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visit youtube and type "without you"
it's not easy to be placed above the original singer




hottest song on the planet

my apologies that this new desktop has yet been installed with any photo editing software so the best i can make out of the screenshot i took was to crop. note the last ad right at the bottom. it says:

English Accent
English pronunciation software to help you reduce your accent today.

and that marks the difference between a linguist and an english teacher. what does it mean by "reduce your accent"? firstly, as we linguists know, accent is not the marker of competency. when we say someone is good in english (or any other language for that matter), do we judge it based on their accents? similarly, when we say someone is bad in english, do we judge it based on accent? no. we judge it based on grammatical correctness.

ironically, this ad either slaps itself or is trying to promote ethnocentrism. for one, by "reduc[ing] your accent", it simply means to create a "westernised accent". or in crude terms, an "ang moh accent", which is inaccurate in itself because even within britain itself, people have distinctively different accents. so, why should we have a more westernised or less asian accent? this is racist. because clearly, this is not targeted at the inner circle nations in kachru's model and it is propagating the notion that any other accent is inferior, or less severely, wrong.

but i believe this may possibly be unintended due to some socialization into some form of ideology. but being too entrenched in academics, i can't help but cda this ad. sorry.





i'm not certain if it's a trend to do the somewhat pessimistic balance sheet of time that we have but recently some friends are certainly doing so and they always end up with merely 4 hours of free time. perhaps that's the sad part about conformity into societal expectations. i'm amazed, however, at the fact that these 2 friends of mine do not know each other, yet they end up with the same result.
----------------------------------------
extract from friend #1
- 40mins wake up and eat breakfast.
- 1hr 15mins to and fro work
- 10hrs to work (include one hr lunch break)
- 1hr 30mins eat cum watch tv and bathe.
- 4hrs of personal time... (usually rot online for +2hrs, read 30mins newspaper...left 1hr 30mins unclocked time)
- 7hrs sleep.

extract 2 from friend #2
- 6 hrs to sleep
- 2 hours to eat (breakfast, lunch, dinner)
- ½ hour to wash up (morning and night)
- ½ hour to bath and prepare for work
- 2 and ½ hour of traveling time to work and home
- 8 and ½ hour at work (Include rest time, exclude lunch)

Total hours = 20 hours
Flexible hours = 4 hours
----------------------------------------

and no, i dun usually enumerate my friends like this. i recall a conversation between serene and myself over msn and it goes, not exactly but, somewhat like this...

serene: when you ord?
me: 14th april.
serene: looking for a job?
me: nope, i don't intend to work. haha...
serene: good. so unbridled by societal expectations.

her response surprised me more than mine did her. but it brought forth another revelation. that my belief that my response will surprise her is tuned to the frequency of what society accepts as a norm. working after graduation is a norm. so i shall not work! MUWAHAHAHA!!!

as if... -_-"


i never understood what this show is about. the name simply conjures the image of badly scarred creatures or animal-faced people and i always thought it was about some aliens travelling in space. which is also why i never understood why people watch this show.

but recently i caught some episodes of it. though i'm still not a fan of this show, i noticed that it repeatedly reminds us humans that we, at least for some time, were savage. we probably still are and i'm reminded of the social contract that we're bound to. sometimes, i feel like the freedom we have is all illusory. we only have as much freedom as certain people dictate. i'm getting sick of these bonds but at the same time, i acknowledge that the world would be even more chaotic if the contracts don't exist.

life is always contradictory, isn't it?


i've never played this much free cell or maybe never at all. thank goodness it has become a tautology to say that an operating system multi-tasks and i thank free cell for helping me kill boredom. or should i say 'murder' since there's the intention.

sorry i committed murder but boredom has been killed so many times over by so many other people. free cell's my accomplice this time. if you ever need to murder boredom, try free cell.

but contrary to little miss contrary, i don't miss school the least bit. in fact, i'm glad i'm out of it. but i may still go back someday to do MA. someday...


this is a grossly messed-up society. a world that reeks of uber unsatisfaction (i can't believe it actually took this english major more than a split second to nominalise unsatisfactory). or should i say there's this tendency to repulse. a desire to oppose. sometimes i have this same desire that i observed many others do too. many a times, this phenomenon gets so bad that hesitation periods as inaction.

through a flawed and unrepresentative sample size which nevertheless proves a potential stigma, it does occur that at times, we can't really tell an old-looking young person from an old one. much less a pregnant woman from a fat one. it's at times like these, you either wish you weren't there or you weren't seated. not giving up your seat in authentic scenario might land you up on stomp or youtube. giving them up at the wrong time may get you some enmity-filled stares.

so what happens? it's not a dead-end but definitely an enormous risk to close your eyes and pray that you, at the very least, look like you're really asleep if not really at all. looking elsewhere or talking on the phone aren't much help. but no matter which path you choose, do not be surprised to see a familiar figure appearing on the straits times. finally, you can always give the seat up. but if you do, remember to head straight for the next cabin out of the line of sight of your "beneficiary" unless there's a really attractive member of the opposite sex. you won't really feel those cold eyes staring from behind you or hear the curse under mumbled breaths anyway. on the brighter side, a wrong move may bring some smile or laughter to this hunk or babe. just pray s/he doesn't have some plant sticking in between the teeth. if not, even the most nutritious vegetable will become vietnam. - ally mcbeal


went down a second time... forgot to take atm the second time...


