Each one of us carries with us a gene that, while unique to ourselves, is also the result of several hundred-thousand years' worth of mixing different DNA strings in such a particular combination that it now defines us as the persons we are. Any tiny difference in the way your genes had been put together in all that time, and you wouldn't be you any more, in other words.

So the gene that we carry has survived up to this point in time, and our genetic imperative is to ensure this gene we carry will continue to survive by combining it with someone else's gene, thus passing it on to the next generation. And speaking in evolutionary terms, we hope that the new combination will improve the new genetic host, making it stronger and fitter to survive into the following generation after that, and so on.

Natural selection tells us that often, gene-lines come to an end because the genetic mix was flawed and was thus unfit to be passed on. These genetic hosts are therefore literally dead-ends, and deserve to be removed from the gene-pool because they were defective. These genes will not contribute to develop the species any further as the stronger, fitter genes that do get passed on to the next generation pass them by.

But although the biological drive to have offspring is strong -- after all, the more offspring there are, the more likely it is for the parents' combined genes to continue to survive another generation -- these days, the human species is making evolutionary history by making a conscious decision not to procreate any further.

Considering the falling birthrates that today's ST is pointing out in Taiwan (politics too unstable, therefore we'll not have kids), and throughout the developed nations of Asia, people are declaring themselves as evolutionary dead-ends, thereby voluntarily removing themselves from the gene-pool. Thus, they summarily end several hundred-thousand years' worth of their own gene's evolution, not because the genes are themselves defective, but because the current hosts are "exercising a choice" not to pass them on any further.

It's almost like saying that we are the epitome of our gene-line's evolution, and this is as far as it goes... because we said so.

We human beings think too much. We intellectualize our environment by assessing and analyzing risk factors and cost-benefit ratios. We imagine worst-case scenarios and visualize perfection, and are even prepared to hold out for it even though the ideal is only ideal because it is unattainable. We have developed over-complicated mating relationships, and possibly childcare duties as well.

Our big brains that we're so proud of, the one that has led us to evolve into the dominant species on the planet, could perhaps also be our greatest impediment to evolutionary progress. Evolving smarts has helped us immensely, but evolving too smart could in itself be a genetic defect. I can already imagine the gene-pool lifeguards yelling, "OK, everybody, out of the pool!"

Those of us who do have children, we sometimes think of in animalistic terms. We say that they "breed like rabbits," and we are aghast at men who have voracious sexual appetites, calling them "beasts," "wolves" and "buaya," but chances are, in the long-run, their genes have a better chance of advancing our species than those of the more conservative persuasion. If our wholesome couples persist in choosing not to have kids, we can be assured that the future will only belong to the horny bastard.

Now, there's a future to contemplate!

Dusted off my old street performance outfit this morning. 900 SAC recalled I performed an item for them a few years back, and commissioned an encore in honour of Easter Sunday today.

The piece is a short solo set to "Watch the Lamb" by Ray Boltz, a strongly narrative song. The performance was originally choreographed by Todd Farley, but I 'koped' it and modified quite a bit of the movement because the original was too slavishly literal, acting out the song line-by-line. Boring.

I got the music and burned it onto a CD as the only track so there could be no screw-ups in selecting the right song. I arrived early before service to do a sound-check, no problems. We were all set.

Just before the sermon, they introduced my item. I entered to appreciative applause, centered myself at zero-position, cued the sound-booth, and... nothing. No music over the loudspeakers. Now, that is quite an experience -- to have hundreds of pairs of eyes staring at you, expecting you to do something, and there you are frozen like a rock because only you know that technology had somehow managed to mess things up again.

It was a contrast of panic states: me petrified onstage, while in the sound-booth the techs are freaking out, pressing buttons, sliding sliders, double-checking connections, the works. That was it, I broke with performance discipline and went for a mike to buy a little more time for the tech crew to resolve the problem.

As I ran out of patter, they did get the problem fixed, sort of. The guys jury-rigged a laptop to play my CD over the speakers, but the sound quality was crap, barely audible and not quite doing the music much justice. Still, the show had to go on, and that was my show for the day. I won't be expecting rave reviews for this one.

Post-mortem report: during service, someone came into the sound-booth and made off with the cable connecting the CD player to the amplifier. A-mazing. I can be as careful as I ever could be, and yet someone else's human error can ruin the whole show.

