


How to shit in the woods


We heard the wind whistling through the trees, sounding like a stream


Me blowing a Dandelion. Finally I've a video of dandelion blowing!


Real stream


'Cal' sign on hill side Alien crop circle


Bear in the baseball field


Selling badges


He comes straight out of a movie on the 60s


Detail of a mural dedicated to the Civil Rights movement etc, illustrating the police car event mentioned above.


People's Park. The girl with the shaven head from earlier was here, and she said she had water from the Ganges river which, when sprayed on us, would take away our bad karma so we could be rebornd (more likely we'd get sick from the dead bodies floating in there). Some of us got our heads sprayed.

One barefoot guy came up to us with a big bag of slightly stale bread and offered us some. Aww.

Looking for glue, I went to a dollar store where there were bottles of herbs (eg 32g of Oregano) for $1! It also sold a vibrating toothbrush. Uhh.

There was a shop selling a bust of Nefertiti (modelled after THE bust), but she had both eyes in there. Gah.


This van ("'71 shirt [?]") comes straight out of a movie on the 60s. I smelled pot inside, hurr hurr.


Quotes:

*Phone rings* Huh? [Me: Pick it up. You'll die in 7 days.] Fuck you. *Picks up* Hello? *Puts down phone due to lack of reply* [Student 2: You'll die in 7 days] Fuck you... *Phone rings again* [Student 3: Now you'll die in 6 days.]

Wow, I'm amazed that they published this letter denouncing the usual politically correct spiel about different domains of operation. It was only pushed out online, but still.


ST Forum > Online Story > Writer has got it wrong

DR ANDY Ho, in his article, 'The metaphysics of existence' (ST, May 25), has confused the whole issue between science and religion.

First of all, to describe the difference between them as an adverbial one - between a 'how' and a 'why' - is very superficial.

All 'how' questions finally lead up to the 'why' question. Science is ultimately interested in the 'why' questions, the biggest of which is, 'Why is the universe the way it is?' In the broadest sense, this includes the question, 'Why does it exist at all?'

Both science and religion try to find answers to these same questions. There can be no comforting division of labour by which the areas of enquiry of the two endeavours can be kept nicely separate.

Because all the big questions are ultimately interrelated, the answers to the questions of value, meaning and purpose can only be glimpsed at through a proper understanding of how and why things are the way they are.

Science and religion differ on how they approach these questions. The processes they follow are diametrically opposite to each other.

Science follows a particular methodology for explaining the reality around us - the methodology of induction and deduction. Induction is based on data, and deduction on logic, which is formalised in the language of mathematics.

In fact, science is defined by this methodology, and not by the subject matter it studies, nor by its specific findings. As the scientist, John Casti, puts it in his book, Complexification, science is more of a verb than a noun.

Religion, on the other hand, has nothing to do with data or logic. Its approach to explaining the reality is based on speculation, dreams, mythologies, visions and subjective mysticism.

Dr Ho has got it completely wrong when he suggests that science defines reality by what can be studied by its method, that anything that cannot be so studied is denied existence, that all religious claims about transcendental non-material reality are 'defined away' and are 'not allowed' to exist.

This is a bad distortion of the scientific approach. In fact, Dr Ho turns the scientific epistemology on its head.

Science does not compartmentalise reality into that section which is amenable to its method, and that which is not and then 'define' away the latter. There is no reality, as experienced by human beings, either directly or indirectly, that cannot be studied by science. But it has one dogma. It will only follow the method of induction and deduction - data and logic - in trying to understand this reality.

But, why this dogma? What is so great about induction and deduction? Well, it is the only method that works. We survive in the real world (and have survived throughout the whole history of our existence on this planet) by applying consciously or unconsciously a myriad of technologies ranging from the simplest, such as a twig from a tree to scratch my itching back, to the most complex, such as the computer on which I am writing this.

All of these technologies are the result of understanding the nature of reality by applying the methods of induction and deduction, sometimes, almost intuitively, as in the case of the twig, and sometimes more deliberately, as in the case of the computer.

In contrast, there is not one single evidence of an alternative explanation of reality, through, mysticism, the supernatural, et cetera, actually working in the real world. There are millions of anecdotes, brilliant myths, evocative literature, but not one piece of verified evidence.

Now, in applying the principles of induction and deduction, there are many speculative hypotheses about the existence of various entities which do not pass the test - entities such as ghosts, angels and transcendental supernatural beings.

In this list could also be included things like unicorns and aether. Science does not believe in ghosts and spirits and God, not because they are not amenable to the scientific method, but because there is no evidence, empirical or logical, of their existence.

Science does not believe in unicorns and aether (any more), not because they are outside the scope of science, but there is no evidence of their existence. The supernatural is not 'ruled out by fiat', as Dr Ho says, but by lack of evidence.

Actually, the protagonists of religion and the supernatural are acutely conscious that they cannot stand up to the scrutiny of induction and deduction. So, they make out as if they are playing a different game, where the rules of induction and deduction do not apply; where a different epistemology rules.

