finishing

This is one of the rare times I have been or rather will sound hopeful around here. I reckon it sounds horrible but sometimes honestly I do feel that the revelation of emotions, particularly hope, is a sign of weakness. Feeling hopeful or voicing commitment to me is akin to painting a huge bullseye across my ass, wearing a fuck me t shirt in a bad part of town and ordering chinese food in amsterdam. Though conceivably you can do all 3 simultaneously in amsterdam, it is the last example that perhaps illustrates the principle the most.

You can hope all you want but you WILL NOT get good chinese food in Holland. The next time your friend says "Gee, lets go into this dubious looking fortune cookie, "Asian Noodle" serving place, maybe they serve authentic stuff and this horrible decor and faint smell of cabbage is really a guise" ... Punch him. There's probably some cool latin phrase to insert here but since I don't remember it, I guess I'll just have to, in a manner of speaking, go straight to the point. (How's that for oxymoron?) i.e. I believe that Hope really is useless, and we create our own luck by using our brains or abusing our friends.

So it startles me no less than anyone else that as I write this now, I am hopeful. I will be the first to admit to my own faults, people around me know that, and they hate me for it. Primarily because there are so few of them hah =) One of these though to me is cardinal and that is not finishing. I have the attention span of a louse on a camels ass and I have a bad habit of not finishing projects that I start (to my satisfaction at least). Tonight I have done a few things though to set in motion a series of events which I believe may change me forever.

First, I have just finished building a water filter or rather a recepticle for my water filter. I have crafted it from hard wood and it took me 2 days to complete without electric tools. I do like woodworking and making things with my hands. More importantly though, this is the first step for my DIY revamp of my garden so that finally I can have all the nice garden barbecues I been wanting to have for ages. If you want to have my lambchops, you'll best find a way to help.

Second, I have just initiated contact with an automobile manufacturer in Thailand and this is where the hope part comes in. Trying my hand at deal making or just plain sales. If they do take up the component and incorporate into their vehicle design, it would mean a new area of business for the company and the best thing I have done so far in my adult life. This adds on of course to the little bit of running around that I have been doing for another little business venture which might come a close second to making the sale in Thailand.

Third, I am at this moment preparing for a business case competition in Thailand where I'll be from 16-21 August. I've got a great team with me, the best probably anyone can hope for. Still, hope here yet again... Wish me luck

happy birthday Singapore, 40% off petrol my ass!

Its National Day today, and the mood of the moment is ambivalence. This is not a particularly good time of the year for me and has not been for the past coupla years. Most national days pass rather quietly, but this one was special not least of all thanks to some bleddy fucker who decided to start a hoax about there being 40% off petrol between the hours of 4 to 8 pm today. If you haven't already, you should have seen the freakin jams.

Must admit that the bugger had a brilliant idea, it was a masterstroke in a sense tinged with all the deliciousness of irony, that on our nation's birthday, many among us would be caught up in the uniquely Singaporean pastime of queuing for non existent bargains.

Quite funny in a sense though sad too in many others. Whoever you are, fuck you but hats off to you all the same.

For a brief moment, I pondered if it might have been part of a horrible terror plot... lure the greedy singaporeans to petrol kiosks and then have a "barbeque" in some form of perverse social admonition. But I realised that unless the terrorists read lit at JC level, they might not have fully appreciated the depth of what they have achieved, and thus bereft of intention, there could not have been motive. Most of the lit students I know somehow end up doing law or NIE with working for a terror network ranking pretty low on the job list. And even then, surely there were better targets, placing landmines under the luxury cars of the rich buggers who snatched free textbooks from the less well off for one... Bumping off moses lim before he crossed dressed as a nonya would have been another.

Learnt that I need to work on being more assertive today. Its a start I guess. My oven's broke and I'm looking for an espresso machine.

Happy birthday Singapore

The ERP and me

Hate to flog a dead horse, but this ERP thing is getting to me. Gantries are so common now I think that every home should have one for national day decorations. Think about it a personalised gantry to place over your car. I think we can even have variations... A nice BIG POWERFUL looking gantry for the SUV drivers and maybe a range of small itty bitty ones for the the plastic fisher price cars and the Perodua Kancil. Our embassies overseas can also have gantries over their gates so that Singaporeans living overseas need not go too far to have a taste of home... brilliant sia. But none of them will be as awe inspiring of course as the spanking new gantry they planted smack in the path of my way home from school.

Like alot of things in Singapore, the new gantry appeared out of nowhere one day. Ok, maybe it was sitting inside some bureaucrats asshole until it was ready to be sprung on the driving populace. But anyway, from day one, I knew love was not meant to be. The bleddy thing almost caused an accident because the idiots infront of me slowed down to see it...

