Too good to resist

2 slices 12-grain bonjour bread lightly buttered, 2 slices picnic ham, 1 slice cheese, half a tomato sliced thickly, 1 fistful shredded lettuce, half a cup tomato juice, and I eat my lunch at breakfast time.

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Catch Me If You Can

I think this may be the first book I read where I actually preferred the movie. My favourite chapters were the chapters on forgery and the intricacies of the cheque numbering system; the least favourite were the ones on the doctor and the lawyer scam.

Frank Abergnale is really quite a remarkable man. He has guts like a bullet train, and is not totally without morals. For example he never cheats individuals, only large banks and MNCs. There is something Robin Hoodian in this policy that is very appealing to the working class. Surely the public will cheer if I were to cheat LTA or ST or GV of some money right now. But I have too many scruples.

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A Hilltop Field

A Hilltop Field, by Jane Tyson Clement

Faith has no abode, no tree-hid haven,
no rock-encircled harbor where the tide
will never swirl nor threaten; nor has faith
the quiet breast of broad sweet-flowing river.

Faith has a hilltop field alive and growing,
faith has its nets staked out in open sea,
faith is a rocky river, swift and harnessed
to fill the valley with its energy.

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This is my Tuesday

Met my heartlander friends for dinner at the new Glutton's Bay at the Esplanade on Tuesday after work. The ambience was great and the food wasn't too bad. The Hokkien Mee/ Char Kway Tiao store was very popular -- that's the store where they serve their noodles in brown banana leaves. Their Hokkien Mee was vastly superior to their Char Kway Tiao though. The Char Kway Tiao was worse than average; the Hokkien Mee was better.

We also had black Carrot Cake, barbeque Stingray, and baby Kailan -- standard hawker fare when eating in groups of four or more in Singapore. Carrot Cake was average; Stingray was good and the baby Kailan excellent. The steamed rice was strangely very appetising as well.

After dinner, we trouped over to a friend's place to watch the Thai horror film, Shutter. It was my first horror movie in eons and I was scared even before I started watching. Good thing my friend's TV was very small (14 inch) and I watched it with five other people in the room.

Surprisingly, I enjoyed the film. It hasn't haunted me as much as other flicks I've watched. I really think the small screen helped! :)

Watching horror films is like taking a hour and half long roller coaster ride.

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Tolkien: A Celebration

What a gem of a collection! The collection starts and ends with essays by people who knew JRR Tolkien personally, giving this collection the perfect start and finish. Tolkien's literary legacy, as expounded on in these essays, is bursting with layers and wonders of meaning.

Take this: the ring of power symbolises the will turned in on itself. It is empty in the middle, the gradual but sure erosion of the true self. Wearers of the ring become invisible, cut off from all normal relations in the world.

Or this: Samwise Gamgee represents all the readers. Like us, he loves to listen to stories, and he is pulled in by his ears by Gandalf while listening at the window. Near the end of the novel, he wonders if others will speak of his and Frodo's stories as well, linking this story into the larger narrative of myth and reality.

Or Lambas as the eucharist.

Or Frodo being the chosen one to destroy the ring -- hobbits being the shortest, weakest, humblest, simplest creatures -- just as the last shall become the first.

Or how the heroes pass through a kind of darkness and death experience to new life -- Gandalf on the narrow bridge of Moria, Aragorn in the Paths of the Dead, and Frodo when stung by Shelob.

Or the prevailing sense of hope even in utter despair.

NB: This is a collection of writings on JRR Tolkien's works and the spiritual values that undergirded his imaginery Middle-earth. It is edited by Joseph Pierce and the essays include the following: Recollections of J.R.R. Tolkien, George Sayer; Over the Chasm of Fire: Christian Heroism in The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings, Stratford Caldecott; The Lord of the Rings - A Catholic View, Charles A. Coulombe; A Far-Off Cleam of the Gospel: Salvation in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Colin Gunton; Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: An Interview with Walter Hooper

list of essays in the book

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The World and Other Places

I read Jeanette Winterson's The World and Other Places before the busy week at work. The World and Other Places is a collection of short stories, including Psalms, Orion, The World and Other Places, and The Poetics of Sex. I read her first novel a while back, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, which was a riveting read that got somewhat rambly at the end.

Winterson's work is full of sentences that take you by surprise at the precision of truth in them. Her images are often biblical, requiring a profound sense of the metaphors in the Bible to understand. For example this, when she describes calling a puppy by its name: "The moment between chaos and shape and I say his name and he hears me."(4) This of course reminds me of the moment of creation, where God brings order out of chaos with a spoken word. Other sentences also captivate me, such as this: "She is painting today. The room is orange with effort. She is painting today and I have written this."(45)

I enjoyed the story of Orion and Psalms. Orion is a myth explaining why the Orion constellation cannot be seen in November, the month of Scorpio. In Psalms, the conflict between obedience and rebellion is played out in the conflict between Psalms the turtle and Ezra the imaginary rabbit. Psalms the turtle is eventually drowned, leading to a stream of other biblical pets: "the Proverbial fish, Ecclesiastes the hen, who never laid an egg where [they] could find it, Solomon the Scotch terrier, and finally Isaiah and Jeremiah, a pair of goats who lived to a great age and died peacefully in their pen." Ha ha! Actually I find the story sad, but still, it is very funny.

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Returning to the topic of snakes and their hemipenes

I have time to blog again, can you tell? :)

Since my last post about male snake anatomy (see here), I've come across another article from Michigan Daily innocously titled "Study asserts snakes have body side preferences".

