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i fear i am fast becoming a jogging freak which may well damage my knees further. i'm jogging like everyday. and i mean e-ve-ry-day.

everyday when noon comes, i can't wait for evening to go jogging.









but i still wait. which means my statement is fallacious.


it's been a real long time since the first instance of the taiwanese-criticise-singapore-english-saga surfaced. but only now, i decided to step out and be fairer with my judgments though no one really asked for any.



other than the peculiar mispronunciation of our thanks (pronounced tangs and not dense), the misunderstanding that 薇如's accent is pretty thai or filipino and the inability to comprehend a different accent by the 'english teacher' (which 蔡康永 seem to comprehend without much difficulty), the taiwanese really didn't criticise our english. even if you scrutinise the video, they never did say our english was bad. they merely said the accent was weird. why is it that we can laugh at others' accent or say some people's accents are difficult to understand but we can't accept people making comments on ours?

for an outstanding student like jolin tsai who could publish a book in english, teach it and have an excellent american accent, it really is peculiar too, that she can come up with sentences like 'what has been you up to?' check 04:40.



2 mistakes committed. the auxilliary does not agree in number with the agent and the syntax error. i would've tried looking for the 'rice pink soup' i mentioned in an earlier post. but i suppose it's too difficult to find it with barely any other clue to the video.

so singaporeans, don't get too defensive. they didn't criticise our english standard. iiit'ssss jusssst theeeee accccccennnnnt!


nothing.

i really haven't been doing much other than helping at my cousin's place and people's responses are almost always, "so how much are you paid?"

for one, if i am paid, i wouldn't call it "helping". do you pay for using is, are, was, were?
pardon my linguistic sense of humour.

my brain literally feels fatigued even 3 months after that nonsensical 60km midnight run. i must agree the organising committee is creative. but they are also crazy. it can't be helped when you put a bunch of avid runners in a team to organise an event.

it is easy to trace the interests of people by the kind of activities they plan. if i were in the planning team, the activity would've been swimming.

am i an avid swimmer? no. but the view's good.


I've finally finished the first season of Heroes. Yes, I'm that late but all is still good. The story is great. The gore and violence fantastic. At a gore-rating of 8/10, it pretty much satiates my sadistic thirst for violence - fictitious that is.

But as always, a problematic story if i may add.

For one, the show harps on saving the world throughout the series and yet we realise that it really is just New York City. And for a time-bending JAPANESE guy whose father had been waiting for 'the one' to go all out to save NEW YORK CITY, it is peculiarly strange. By chapter 19, it is established that the population of NYC is but 0.07% of the world, yet they still use the term 'save the world'. subtly, this show seems to be promoting ethnocentrism.

Stepping aside for a brief moment, the characters Niki Sanders and D.L. Hawkins seem to have drawn its inspiration from Heidi Klum and Seal.

Yet another disturbing fact in the show is that, the people who can die have been trying to protect someone who cannot die. Theoretically speaking, if Sylar can't get Peter Petrelli's brain, it makes no sense for him to get Claire Bennett's. And for someone who had her body cut open and braved nuclear radiation to sedate Ted Sprague still walk out alive, it really is weird how she needs protection.

Towards the end, when Peter was about to go nuclear, Noah Bennett actually attempted to stop him - not forgetting it was suggested by Peter himself - with a gun. For someone who can regenerate, what's the fucking use of a gun? Use sedative or stun gun!

Finally, the most ironical thing of all is that, they have been trying to save the world. Nevermind that it's only NYC, but their idea of saving the world is to kill Sylar when the one to go nuclear really is Peter. So even if Sylar remains alive, NYC won't be wiped out. only those who are special will.

ultimately, the 'world' is really just the special ones. New York is only secondary.


what image does it conjure?

what makes you think there aren't blonde men?

dumbass...




i have this suspicion the idea of 'please aim properly' are from females because i expect males to understand why we sometimes miss the target.

don't ask me why. it's difficult to explain. and no, it's not coz we think our tomahawk's longer than it really is.


it's finally over. 124 days passed since the countdown from 123. some questions kept coming up these few days and here's some of the conversation translated to english (reason being that i'm way too lazy to type in mandarin)

pt: what you intend to do after this?
me: i'll sleep for one week then decide.

jr: what you intend to do tomorrow?
me: start thinking about my future
ym: don't worry, you have the whole day to think about it
me: no, i have the whole year to think about it




i remember reading an article in the papers regarding friends being the best matchmakers which i undoubtedly agree. reason being that friends know you and their friends much better to know if things may possibly work out between you and their friend as opposed to some machine that runs algorithms, if not random, to "matchmake" 2 strangers that the machine barely knows other than the information provided. and very often, it is the personality information that one is unable to provide to the machine. and very often, it is the personality that counts.

strangely, friends seem reluctant to matchmake 2 people. at least me... T_T how sad is that? and all they ask is, "how come you don't have girlfriend?" well, because you don't introduce anyone to me? but i can't really blame it on them, can i? afterall, i am sometimes too lazy to do the matchmaking for my friends myself though i did try like twice or something. surprisingly though, a female campmate of mine readily provided her sister's contact to whoever asks for it and leave it to them to work things out if possible. and of course, i am not one who goes asking for numbers. i asked for the email so i could spy on her friendster account. that's what professional stalkers do except that there aren't professional stalkers.