They just postulate the existence of the supernatural and go on to build elaborate, but vague, speculative structures of concepts, not needing to be constrained at all, either by the demands of data or logic.

They package all that up in some obfuscating verbiage and call it a special kind of reality which science cannot penetrate, thereby hoping to gain legitimacy for their unbridled speculation. Dr Ho's article is another exercise towards that end.

Now, anybody has the right to withdraw from the real world and create an artificial construct for his own pleasure. It is like playing Monopoly with its make-belief currency and special rules of property ownership based on the throw of a dice.

Everybody is entitled to such indulgence. Enormous trouble would arise, however, if the player attempted to use the Monopoly money for real-world transactions. Unfortunately that is what happens when religion claims to have explanations for the real world phenomena and thereby provide answers to questions of values, morality and purpose.

A quick word about the Anthropic Principle that Dr Ho touches on. It is only the Strong Anthropic Principle that hints towards a purposeful universe created by an ultimate 'first cause' with a purpose of its own.

But, hardly any scientist of note believes in the Strong Anthropic Principle. Most recognise the Weak Anthropic Principle, which does not require the postulation of a God-like being. There are various interesting attempts to solve the riddle of the fine-tuned 'cosmic constants' which make us, human beings, possible. Current 'Inflationary' theories are also attempting to answer the first cause question using the rules of quantum fluctuations. But the moot point is that all of these theories are subject to the harsh scrutiny of induction and deduction. Only those that pass will have a claim to reality.

Dr Ho ends his piece by advocating humility on both sides of the debate. Here also, let us take a reality check. Science is the most humble and humility-generating human endeavour. Since it relies on data which are ever changing, all scientific truths are 'contingent' - till such time as contrary data do not overthrow current truths.

There are no absolute truths which are unquestioned for all times to come. No matter how exalted the position of Einstein, one verified evidence of contrary data, no matter how lowly the student or research worker who generates it, will overthrow the theory of relativity, and replace it with some other that is better able to explain the new data.

Science is the only human endeavour that progresses by trying to prove itself wrong. It accepts a theory only if it has failed to do so - and even then, temporarily. The only absolute for science is its epistemology - data and logic.

Contrast this with the posture of religion. All religions claim absolute, universal, eternal truths which can never be questioned. Even though different religions propagate different wisdoms, they all claim that their truth has come directly from God. How much hubris is required to claim that a book that was written 2,000 years back has the answers to the problems of life today! There is no humble egalitarianism in religions. All religions arrogantly claim special dispensation from God for their adherents.

So, how should we deal with religion then? With great respect. Everybody should study religion - all religions. But only as history; as a part of mankind's brave striving to make sense of his reality.

It does not matter that the religious explanations of this reality do not hold water any more in the light of modern scientific epistemology. The subsequent invalidity of a hypothesis does not detract from the glory of exploring it in the first place.

Ptolemy and Newton are no less revered figures today, even though their schemes were overturned at a later date. The problem arises when religion is yanked out of its setting in history and is made to masquerade as an explanation of eternal reality and a prescription for modern life.

All the views expressed in this note are far better explained in Richard Dawkin's latest book, 'The God Delusion', which I strongly recommend to all readers.

Shyamal Ghose


I've always found that setting up the dichotomy as Science vs Religion is unhelpful.

Characterising it as Faith vs Reason is much more accurate since the two are inimical to each other - as the writer points out, data and logic are sufficient to debunk religion even without reference to the Scientific Method.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 6 (11/5) - Berkeley

We left Palo Alto for the weekend for Berkeley. Unfortunately I left my sandals behind but fortunately I picked them up when I returned.

Seen on the BART: "AIDSmarathon.com. You can do it! In 6 months, we can train you to complete a marathon or half marathon and make a difference in the fight against AIDS!" Right.

Arriving in the Berkeley YMCA, we were aghast at a sexist testament to the marginalisation of men in modern society - the guys got a triple and a quad, while the girls got doubles, and 2 girls had singles.

For lunch most of us went to a sandwich place a stone's throw from the YMCA, where we could make our own sandwiches - we were billed by weight (50 cents per ounce). Naturally, mine was the most expensive at $6.74 (with tax); I loaded a French roll with mayo, lettuce, tomato, sliced pickled gherkins, Black Forest Ham, Crispy Bacon and Provolone Cheese. My bread was quite heavy, but being baked with some butter (I think) it was a bit crumbly and nice. This concept would never work in Singapore - people would pile lobster salad on the lightest bread and the place would fold.

I saw a girl with a headscarf wrapped tightly around her neck, but below it was a plunging neckline. Hurr hurr.