something happened to my sim card for some reason so i couldn't call out nor receive phone calls yet i can send and receive smses. this sorta reminded me to go pay my overdue bills and i left for the axs machine downstairs. then revelation... i forgot to bring my atm card -____-


i had wanted to talk about the lady who, upon seeing a sweaty me who was running from hougang to ang mo kio, took a deep breath, pursed her lips and stepped to the side, probably assuming that i stank like a skunk. as an english major, i should know that for comprehensibility, i should've avoided using so many nested clauses but you might wanna try drawing a tree using the x-bar theory.

getting back, a more harrowing sight was that, while heading back towards hougang, i saw a crowd gathering below a block. the next thing that caught my eye was a stage, something like those you see during the 7th month getais and some tentages with a toilet that could either be a funeral service or a tribute to the gods. but a strangely familiar blue-white tape caught my attention. when i focused my lenses, i realised that a dead body was on the ground and a police was just covering it up leaving the hair exposed at the sides.

well, to finish it off, i am going to stay true to our doa team - random thoughts. a campmate asked a very intelligent question today and i was impressed. let's see how many of you can get it right. here goes:

there are 10 bottles of pills that look exactly alike. 9 of the bottles contain normal pills and 1 bottle contains poisonous pills. each normal pill weighs 1 gram while each poisonous pill weighs 1.1 grams. using the weighing machine only once, how can you tell which bottle contains the poisonous pills? (note: it's a weighing machine. not a libra-like weighing scale.)

winners stand a chance to win ticket for 2 to hawaii!

never take an english major's word at face value.


i was reading hao's recent entry on some conversation he had with a colleague and it seems to be sort of an answer to the topic i was discussing with lilian moments earlier.

frankly, i've found a pretty well-paying freelance work and it pays so well, i don't feel like getting a full-time job. don't ask me how it pays. it's top secret! a clue would be that any full time job is simply hogging my time by paying me lesser. yes, i mean ANY.

but i have my doubts. getting a full-time job is sort of a security for myself. firstly, freelance jobs are quite sporadic and unpredictable. thus, if i were to rely on it and should it fail me one day, i am gonna be soooo dead. secondly, freelance work does not offer the kind of decor that a full-paying job does to my resume. working experience? it's as good as none. i'm not really bothered about the medical, insurance and cpf benefits that companies can offer because it's not that big a deal if things do work out. problem is, no one came back from a quantum leap to hint at anything.

it's back to the old alumni meetings setup and everyone is so well-to-do and suddenly a question shoots, "hi, what's your line?" and i'll really be wondering what my line should be. but reading hao's entry, it really sets me in a different perspective. is life really about donning western-influenced suits, marching to the random taps of shoes and stilettoes at freaking 8 o'clock in the morning, rushing through the crowded underpass of raffles place? i doubt and paul's famous street comes to mind. "the meaning in life isn't about the means to live"

a bigger problem is the contradiction i have within myself. as a right-thinking human, i crave for glory - now don't cda me. i don't need to be hugely famous or filthy rich but at the very least, i seem to subscribe to the japanese ideal of having a respectable designation printed on the small piece of card where i can hand out during chance meetings. at the same time, i dread imagining myself all dressed up in suit and slave it out for some company whose boss i barely know how to spell his name - that was an inclusive pronoun.

i'm still contemplating applying for a full-time job but breathing easier now. much easier.


i've been to rehab twice. it's not helping. am going a third time. the guy's not doing his work properly. i guess it may be due to my confusing reports. i keep redirecting his attention to something else. for what i don't know. they were unintentional. i want to recover soon too. going nuh rehab centre for physio again next week. what were u thinking?

no time to blog any time soon after this. got some serious stuff to do... i'm serious.


to be blogging 4 times in one day? that's not like me but this guy is really funny...




some professionals talk like they really know it



the good thing bout this guy is that he handles the blooper really well... i'm impressed


for most of my life, i've accepted that dying is like sleeping except that you don't wake up anymore and possibly are without dreams. only recently i've began to think why we have such a conception. afterall, nobody ever lived to tell the tale, if you don't mind this wicked humour.

i recall blogging about this particular guy who woke up from a halted heart-beat and said there's no heaven, no devil, no nothing. but who can be certain he "died" during that brief moment of cardiac failure?

going deeper, it is not unlikely that death indeed is not much different from sleeping. afterall, we can only deduce from what we can observe and dying does, from the surface, appear like sleeping. if we move on to medical science and combine it with descartes' meditation, it is only understandable that when we die, the thinking substance halts. this agreement can be observed from the medical field that a person is considered pretty much dead when deduced "brain dead".


mum was on the papers and read about this particular person who left the handphone on the couch too long and it caught fire, so she was telling us not to put our phone on the sofa for too long. below is the conversation...

mum: 不要把手机放在床上也是阿。
sis: 高级跟低级的handphone不一样ok.你又不懂他们用什么手机。
mum: 什么高级低级。什么东西都一样。你的屁股坐在sofa上面坐久了也会烧。
me: 我的屁股是高级的。坐久也不会着火。