Ratatouille

Watched it opening night. What can I say? It was awesome! :)

That little fella with his little pink nose is just too darn cute.

Read More!

ITB is my bane

Ran 4.5km at 10km/hr and when I stepped off the treadmill, there it was again, like an old friend, but this time, in my good leg. My good leg! What do I need to do? Realign my hips, or what??

Read More!

Sheares Bridge Run 2007

Actually, it really wasn't that bad at all. In fact, the 12km was quite enjoyable — no ITB pain, no fatigue, no problems breathing, no chafing, no blisters, no muscle ache... haha! What a ride. :)

I felt nauseous the first 3km because the piece of french loaf I had for breakfast 20 minutes before the run felt like it was expanding in my oesphagus and coming back out, but once I got over the nausea, I was okay.

I should known that it would do that, but what to do, I wasn't well-prepared and NTUC doesn't sell Jacob's breakfast biscuits any longer. Poooey. I really like my Jacob's breakfast biscuits, the chocolate ones especially. They are awesome for a pre-run breakfast 'cos it's fuss-free and you gives a lot of energy without being voluminous (the way bread is).

Anyway, it was fun. I'm developing a higher tolerance to being squished in a big crowd of smelly people. As usual, since this run is organized by the Army, the guys outnumbered the ladies possibly 10 to 1. They made announcements like these: "Brothers, please slow down. We are letting the vehicles pass through." What, brothers?? I looked at him; he looked at me, but he repeated the announcement word-for-word. I suppose this is my one chance to experience the camaraderie of the Army. (Thank God.)

SPOT THE WOMEN CONTEST







The best part of this run is running on the Sheares Bridge. It makes you feel so important, like a car. The uphill wasn't that bad at all, but we were running slowly.

We went to MacDonald's at Marina Square for some breakfast after the run. It was packed with smelly people, myself included. I felt quite sorry for the normal people trying to have a quiet Sunday morning breakfast. Went home, had a nap, then had some chilli I made yesterday. Yum!

Now I'm walking around with a post-run glow. Heh.

(This post is about running, even though it sounds like it is about food and women, it is about running.)

Read More!

I'm going to suffer tomorrow

• Sheares Bridge Run, 12km, bright and early.
• Haven't run in two, three, maybe even four weeks.
• It's 1:15am and I just got home.
• All I had for dinner was snack food.
• Like I said in the title of this post.....
  

Read More!

A poll for my gentle readers

Every so often, this blog gets boring and degenerates into a digital brain dump. So I'm taking a poll. This is your chance for your voices to be heard. So head over the right-hand column and cast your votes today! You may click more than one option.

Read More!

I came home and there were bananas

I came home and there were bananas on the table, happy, yellow and grinning on the glass coffee table in the middle of an empty house. I turned on the lights and went into my room; the bed winked at me; the feel of the cool sheets, the enveloping softness of the pillows, the safe warmth of the blanket seemed a lifetime ago.

And I made myself a hot cup of Yorkshire tea and put my legs up. It had been a long day.

Read More!

On determiners

Determiners are used before a noun and make specific sense of the noun. Traditionally, determiners are categorised as a type of adjective. (See earlier post) However, it is becoming more common for grammars to categorise determiners as a class of their own.

Determiners can be thought about in terms of their position. For example, in the phrase "all the seven people,"

all = pre-determiner,
the = central determiner,
seven = post-determiner,
people = noun.

Each determiner has a specific place. You can't say "seven the all people," if you know what I mean.

The diagram above shows which types of determiners can go in which position.

Some thorny things to take note of:

1. Demonstratives can be used both as a pronoun as a determiner.

That rambutan is hairy! (determiner)
That is hairy! (pronoun)

2. Note the difference between possessive pronouns (mine, yours, his, hers) and possessive adjectives (my, your, his, her). Possessive adjectives function as determiners while possessive pronouns are pronouns.