Campanile


Us


Them


Waiting for the talk

We then went to Berkeley for our only academic activity there, a talk on Asians in the US by Professor Ong Aihwa. Amidst reference to her books, we learnt that the perception in the US was that Asians are bad at talking or managing - except for Indians. At Davos, the Chinese unveiled figures to frighten the Westerners, but the Indian delegation sweet-talked their rivals. Also, Asian musicians are seen as technically superior, but with no feeling because they work so hard they become narrow. Asians contribute to their own marginalisation: the parental and familial obsession with Engineering, Medicine and Law reinforces stereotypes (someone wanted to do Anthropology, and his parents said they might as well just pack up and go back to their home country since it was a waste of time), and no one wants to come forward to take part in politics.

The Berkeley campus is more dingy than Stanford, and there is more graffiti in the toilets (the female ones also):



Protesting for UC to cut its ties with the military

Apparently NUS student feedback *does* matter - it affects the lecturer's promotion prospects and progress on the tenure track.


Daniel with a cigarette

For dinner, we met some Singaporean students for dinner at the Shanghai restaurant at the "Asian Ghetto" (wth).

College kids here are more loud and uninhibited, and the girls were picking up the atmosphere. Some of them said they were cold, and 4 of them had a group hug. I went over to join in and they screamed, marginalising me once again.


Quotes:

You have a double chin. [Me: You noticed. Is it nice?] Which one?

Now I know why you know so much. You don't watch TV. You use the time to go and read things.

"He knows all about art, but he doesn't know what he likes." - James Thurber

***

Someone: isnt LDPVTP WT ?


MFTTW: i've never been groped in my life

i don't understand why people say it happens alot in sg
maybe they have fantasie.s

Me: no one wants to grope you

MFTTW: mm, probably.

ha.
but there aren't that many gropable girls in the mrt either what.

Me: beggars can't be choosers
hurr hurr

MFTTW: sheesh

most sg girls don't have boobs nor butts, what is there to grope... no convenient protrusions

Me: padding lor

MFTTW: they grope the padding! how un-fun!


Someone on HWMNBN: i usually just ignore him but pretend to listen

that's the beauty of msn


MFM: something was bugging me about the way you look, and i just realised it's because you resemble one of my professors, whom I thought was a 50 year old grad student when I first saw him

Me: erm
so I look old
and I look sloppy?

MFM: it's the hair, the body shape, and the generally jolly expression
you're not sloppy for a student


My No 1 Fan: i'm damn jealous of u
so is my mum
u got to go to google

my mama is as fascinated with ur life as i am
in fact more

i think she used to live vicariously thru me
cos i got to go to uni
do all the things she never did

then she realised i had a friend who has a more exciting life and is quirkier than me
so i think she's taken to living vicariously thru u
=p

maybe i should intro u to her blog
but she might start hating u
she likes being catholic
she wun understand why u can't believe in God
=p


Someone on the 'Brotherhood': most of them post from 165.21.154.XX
darkness posted from another IP

Picture with a Teddy Bear on your blog

Hi there!

This will probably be the most random blog comment ever, but I figure I'll try it anyhow. Throughout my day of researching blogs and clicking through endless seemingly unrelated links, I somehow found my way to your post from June 14, 2005 and saw a picture you had on there with a little blue teddy bear in it. I have a friend who has a bear almost identical to that one that she's had since childhood and it's been this big mystery as to where it came from/what company makes it, etc. because the tag wore away. I know this is a huge long shot, but do you have any idea what company made the bear or where it came from?

I'm so sorry this is such a weird comment! But I just think it would be so funny if I could find one on eBay or somewhere and give it to her sometime.

Any info you have would be great. Thanks!


Unfortunately, I am unable to help. Maybe someone else can.










Addendum: They look different.

This one's too good to only post extracts of:


College girls put their whoring behind them (May 9, 2003)

"Anybody on the lookout for a bit of bush on Japanese college campuses these days is more likely to find the George W variety than anything else as female university students' lower bodies have turned neo-conservative, according to Spa! (5/13).

Gone are the days when female university students could be relied upon to staff Japan's myriad sex services or simply spread their goodwill, and their legs, for all and sundry.

Instead, according to the weekly, a combination of excess, repulsion and horror have seen Japan's female university students clam up and regard fornication with frigidity.

Female university students in today's early Noughties are the same schoolgirls who were most active when enjo kosai, the euphemism for prostitution literally translated as compensated dating, was at its peak in the late '90s. But that same enjo kosai has caused many to turn off the tap.

"Having sex just to pick up a bit of pocket money is outright stupid. I can't understand how anybody could ever prostitute themselves," Rie, a second-year student, tells Spa! "I don't do one night stands, either. I did once, but I felt like a slut afterward and have regretted it ever since."

Tomoko, also a second-year student, is another turned off by the idea of enjo kosai and playing around.

"I only have sex with my boyfriend and it's absolutely exquisite," she tells Spa! "All those girls who play around with everybody must have no idea how good it is if you only do it with one guy."

Some girls standing off are simply plum tuckered out after playing around for years during their schooldays. Others think chastity arises from maturity.