Although snakes have no hands, they have hemipenes that can function as limbs.

Robert Mason and Mike LeMaster of OSU studied more than 400 garter snakes that they found dead from suffocation in Manitoba, Canada.

The scientists weighed the snakes and measured their internal and external organs. They found that garter snakes tended to have larger hemipenes, kidneys and testes on the right side.

OSU researchers used the unexpected size differences in the data they found to form the hypothesis that garter snakes use the right hemipenes more than the left, and that the male is more likely to use his right-side than his left in certain circumstances.

The scientists are yet to find any practical applications for their research but think that it might help in future research of human hand-preferences.
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All things bright and beautiful

For the longest time I didn't understand how people could love a beautiful sunset without being awestruck by the goodness and beauty of God. To me, an awesome sunset is a testament to God's faithfulness, his creative whim at making things simply for the sake of them (why make a sunset? the sun can set just as well without the fanfare of colour), and just a indescribable sense of the goodness and beauty of all creation.

And then I realised that I only think this way because I interprete the world through a biblical worldview, Bible spectatcles, so to speak, and that it is because of the constant reading and re-reading of Psalms, where the "heavens declare the glory of God" and "day after day" pour forth speech; of Isaiah where the mountains and hills burst forth in to song, and the trees will clap their hands; of the Gospels where Jesus said that the rocks would cry out in praise if we were to keep silent; that subconsciously a worldview is formed about nature.

It is interesting that for others things, for example the sinfulness of mankind, the redemption by Christ, etc., I can take off these glasses and see as a non-deist does. I intrinsically understand what it is like to have a headonist worldview -- it makes sense to me. But I cannot take off these Bible spectacles concerning nature, and try as I might, I cannot understand nature apart from God. It is an interesting phenomenom...

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Busy

Very. Busy. Week. I have no life apart from work this week -- no dinner dates, no jogs, nothing. It is a shame that I am absolutely unable to squeeze in a jog this week. It'll be harder to start again next week, especially with the post-busyness depression. Not looking forward to it. Sigh. Anyway, going to get back to work now.

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When you are old

Today's a poem kinda day, so I'm posting one of my favourites here by William Butler Yeats:

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim Soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

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Back home late

Tonight I feel like the only one alive. The night air is still and cool; all my friends are asleep, dreaming of their own quests and escapades.

I have my own escapade too, but mine is with two eyes open, fingers poised, words flowing. In my escapade, I'm a heroine, victorious from battle, wreathed with garlands on my head. In my escapade, I return home to a house noisy with laughter, full of food and music.

What is yours?

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Pining for broadband

Everytime a long weekend comes along, I pine for broadband. The newspapers today featured a survey -- more than half would rather give up their daily shot of caffeine than internet access. Considering my dependence on the effects of coffee, it is a hard decision to make, but I would have given up the java too.

Today's papers also had a special on the growing popularity of new age practices here in Singapore. It noted that as Singaporean laboured under increasing urban fatigue, more sought alternate practices that focused on holistic living. I am not surprised. How long can a person live in pursuit of money, career, or even simpler, in pursuit of a way of living? As Jeanette Winterson wrote in her short story "The World and Other Places", "The curious thing is that no matter how different they are, the people are all preoccupied with the same things, that is, the same thing; how to live. We have to eat, we want to make money, but in every pause the question returns: How shall I live?" (95)

(There is a popular book in the Christian evangelical circles titled "How now shall we live?" The title always makes me think of the phrase, "How now brown cow?" but that is another matter altogether.)

What I am trying to say is this, my pining and need for broadband is part of my colossal attempt to lose myself in the architecture of urban living, and in so doing, hiding from myself, myself.

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This is the way I work

If you use Microsoft Outlook to send and receive emails, you may be aware of the little red follow up flag. I've only recently begun to use this feature and I can only say that the little red follow up flag is driving me nuts. It keeps my to-do list in my frontal lobe and all I want to do every minute of my 8-hour day is to right-click the email and hit "Flag complete". I suspect that the little red flag may be making me drive my colleagues mercilessly to get things done. Must. Control. Urge. To. Over. Achieve.

Post complete.

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A Short History of Nearly Everything

Flipped through this tome of a book that tells the stories surrounding the emergence of all the main sciences -- astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, geology, etc. Bryson's style is easy to read and generous with anecdotes.

Like the anecdote of the French man Le Gentil who waited an extra 8 years to observe the transit of Venus as he could not take accurate readings the first time, being held up in his schedule and caught on a rocky boat. 8 years later, his patient attempt was foiled by cloud cover for the exact duration of the transit. And so he packed up his things and returned to France, only to find that he had been declared dead in his absence, his wife having re-married and his possessions re-distributed. Poor guy!

Or the story of the Swedish guy who believed that gold could be distilled from urine and kept bats and bats of urine in his basement. He discovered phosphorus instead when the urine would spontaneously combust in contact with air. Due to the attention Sweden gave to this new element, they are still one of the largest match making centres in the world today.

Or the story of the bed-ridden inventor who invented a system of pulleys to help him manoeuvre in his bed, but ended up strangling in the ropes; or the story of the two men who accidentally and ignorantly discovered the static the universe was emitting since the beginning of time and so won nobel prizes; or the story of the discovery and subsequent loss of the first dinosaur bone in Iowa, USA.

If I learnt anything at all, it is that our quest for knowledge has been riddled by many lucky breaks.
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Against the death penalty

Read this post by Alfian -- it is nothing short of perfect. Shit, I'll never write as well as him.

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