3. Of- pronouns can be categorised either as indefinite pronouns or determiners. Of- pronouns refer to those words that can be used with "of", for example, each, all, some, any, a few, none etc.

Suitably confused? Well, me too...

Read More!

On adverbs: adjuncts, subjuncts, disjuncts, conjuncts

A slightly more detailed organisation that in the previous post. Conjuncts = conjunctive adverbs. Intensifiers fall into the category of subjuncts.

Read More!

The Pervert's Guide to Cinema

You should have seen the face of the sweet young thing at the ticketing office when she asked me what I wanted to watch, and I said "The pervert's guide". Only later did I notice that the billboards had unobtrusively referred to the film as "Cinema". Well.

Anyway, The Pervert's Guide is an intriguing look at cinema and what it tells us about ourselves. Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher and psychoanalyst, basically gives a two and a half hours lecture on cinema, with clips from some of the most highly-regarded films in history. He says, "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art. It doesn't give you what you desire — it tells you how to desire."

I don't have the brain right now (as the scarecrow says in "The Wizard of Oz") to put my random thoughts into paragraphs, so here they are in point form.

- Zizek talks about our need for fantasy so that we can negotiate reality. In Blue, the female protagonist escapes reality into fantasy when she couldn't cope with her dead husband having had a mistress, but later escaped fantasy back into reality, and it was with this sense of the fantasy that she could cope in the real world. In Eyes Wide Shut, the male protangonist finds himself struggling and failing to catch up with his girlfriend's fantasy about her having an affair, and so he creates his own, but he finds himself at an impasse in the fantastical world as well.

- The use of a window, glass, a crack in the door as a double metaphor of the character looking into his fantasy world (cp Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock), and viewers watching a film.

- Fantasy is a bit like religion, I think. Everyone needs a meta-narrative of some sorts to be sane. But those are just my thoughts, not Zizek's.

- I don't think I will ever want to watch any of David Lynch's films... Zizek mentions that the extermination of the paternal figure is a key element in Lynch's films. I think to a certain extent that is true, in the sense that everybody wants autonomy, but in "normal families". this is expressed as a shift in the balance of power, rather than the desire to kill our fathers.

- Zizek also talked about the birds being "raw incestuous power" in The Birds by Alfred Hitchcock. Erm. Okaay.

- Watching a movie is like watching a toilet bowl. You flush your excrement into the "netherworld" and never see it again, but watching a movie is the opposite of that — you stare into yourself, wondering what will come up.

- Sex requires fantasy. It isn't just about bodies; it is about your idea of who you want, what you want. Males and females have different fantasies. The male is always baffled by the mystery of the subjective woman and wants her to fit neatly into his fantasy. Women's eroticism is in the re-telling of the act — the narrative.

- The power of music. In The Dictator (Charlie Chaplin), the same music is used after the speech by the dictator, and the peace-loving speech of the barber. The response from the people is the same: wild cheering. So, does the content matter?

- The belief in illusion. In some films, the director actually appears at the beginning to say that it is fictional (for example Frankenstein), but viewers are still affected despite knowing that it is not real.

- I wonder what that says about our current obsession over reality tv?

For a more coherent idea of what The Pervert's Guide is about, read this page.

Read More!

Free stuff I cannot do without: Calq

Since I've moved to a Mac, I've had quite a bit angst over the inbuilt calculator on dashboard. I can't exactly pinpoint why. Perhaps it is because the screen is small and sometimes when you click on a number, it doesn't register. The calculator that came bundled with Windows worked better for me.

So it is a bit ironical that Calq is an application that works for both Mac and Windows, when for once, the Windows folks don't actually need such an application. Aw well. Maybe after reading about Calq, Windows folks will want Calq anyway. :)

Calq is a quick and nifty calculator that you can call up with a hotkey combination. What pops up is a small window that lets you type in your calculations from your keyboard. It recognises brackets: (1+2)*6; it even remembers the last 100 calculations! Just click the up arrow to look through your calculator's history. How useful!