"When I was in high school, it was almost a status symbol to go off and have sex with a good-looking guy you'd just met," second-year student Risa tells Spa! "Recently, though, I've come to think that one-night stands are something that high schoolgirls do. Now that I'm in university, it's become more interesting to see just how far you can string a man along. Getting picked up really easily is for dorks."

Sexually transmitted diseases can also take some of the blame for female university students' newfound sexual conservatism. Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare statistics show chlamydia rates grew sixfold in the time the average Japanese girl began high school and the time she graduated. In addition, one in every 13 female university students has contracted the same STD. As a result, some who'd still love to be playing around, simply can't.

"My experience with guys runs into triple figures. I've picked up some just for sex, sold myself off and picked up plenty to show for it, too ... chlamydia, gonorrhea, herpes, genital warts," first-year student Ayaka tells Spa! "The state of my body now means that I can't go looking for a sex or a boyfriend any more."

Horrific experiences resulting from teen-age promiscuity have also turned some university students off sex.

"When I was in my first year at high school, it was the in thing to go out hitch-hiking and offer yourself up to any guy who picked you up," Yoshimi, a second-year student, tells Spa! "As a result, I've been dragged out into the middle of the countryside and dumped on the side of the road, I've been gang-raped in a car in suburban Tokyo and I've had a light bulb shatter after it was shoved up my vagina. Ever since then, I simply can't stand the sight of men.""

"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning." - Sir Winston Churchill

***

generalisation

"I might often be accused -- correctly -- of over-generalising in some of my comments, making the odd sweeping statement here and there, and so on. But who cares? I know I'm generalising, you know I'm generalising, so what's the problem? There are too many pedants on the Net who insist that people attach a mass of qualifiers to everything they say, preface every statement with an IMHO and follow it with a list of exceptions. But such qualifiers don't make anything more true -- just more boring. Truth, if it is to be found at all, lies somewhere in a dialectical space between a statement and its antithesis. Better to push at the boundaries of such a space than potter about in the middle."

***

German burglar pays dearly for credit card trick - "A hapless German thief snapped his credit card in two while prying open a lock, inadvertently leaving behind his name and account details for police."

Global warming rally cut short by cold weather - "More than two dozen demonstrators braved cold, wet weather Saturday in Reno to attend a rally designed to draw attention to global warming."

Straight Dope Staff Report: What casino games offer the best odds? - "A savvy observer can keep track of cards as they’re dealt, and when the ratio temporarily favors the player, bet high. This is known as “card counting.” The method was first shown definitively in the early 1960s by Edward Thorp, a professor of mathematics at MIT. Thorp developed a system to count cards, simulated his system on an IBM 704 in FORTRAN code, and ultimately went to Las Vegas to test his theory, winning over $11,000 in a single weekend"

Gay pub can bar heterosexual drinkers - "A Melbourne pub catering for gay men has won the right to refuse entry to heterosexuals in a landmark ruling at the state planning tribunal. The owners of Collingwood's Peel Hotel applied to ban straight men and women to try to prevent "sexually based insults and violence" towards its gay patrons."

Inside the Creation Museum - "In the next scene, after the fall from grace, Adam and Eve, looking far less happy than before, are standing next to two lambs they have slaughtered on a sacrificial stone table. The sacrifice has a practical value -- the original couple are now wearing lambskin suits and the lambs are skinless -- and a spiritual one; the lambs are sacrificed, a visitor explains to me, in partial payment for the debt incurred by Adam and Eve for eating the fruit of knowledge. I tell the visitor it seems unfair for the lamb to pay for their mistake. "Well, it wasn't enough," he says. "God had to send his only Son to pay the ultimate price for their sin." When I tell him that sounds kind of extreme, he looks at me and shakes his head slowly a couple of times before moving on... In the middle of this urban mess is a big wrecking ball with the words "Millions of Years" carved into it. Ham blames the notion that the Earth is quite a bit older than the Bible suggests for just about all the world's problems. Evolution, which requires large amounts of time for small changes to accumulate into larger ones, makes it far too easy for people not to believe the Bible, he says. And that loss of belief "is at the root of modern evil.""

YouTube - Facebook Infomercial Parody - "Well, to be honest, we really just like hooking up. A lot. Often. But commitment really isn't our thing. Nah, I just got out of a nasty relationship. And I'm bicurious. And we didn't really know what to call it either. I mean, we're friends with benefits, hookup buddies or what you really want to call it. But that Facebook gave us the label that our relationship needed. 'It's complicated' *start making out*... Thanks to Facebook, I have found so many friends with similar interests. Like, I'm in this group that's called "I love beer, especially drinking it". I mean, who knew that there were so many people out there who love beer as much as I do? *takes sip* Amazing!"