news (?) of the taiwanese media making comments and laughing over our singapore-flavoured accent of the english language is no longer anything new. at least not enough to be in the newspaper. but the latest entries in star blog that i read off mypaper led me to visit the actual blogs of those personalities and inevitably triggered the linguist-cum-critic-itch in me to actually post this here.

first and foremost, maia lee mentioned that english is our second language despite the fact that our education system has all along taught english as the first language. is there a contradiction then since our native tongue is mandarin as she accurately pointed out?

in dawn yang's post, she repeatedly referred to the 'singlish accent'. i hope i get this right as i believe that singlish is not an accent. it is a structural difference. singaporean accent is another issue and accents are never wrong because, as i have often argued my case in stomp, accent is not a measurement of proficiency. grammar is!

jamie yeo made an accurate observation that singaporeans speak english lazily which probably explains why the phonemes we have are left with the short vowels.

i kinda like most of the later half of what egena wrote and i'm having extreme difficulty pronouncing her name despite the guide she gave. the only thing i know is that, true to the nature of english, you don't read it the way it's spelt.

i recall a really old taiwanese variety i caught eons ago where 2 celebrities hit the streets to find someone who can translate 米粉汤 to english. some students walked by and chose the guy best in english among the group to do the translation and what did he come up with? rice pink soup. go figure. more examples? when stefanie sun said 'retro', the subtitle came up 'rachel'.

finally, as a comment on the taiwanese video, i have to state that 微如 (if i did get her name correct) appeared to use a philippino or thai accent and claim that it belongs to singaporeans. she probably should find out more about the people whom she came into contact with during her time here and realise that not everyone in singapore is a singaporean.

and to the taiwanese english teacher? that's the difference between a teacher and a linguist. i rest my case.


when i started out reading kirino natsuo's grotesque, it simply appeared to me as what it is - fiction.

oddly, the first news of the prodigy-turned-social-escort didn't make me see how similar her fate is with the protagonists of grotesque. today, however, when i read of the interview, the similarities were so stark, i wonder why i hadn't noticed.

math prodigy turning to prostitution. elites of the Q school system falling from grace. but that's yet another societal judgment of social escorts in general. is it really a fall? i'm not here to judge. interestingly, everyone thinks so and in kirino's work, sato kazue really stood out as the one most similar to sufiah yusof. an extremely clever woman who was a regular administrative worker by day and a prostitute by night. the reason? it makes her feel wanted. makes her feel loved. makes her feel powerful. and it pays. the only difference is that yusof probably looks much better than sato.

this reveals yet another warped mentality of homo sapiens. we often judge the successes of a child based on their results or performance in teenage years. but grotesque has shown otherwise. the top student of the Q school system, mitsuru, joined an underground religious organisation, killed innocent people and ended up in prison. yuriko and kazue, both turned prostitutes and ended up being murdered. takashi, son of a professor ended up as a pimp. as much as i claim that i'm not here to judge, i seem to be judging subconsciously. but that's a socialisation which i am not to be blamed. ask me again, i'll throw the same judgment.

if we step away from the 'social rules', we do realise that the universal indicator of success is often measured in terms of money and we really do study for the sake of money. if that solely is the case, then sufiah yusof is indeed successful.

this reminded me of another story of bloggers who died suddenly. probably due to the stress to maintain a 24/7 work schedule. so i better hit the sack now at 1:20pm in the afternoon before the same happens...

try reading grotesque. it's scarily good beyond words.


change to make others happy, you end up making yourself miserable
- eureka


it's nothing new already to hear of the best investigator rising up the ranks or the best network engineer with a ccie (cisco certified internetwork expert) certification sitting high up on the corporate ladder or the best teacher promoted to management positions, probably as a principal. but i squirm at the idea of promotion not just as an exhibition or proof of non-conformity. as i already said much earlier, non-conformity has become pretty much conformity. but i digress.

despite the apparent plea to reconsider promoting the best and giving the job scopes of the elites an extreme makeover, i still stand by the pay increment system. doing away with all the explanations of the societal syndrome of lusting after career advancement, there really is a need to keep the best doing what they do best.

it simply does not make the least sense to me why the best in the field should be removed from their job and assigned something totally foreign so that they can start learning all over again and contribute in another department while compromising the levels of competence in the work that they are the best at.

this is also why stratification occurs in all lines of work because the best and the highest paid are often shifted to another position while those in the original role remain those of lower competence (as a relative concept) and, not to say, lower paid. discrimination is thus born.

to concretise the theory above, an example or two would do best and it is clearly, but not limited to, right where i began. if the best is simply paid the highest without a change of job scope, discrimination would no longer be based upon the job such that when one says that s/he works as a cleaner, it no longer conjures the image of a lowly-skilled-lowly-paid worker. similarly, a manager no longer means that s/he is better paid than a receptionist. now, that is being true to the singapore system of meritocracy and at the same time removing the ladder metaphor in the corporate world.

but a contradiction takes place. how then, should the "higher ranks" (without promotion, this term may be obsolete) come about? i have no answer to that and i do not have the luxury of time to brainstorm on a perfect plan. perhaps a more competent being would be able to patch this less than perfect idea of mine.

to sum up, as the discourse of argumentation has taught me, promotion is detrimental to society in 2 ways. first, it hampers the advancement of the lower ranks by removing the best from the job. second, it propagates discrimination of work (may i say workism?) by creating a cap to the salary of those in that line and correlating low pay to the job.

as a closing note, it is agreeable that the best should still be paid what they deserve. but paying them more for a job scope that they have no experience in? we really ought to check the sanity of those approving the promotion.