And when you are done with your calculations, the calculator fades away unobtrusively.

Perfect. :)

Read More!

Free stuff I cannot do without: Skim

All I want to do is to be able to highlight my PDFs so that I don't have to print it and underline it manually.

Skim does this, and more. Not only does it let you highlight text, it also lists all your highlights in a column on the right. (See screenshot above.) It lets you insert notes, both sticky-style and inline.

The inbuilt search engine is sweet too. You can search the text of the PDF (search bar on the top of the left panel), or you can search through just your highlights and notes (search bar on the top of right panel).

Combined with Yep, an iTunes-like application that tags and organises your PDFs, you are good to go. Yep costs US$34. I may buy it if I get a scanner.

Skim and Yep are Mac-only apps.

Read More!

On verbs: have had and had had

This article by BBC sheds light on the matter.

If you think that that is ridiculous and you have had enough of the "had had"/ "that that" debacle, read the section of The Well of Lost Plots where Fforde pokes fun of it. It's great fun. :)

Read More!

On verbs: tense and aspect

Remember my table of tenses? Well, apparently it is wrong, at least according to David Crystal. David Crystal says there is NO FUTURE TENSE. Rather, English expresses future time by a variety of other means, such as using the words "will" or "shall".

It makes sense. Because when we write "I ran", "I run", and "I will run", "ran" and "run" signal tense. On other hand, with the verb phrase "will run", "will" is actually a modal verb without any tense markers. Semantically, it carries the meaning of the future, but not it does not signal tense.

Also, it is imprecise to say that verbs like "running" and "have run" are the "progressive tense" and "perfect tense" respectively. This is because the -ing form of the verb does not have anything to do when it happened, whether it is in the present or the past. Rather, it has to do with aspect, which is concerned about duration: is an action continuing or completed? There are two aspects in English: the progressive aspect (-ing) and the perfective aspect (have).

Note that the word "have" must always be used with the perfective aspect. In the sentence "I have eaten", the perfective-ness of the verb is not determined by the -en form of eaten, but by the word "have". Therefore the sentence "Apples were eaten" is not of the perfective aspect. "Apples were eaten" is in the passive voice.

Read More!

On verbs: finite and non-finite

There are so many ways to understand grammar. Grammar is a bit like the elephant that the five blind men tried to describe, each of them grabbing on to a different part of the elephant — trunk, tail, leg, body, tusk — each of them convinced that he is correct.

Anyway, I've discovered a different way of classifying verbs. One of the pitfalls of studying on your own from a book you pick up from the library is that the terms you learn may not be the same as the ones used in a test. You stand there holding on to the stringy tail when everyone else has her palm on the body. Naturally, there will be miscommunication.

A simpler way to think about verbs is to classify them into finite and non-finite verbs. Finite verbs are verbs that are signal contrasts in number, tense, person and mood. Its form changes from sentence to sentence, depending on the meaning.

Tense
I walked.
I walk.

Number
He works.
They work.

You get the idea. Now non-finite verbs are what I called verbals in this post. Except you need to throw out the part where I said they don't act as verbs, 'cos in this definition, they sometimes belong to part of a verb phrase. Also, this definition doesn't seem to care too much whether it is acting as a noun (gerund), adverb, or whatever. It even says that the word "gerund" is used by "older grammars". Hmm.

As defined by this grammar, non-finite verbs can be the following:
1. Base form used as an infinitive.
2. -ed participle
3. -ing participle
4. -en form

And I don't even have to worry what the non-finite verb is functioning as. Much simpler, don't you think? But I'm rather fond of the word "gerund"....

Read More!

Happy iCal day!

Today's the day when the date on the iCal icon doesn't change whether or not iCal is running. Not that it makes a difference to me, since iCal is configured to run on start-up on my Mac...

Read More!