What in.... Hell? - "English teacher Denice Kovanda gave her students at Fillmore Central High School in Geneva, Neb., an assignment: 'Create a travel brochure for a place you'd like to visit.' Michael Sattler, 16, got a grade of zero on his. "I asked what was so wrong with it," Sattler said. "She said I used the word Hell in every part of it. It was all about Hell, Hell, Hell." But, Sattler argued, his brochure wasn't for 'the afterlife', but rather Hell, Michigan.""

Person 1: i luv ur "tribute" to nyps,and yes, i still go there.thank kami im leavin thi yr.anyway this yr,they make us go up,up,up to class(5th floor),put bag in class,then down,down,down to courtyard (2nd floor)
Btw,they have holiday supplementary from 7 to 12 and if you wear PE uniform,you have to run 3 rounds round the track unless you have a valid excuse.
Yea,and did you know that now they have a lightning alarm.When there is lightning this lame alarm will sound&whoever is still outdoors,(field/courtyard)will get a pink slip.

Person 2: omg! i cant believe nyps is still the SAME after all these years...it was pure tortue to be in nyps. everyone seemed to want to get it but we were all fighting to get out...

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 5 (10/5) - Art, Macbeth

Most entrepreneurial ventures and startups fail, so if you're not willing to risk your asset values disappearing, your apartment being worth a fraction of what it is, your jobs being in peril, your security at risk and your women becoming maids in other people's countries, foreign workers you're not going to become an entrepreneur. Ditto for a people as a whole.


I saw a "Washington - Evergreen State" license plate this day, but never saw any "California - Golden State" license plates throughout the three weeks.

Wireless was very erratic at the hotel.

In many US buses you signal a halt by pulling ropes strung along the sides of the buses. This is good because you don't need to look for the stop buttons, and can just reach up from anywhere you're sitting. For the company this is cheaper because you only have to wire one contact point at the front of the bus on either side, instead of the whole bus for buttons.

The day began with a forum at the Haas Center for Public Service. Because it started later than scheduled, we got to walk around first; I met a bunch of 3 conspiracy theorists from an organisation called LaRouche giving the usual crap about a cabal, and how global warming is an evil plot to suppress development and kill people in the Third World, and Al Gore is controlled by corporate interests out to make money. Even more amazingly, the guy who I engaged claimed LaRouche had refuted the principle of Supply and Demand in the 70s. Another kept calling to passerbys, but I noticed he only targeted one sort by calling 'young lady' to various girls repeatedly; naturally they gave him the 'go away you creep' look.

At the forum we were told that students like us and students from the National Taiwan University would be the future leaders of our country. Funny, I thought that role would fall to the Singaporean students at Stanford.

Some of us were skeptical about the idea of student led public service. I pointed out that you always see the same few names floating around in these circles: for example someone one of the students who spoke to us talked about was also very active in RI and RJC. The reply was that this was often because no one else wanted to participate in this sort of activities, and that perhaps their examples would inspire others.

Public Service in the US is a very broad term. Besides encompassing working for NGOs and Human Rights organisations it also includes what Singaporeans know as the Civil Service - working for Federal, State and other governments.


Why would anyone throw peanuts into a recycling bin?!


Rear of Memorial Church. There's a 2 year wait to be married inside, so people sign up before they get engaged.

We then went for a talk on Race and Incarceration. I told my neighbors to send me to the Medical Center if I got beaten up during Q&A.

After unveiling supposedly shocking statistics about how blacks are disproportionately represented in incarceration statistics, one of the speakers quoted Massey, 2007 in 'Categorically Unequal' claiming that the US criminal justice system had created an American Gulag. At this ludricrous assertion which mocks and trivialises the suffering of the people in the *real* gulags, I muttered an audible curse, causing someone in front of me to turn around and look at me.

The talk was supposed to end with a debate between the two speakers, but really there wasn't much to debate, since they weren't so much opposed to each other (I'm not asking for diametric opposition, but they didn't disagree on anything) as talking about different things. Unfortunately we had to run off, so I didn't get to ask my classic question about the criminal justice system being biased against men ("If the fact that blacks and other minorities form a disproportionate share of the prison population means that they're discriminated against and that the system is rigged against them, does that mean that men are also discriminated against and that the system is rigged against them?"), or why they had to look at it as a race issue rather than a class issue, which would certainly be more helpful.

Unfortunately not everyone found the talk as fascinating (albeit in a bad way) as me - of the 11 of us, 9 were sleeping at one point or other. Hurr hurr.

We then had a lecture on racial and ethnic politics in the US, by Prof Luis Ricardo Fraga, who introduced the interesting concept of ascriptive inegalitarianism - some segments of the population are excluded from political consideration by those in power. This happened to non-property owners before Andrew Jackson and to blacks both during Slavery and the Jim Crow period. Presumably it would apply too to women before the suffragettes.

In the US, many people are obsessed with the original meaning of the Constitution. In that case, why don't they reinstate Slavery and exclude non-property owners and women from the electorate?