"Wah.... new gantry...."

Like fucking moths to the flame I reckon. I was surprised though that no grassroots types were there "spit shining" the pole since it was the latest thing out from the government.

"Wah sir, your gantry erect so fast, so hard and so accurate. And by the way ah, can you helps my son get into the gifted steam?"

Oh well, I'm so glad it will solve the traffic situation though, after all surely by charging us motorists money, we will not use the roads during the said timing. Go figure...

The communists would just have instituted a curfew, clean and simple. Travel between 6 to 8 and one of your children dies but not before we take your pigs and chickens. But nooo, since we are a market society, we need to apply market mechanisms hence this ultra sophisticated approach of hitting our wallets which would surely work. My ass it will! I think the scheme is as likely to work as I do of becoming skinny.

But just for once I would like to get into the minds of the policy folk. How does this fit into the grand scheme of things?

Firstly, I can see how this might be good for the economy. By penalizing exit from the city area, more people would ostensibly be "persuaded" to remain in the town area or better yet have their dinner in town thereby fueling the retail and f&b scene. Just a hypothesis.... but I do know that hungry people have to eat and they will not wait till past 8.

But how about this whole work life balance shit they were sprouting not too long back? Time spent in town is time away from the family. So much for having close knit multi generational homes. In a perverse way, this is a tax placed on the family dinner. If you want to have dinner with your family, you pay the price. Or you can wait la, but don't blame us if grandma gets ulcers... though if she does, then you can thank us for medisave in an election year.

Suffice to say, I think the gantry will not solve any problem and will instead create one far worst at least in the short run. The problem I have is that it is such an elementary conclusion, it could not have escaped the planners who so happily put the gantry at its current location. This is troubling and I will tell you why later.

The gantry comes after the moulmein exit, so this means that to avoid paying, all one has to do is exit at moulmein. Stroke of genius yeah? So this means that the already crowded Thomson/Novena area is set to become impassable or worst because of the regulating traffic lights. Lets just say I'm glad I don't stay there. And this is where it gets sinister...

There is no way this could have been overlooked and it says to me that a second gantry is hiding somewhere in the recesses of someone's bowels waiting to be expurged on us again... probably at moulmein, if it is not already there. The jusitfication? Because of the jams in the Thomson area. Well done....

Anyway, I suppose that I should not be surprised, such ham-fisted high handedness is nothing new. And I reckon as we celebrate our nation's 40th birthday, we should all realise that we have had 40 years of getting used to rolling over and playing dead.

Frisbee anyone?

So like a good hardy Singaporean, I will learn to enjoy what I cannot avoid. I have decided thus to name the new gantry, this way the next time I am beeped, at least I can say hello back yeah?

Or maybe on a whim I can drive down to town and back and pretend I am a submarine commander getting pinged (At least 4 times since I live in Seletar). This will be good because I will then be able to film the Hunt for Red October (SG Edition) for cheap in my Uncle's old Hyundai. On a good rainy day I can actually get some rain in.

Good lobang for digicams anyone? Happy National Day

ithink therefore icopy

names changed to protect the guilty

it had to happen and I guess I should have seen it coming the moment the first iMac rolled onto our shores. Somehow, anything with the prefix "i" in lowercase letters became cool, and it would also be cool to ignore some basic grammer. Suddenly what might have been the product of a faulty spacebar became an overnight marketing phenomenon.

I had a keyboard like that too, and was once too a marketing god, what with gems such as isicksonotcomingtoschool and inotfeelingwellsocannottakePE. But that was another time and another me, ran out of sorry excuses soon after and hit the sad reality of ifatsocannotgetlaid.

Foolish fat boy that I was, I know now that I should have bottled these up and gone to "Oshim" for a job. Come to think of it, I might have attended TAF club with the same guy who came up with the whole "Oshim" line of products such as the ipok, isqueez, itango and iincontinent (got 2 lower case "i"'s so doubly cool). If you don't believe me, check out their website, its freakin amazing.

And it gets worse... like all nice little diseases, unoriginality is sustained by a core group of dipshits and a happy statutory board has hopped onto the bandwagon. Won't be naming anything here but you might had the misfortune of having seen the damn ads on the taxis already.

Next thing you know, Geylang jumps on the bandwagon and the way to lorong 9 frog porridge gets spotted with ifuck, isuck and imagicfinger, the last being a massage service of course.... right....

I am going to buy a huge black marker. The next lowercase 'i' I see gets farkin punctuated.