Guess that's a clear sign from on-high: Thou shalt not quit thy day job.

Clan celebrated Uncle W's golden wedding anniversary last night at Ah Yat. The whole banquet room was full with our family, his in-laws and friends. Uncle W sure knows how to throw a party!

The food was standard 10-course Chinese fare, not quite spectacular, but then it wasn't the highlight of the evening. Most of the evening we were entertained by the 'live' musicians whose oldies repertoire took us past retro right into nostalgia. Each table had an ample supply of songsheets so we could sing along while we ate. Apart from the MC and the regular musicians, a few other 'guest performers' took turns with the mike, including a cannot-make-it blues singer who seemed to be making up the words as he played. Perhaps that's the nature of the blues?

I think June would have enjoyed the evening if she didn't have to go to Bangkok. They were playing songs from her favourite era.

But to think of a marriage that has lasted 50 years and is still going strong is such an inspiration. Uncle and Aunt have always been a loving couple, inseparable though all these years. In his address to his guests, he hinted at an incident many of us have by now taken for granted, and we got to see it from Aunt's perspective. She had to say 'goodbye' to him once when duty called, and she had no assurance that Uncle would return home alive again, or even if he would return home at all. But her unquestioning trust gave him the courage and assurance that what he was doing was the right thing to do. That operation is now a small, mostly forgotten, chapter in our local history books.

True love breeds true courage. 50 years on and looking ahead... for me and June, we've barely scratched the surface of what it means to be married to each other. As we sang along to those old songs, as we watched Uncle and Aunt dance... I really missed June last night.

I picked up C&C3, and after only 2 moderately successful campaigns on the GDI side I'm already getting my sorry butt severely booted by the Brotherhood, and I'm playing on 'easy' mode. So I like playing games, but obviously that doesn't make me any good at them.

No messing about with the venerable RTS formula for C&C3. Establish (or rescue) a base of operations, fortify base defences while simultaneously building up a massive army comprising a variety of capabilities. When ready, send the troops over the hill to wipe the enemy off the map.

The game is graphically a treat with destructible terrain and firefights that are awesome to behold. When units gain access to beam weapons and railguns they light the map up in a breathtaking firestorm whenever they encounter their opponents. Such eye candy makes even losing a few units bearable while learning not to do "that" again.

Setting the battles in context are live-action cutscenes with a number of characters played by actors on the sci-fi circuit. Michael Ironside and Billy Dee Williams head up the GDI, while Joseph Kucan and BSG's Tricia Helfer lead the Brotherhood. Helfer's BSG compadre, Grace Park (whoohoo!), lends a supporting role -- now, there's a reason to get through a battle and open the next cutscene quickly!

This is a game more suited for multi-taskers. There are resources to balance and allocate, favourite units to keep an eye on, and battles to wage on a number of fronts. People like me who can only focus on one problem at a time frequently have their asses handed back to them on a plate. Never mind. If I can't multi-task, I can still exercise my persistence and resilience, and the payback they get when I finally succeed will be sweet.

Well, he's a different Jim Carrey, anyway. Still playing crazy but in The Number 23, he isn't playing for laughs. His character, Walter, is gradually losing his mind thanks to an anonymously written novel his wife buys for him as a birthday gift.

As Walter reads his gift, he moves from indifference to mild interest, then to obsession and paranoia bordering on suicidal-homicidal tendencies. It's tense wondering what might send him over the edge. Walter's a bit like Carrey's other character, the Cable Guy, but with a deeper exploration into his psychosis and motivations.

The novel he reads seems to parallel his life and he comes to "realize" that the number 23 rules his life like a family curse. Applying numerology on the minutiae of his life -- e.g., name, birthday, address, memorable events -- somehow they all add up to 23, just like it does for the novel's protagonist.

As the gristly details of various characters' deaths in the novel come to light, Walter becomes convinced that they refer to real events, and that he is about to become the anonymous novellist's next victim.

For some people, literacy and mathematics are not a good thing.

Anyway, this whole numerology nonsense is all about finding things just because people start looking for them. We creep ourselves out observing the staggering coincidences between the assasinations of presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, for example. But if you think about it, the probability of the digits 2 and 3 appearing together at any time is as high as any other pair of numbers appearing together: only 1 in 89, if I calculate correctly. And when we accept multiples of the 2 digits, plus the reverse order of the digits, the odds shrink significantly lower still. 23 could rule your life as well! Coincidence? I think not!