Someone said (s)he was struck by the optimism of Americans, whether at Google or Professors bringing academia out of the ivory tower and into the realm of political involvement. Tsk, the Singaporean model is different - you should stand for elections if you want to interfere in politics.

It seems MOE has implemented Service Learning too, but the journals students write are graded, so one Raffles Guy had told one of our group that they just borrowed good journals from their seniors and copied them. Hurr hurr.

Having some free time, and with it open till 8 on Thursday, we went to the Cantor Center for Visual Arts and were given some Rodin commentary by our chaperone who wasn't a chaperone.


The Burghers of Calais, with idiots hanging around, near the Main Quad

Since Rodin worked with bronze, he could mass produce his pieces. Hurr hurr.


The Three Shades


The Gates of Hell, with Adam and Eve


Detail

Rodin also chopped up pieces of his sculptures for resale:


The Thinker, atop the Gates of Hell


The Thinker, standalone


The Kiss


Age of Bronze, reduction


Bust of Victor Hugo


Nigeria, 20th century. Water-spirit mask
Yes, I was wondering how to put this on.


Butterfield, 1999. 'Untitled' (this is such a popular title these days).
This bronze horse looks like it's mae of wood because it was made from a driftwood model.


Tang Dynasty Horse, c. 700-55


China, Ming Dynasty. Early 15th c. Manjusri (Wenshu)


Japan, 19th c. Dragons holding a crystal ball. Silver.


Japan. Meiji Dragon - Ivory and Mother of Pearl


India, c. 1900. Siva as the Lord of the Dance representing his 5 aspects of cosmic activity.


Vishnu w/Lakshmi and Saraswati, 12th c.


17th-18th c. India, architectural panel


Nage, Flores, Indonesia. Equestrian figure honoring a male ancestor, 20th c.


Great Armor, 19th c. Japan.

There was a wood sculpture of the Buddha in the last age of his life. They explained that when he was 80, he ate spoiled pork and then died, so Buddhists shouldn't eat meat. A modern version might have him eating vegetables contaminated with pesticide, and Buddhists becoming carnivores.


16th vc. Chinese Taoist deity.


11th-13th c. Bear-shaped pillow. China
Ow!


Colina, Mexico. Terracotta figures. 250-1000 AD.

The pictures seemed grainy when I set my camera to auto ISO, but I didn't have the patience for funny tricks as in Europe. In any case, they seem alright here with 100% magnification.


Chief's regalia. Kwakwaka'wakw, assembled in 2006.

Their 1500-1800 European collection was okay, but god I miss Europe!


Description of a reproduction of a Stanford Dorm Room, 2006.
Uhh...


Dalou. The bather.


Bourdelle, the Sculptress at work, 1906.


Bourdelle, Rodin working on the Gates of Hell, 1910.


Falguiere, 1882. Bust of Diana.


Geets, the Accident ('Kind in 't Water'). 1899.


Aube, 1879. Dante.


Feuchere, 1843. Amazon breaking a savage horse.


Kelth, 1876. Upper kern river.


Whittredge, Italian landscape.

There were prints by Picasso of the Minotaur having sex. Wth.


Picasso, Bacchanal with a minotaur, 1933.
Others had the minotaur raping and caressing women.

Ruotolo's The Doomed, 1917 looks like the Dachau monument to the oppressed.


Hadzi, Thermopylae. 1965-6.
This insults the memory of those who died.


Brown, 1990. Social butterfly.


Ireland. Other Id, 1992.


Long, 1990. Georgia granite circle.
Wth


Goldsmith Maid driven by Budd Doble. 1876. Kirby van Zandt


Mosaic of Jane Lanthrop Stanford, c. 1900


Stuffed owl

Some of us who hadn't watched Macbeth the previous night then went to watch it. Forewarned by the experiences of the rest, we brought all our warm clothing, but even then it wasn't enough.


Segal, 1980. Gay liberation.
This is the LGBT monument. Since there're 4 figures, we were trying to figure out which was the L, which the G, which was the B and which one the T was, but we failed.
Someone: siallah lgbt monument looks like the waiting room to an oncology clinic. unhappy people comforting one another




Sans idiots






The first Segway I'd seen. I hadn't even seen one at Google. I think I didn't see any others for the rest of the trip.


Following in my tradition of spending a lot on food, I had a lobster burrito for $7.79. There was a surprising amount of lobster inside.


Macbeth


3 Witches prancing around. It was quite weird, because 2 of them were girls but 1 was an Indian boy with a high voice.

It being so cold, I pitied the actresses acting as females, since they had gowns with open necklines. At least the actresses acting as males could wear stuff under their suits.


Another extract


Sensual stretching by the witches
Somehow I don't think this was in the original by Shakespeare


Chris shuffling to keep warm. The girls were doing more amusing things like jumping jacks, but once I took out my camera they stopped; wet blankets!

We took the 11+pm bus back, and there were a lot of people carrying many things on the bus. The bus driver walked down the aisle waking them up, saying: "I have to wake you up. You can go back to sleep now." Then he handed them flyers for 'Homeless Connect Day'. At least the bus ran 24hrs in a loop, or they'd be screwed.


Quotes:

[On my sweater around my waist] Your skirt looks like a belt (belt)

[On 'ascriptive inegalitarianism'] This is a term only a social scientist could love.

Cynicism is good. Cynicism is what keeps us alive in Singapore. It stops us from commiting suicide... I want you to move from fatalistic cynicism to critical cynicism.

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 4 (9/5) - Google (Part 2)

We then got to ask Prakash some questions.

When Picasa was bought out he had to go through 6 interviews before joining Google and they were very intense. During them he was asked very technical questions so he couldn't BS.

Microsoft is more conventional. Although great people work there, Google's more cutting edge while MS just improves on ideas stolen from elsewhere. Yahoo innovates too, hurr hurr.

Google is very end user oriented. At meetings they think not about the bottom line but about the end user.

I asked if their 'Don't be evil' motto had ever been violated, either on a personal or corporate level and he said that although it was a cheesy and cliched line, it was true, though it was becoming hard to continue following it as the company grew (they have 15,000 staff now - 12,000 on that site and 3,000 internationally; 3 years ago they had 1500 staff only).

Almost no one wears suits or some such to work after the first three months. Every day is casual friday - jeans and t-shirt are the uniform. Though departments facing outwards like PR and marketing need to be more formal.

There is no adherence to the "spend 20% of your time working on other projects" rule, but people can take 2 years off to do stuff. They can also go for public speaking lessons etc worth $5000/year as long as they get a B average and above.

Some people bring their whole family to lunch/dinner daily. Tsk. Otherwise, leading by example and culture mostly orks.

People are rarely fired. One guy used up maybe 3,000 chances before he got fired. Another blogged private company information privately and so was let go.

To stop people running off to begin their own startups, employees are encouraged to innovate under the umbrella of Google and get a huge share of the revenue if it succeeds (eg 60%).

A big reason why they can afford to have such a relaxed corporate culture is because they're doing very well financially.

There is not much monitoring, unless you're in product management which is very intense. Culture is very important as a method of employee motivation.

When the company was smaller the founders used to introduce new people to everyone each Friday. They can't do that now with 300 hires a week. Though you can still get a direct email response from a founder within one day.

Current staff get to interview prospective hires, because they're going to work with them in the future.

Google has no gift shop. How sad.

We got the male half of one of the ubiquitous Asian-White couples to take a group picture for us (he took a picture of his girl on our camera before taking us, hurr hurr). I wonder if someone has done a sociological study of this phenomenon.


Sample lunch menu: Tomato-Basil Soup with Roasted Fennel, Lemon-Herb King Salmon Roulade, Braised Artichokes, Black Quinoa-Dill Sweet Potato Cakes, Spring Baby Greens Salad, Pecan Pie with Cacao and Hawaii Dates


Someone throwing a boomerang
This is the first time I've seen a boomerang work - I haven't seen one work in Singapore yet. It's either the wind, or the curse of these waters.

We then went back to Palo Alto.


Cheesecake Factory exterior.


Cakes

At Borders, under the 'Science Questions Answered' section, they had crap. 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Science' listed one science 'myth' 'busted' as being about Evolution. Another was about Global Warming. Also in the series was 'The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design', with a ringing endorsement: "Annoy a godless liberal: buy this book! - Ann Coulter". On both, there was a logo of a pig, proof of their Islamophobia!

Borders also has a "Dummy's guide to Chinese" which had not a single Chinese character inside. Hurr hurr.

We finally went back to Krung Siam, the Thai restaurant which was closed the previous day.


At the Thai restaurant

They had interesting food, like "Gang Kouw Supparod", translated as "One Man and One Girl Curry" (wth). They also had good Tom Yum soup which was not hot at all despite the red specks floating in it; short of making my own, there is no way of getting this in Singapore.

Everyone was into sharing food, but the manager demanded an order of 3 items for 5 people. Intimidated by the many signs reading "we reserve the right to refuse service to anyone", aside from the Tom Yum soup and the Pad Thai we ordered Soft Shell Crab. It was really amazing - we only got 4 pieces of crab (one crab sliced in four), and a lot of battered and deep fried vegetables: broccoli, carrots, corn and snow peas. Eee.

I wanted to convene a pow-wow that night after people came back from watching Macbeth (we went the next day) but I went to sleep, being fatigued and of course no one came since I wasn't awake to chase them down. Gah.


Quotes:

Can you don't walk so fast? We're in California. (not)

USP-Stanford Multiculturalism Forum
Day 4 (9/5) - Google (Part 1)

Some of the Singaporean students at Stanford said that the Singaporean accent and Singlish were very distinctive, and to them it was a very powerful marker of national identity.


Outside our hotel there was a newspaper dispenser offering free copies of the Epoch Times, the Falungong newspaper. Gah.

I'd checked the weather forecast and seeing that it was going to be cooler, wore jeans. Some of the girls said they should look at what I was wearing to know the weather, since they couldn't bother to check it themselves.

There are many named buildings and rooms in Stanford. When they run out of unnamed places, I wonder how they'll raise money.

In the morning we had some talks at the Walter H. Shrenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC). The weather was so good we didn't need the fan, let alone the airconditioner, but just opened the window.


Talk by Jeung-Woo Koo

Apparently Singapore has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. This is a secret, so we only know this because the government tells the WHO.

Unfortunately I was slightly late for the lunch talk on "Explaining Strategies of Manipulation under Electoral Authoritarianism". But there was free food! Unfortunately, it seemed to be all vegetarian; besides some tasty pasta salad, I also picked up a surprisingly tasty half-sandwich with cucumber, lettuce, tomato, guacamole, cheese, some white grass I thought was called alfalfa but isn't. Unfortunately also there was only half a chocolate chip cookie left by the time I came. All of the food, though good, was vegetarian. I was trying to figure out whether this was because: 1) I came late and all the meat had been taken, 2) They were trying to save money, 3) It's a liberal campus (eg 'spudware'). Probably 2) and 3).

When I first discovered Political Science had a statistics module, I was surprised, but this guy did a wonderful regression, quantifying electoral competition and explaining it by looking at variables like Legislative disempowerment, Legislative exclusion and Legislative fraud. Unfortunately most of his models weren't significant, and many of the predicted results were empirically disproven (eg A bigger armed forces didn't result in more electoral manipulation).

Given how environmentally conscious Californians seem to be, I find their fondness for bottled water to be hypocritical. It's not like the tap water tastes *that* bad.

After lunch we went to Google. Unfortunately the bus driver got lost despite (or perhaps because) she was being guided using Expedia via walkie talkie. They should've used Google Maps instead, hurr hurr.


Introduction by Prakash, who showed us around. He used to work for Picasa and got hired when they were bought out. He now works mainly on UI for Google Calendar.


Nice sign


Enraptured by the sign

The solar panels on the premises supply 1 GW of electricity - most of the electricity they use.


Walking to the complex through Charleton Park

They can bring dogs to the office. Wah. Their office is meant to feel like a college campus but I think even some college campuses won't allow that (I bet NUS doesn't).


The 2 circus tents in the distance are an amphitheatre where they hold events, like Google Idol


Bikes with flags employees can pick up and leave behind at various locations - on-site transportation


Building 43, where they work on Gmail and Blogger


The main of the 12 cafeterias offering free food. They also have laundry facilities where they can drop off your finished load at your desk. Some engineers tried to live at work before but they were kicked out for legal reasons.

They used to stock a lot of free junk food, but now only the more healthy food is free, since the staff were getting fat. Now the junk food's all the way on the top floor and you must pay for it - the worse it is for you, the more you pay.


Lounging/conference room


Treadmills in the gym. Those LCDs can show TV programs you can watch as you work out.


One of those unlimited swimming machines - you get in, turn on the water flow and keep swimming as the water rushes past you. This was located on an elevated platform, explaining the weird perspective. Note also the lifeguard (?!).


Beach volleyball. There was one guy who was playing volleyball all day - maybe that was his job.


'The Organic Connection' - where they grow food used in the culinary facilities


T-rex garden


T-rex garden with the pink flamingos (first inserted as a practical joke) more obviously seen now. Note one flamingo in the T-rex's mouth.


T-rex shit


Globe showing global Google searches. The more light, the more searches. They're leading the world, except in Asia where Yahoo's stronger.


The same


SpaceShipOne - winner of the X-prize


Meng's Wall of Fame, with many Singaporean notaries


Doodle 4 Google competition showcase


Microkitchen they have on each floor for them to recharge

Google has a policy of being Burning Man friendly - they try not to schedule stuff during the week of it.


Massage room. Unfortunately a massage isn't free - it's US$15.

Flexible scheduling and a nice workplace, besides raising employee morale, also induce some of them to stay longer and work more - proof that looking one-dimensionally at the bottom line is not always helpful.

They go on a yearly ski trip.


Massage chair and PS2 with the Zeitgeist monitor

Some of their toilets are fully automated in cleaning and the rest have seat warmers.


Ball pit. I don't think anyone jumped in though.

Apparently Macs are very slow and PCs are fast, which is why porting applications to the Mac is a bitch; I saw most people onsite using Thinkpads and some were using Macs.

Honey is not considered vegan because animals are involved in its making. Gah.


A big part of the tour is supposed to be eating at the cafe, but it was closed by the time we got there (because our bus got lost, grr) so we just had smoothies. I had a Strawberry Mojito Colada; they come up with new flavours all the time, so sometimes it's hit and miss. Mine was nice though.


Quotes:

[Me: How heavy are your earrings?] Not as heavy as your hair.