I take Strip's Innuendo of the Week Award back. I will re-award it to my very own Department for the outcry we made about our staff welfare fruit entitlement:

Today's fruit was banana, and this batch was slightly underripe, had been left in the sun in transit and was personally delivered to us by HP.

Mel: This banana is hot and hard!!!
Me: HP, how did you handle my banana? Why's it all sticky???
Amy: It came like that.

Oooo...k. 'nuff said.

Xmac's Innuendo of the Week Award goes to the print ad in today's ST, page 3:

"Special clearance for virgin forests
Why beat around the bush any further?
Make STRIP your first time and we will shave half the price off"

The ad is for Brazilian waxing!

Brilliant!

So foreign students are kicking the butts of our local students in contests and in academic grades. Why's everyone so broken up about that? Speaking as a previous "foreign student," I don't find it surprising at all.

It's not the education system. How we educate our kids doesn't differ much from place to place. Sure, the packaging may look more attractive here and there, but the simple formula remains: kids either make the effort to learn, or they muck about and waste their time -- and everyone else's.

It's the fact that they're consciously identified as "foreign" that makes the difference. Like it or not, it takes a lot more for them to be assimilated into their host country, so they tend to work harder at it. Since they're going to stand out anyway, it might as well be for the right reasons than for the wrong ones.

They also have more at stake. The costs are higher to be based overseas, and there's the constant reminder that there's a significantly higher investment their parents have put into them than their locally-schooled compatriots. So if they like where they're staying, they'd better give their parents the expected (or better) ROI, or risk getting yanked back home again.

Besides, the personal investment is also pretty steep. Having to move away from friends and loved ones for a few years to study means making the personal commitment to make the separation count for something to make the pain worthwhile.

Having the best of two or more worlds gives them a huge advantage in appreciating and understanding learning points better than mere locals.Foreign students have a much larger worldview than locally bred students, being that they have the experience of another world, another lifestyle that they either wish to improve or live up to. After all, they're already living in a situation in which they have to ask questions and learn things quickly or they won't survive long in their strange new world.

Of course there are colossal failures as well, but we don't notice them much. They arrive with a big superiority complex and when things don't match up to their expectations they get homesick and flunk out. Good riddance.

But the fact is, the foreign kids who are doing well here are thriving because they really do like it here. That's something we should be proud of as their hosts. We must be doing something right to attract so many of them, and having them beat the pants off us means we have a new standard to reach for. The alternative is to forever remain stagnant, boring as ditchwater. And let the world pass us by.

As a foreign student, I surprised myself topping classes that I seemed out of place in: the only Oriental kid in English Lit. back then. Except for the class in feminist theory that was mostly populated by angry single-mothers, that is -- that one I hid under the table most of the time. As far as I knew, no one begrudged me my success. Perhaps that's because Canada recognizes itself as predominantly immigrant populated anyway, and it's a fact that we Singaporeans need to wake ourselves up to. We'll gain so much more if we learn to include rather than perfunctorily exclude.

Began the morning picking up the ladies for brekkie. I arranged to meet Aggie, Belinda and NBS (Dee absent with a bad back) at AMK station, then drove to the Siglap Killiney Kopi Tiam before reporting at today's Sports Carnival.

Smuggling in Q-tip in her pet carrier, we occupied the table right in front of the serving counter, and chowed down on the kaya toast standard breakfast set, Hokkien char kuay teow and mee rebus. Killiney's menu variety simply beats Ya Kun's hands down, and the food is up to expectations as well.

I had to carb binge in preparation for the staff Dragonboat event. Sports Carnival was at Bedok Reservoir Park this year, and it was inevitable that some of us just had to get wet. Peggy boss, JY, got us rowers together before the event to work on our technique and timing, and even attempted some kind of Mental Skills Training on us which we thoroughly dissed her for. But Team Peggy was ready.

No memorable victory would be complete without some controversy. Team FiFi insisted Peggy's boat cut their lane, we were sure they cut ours. Independent witness, NBS, said it was hard to tell who cut whose lane because all 4 boats (including Griff's and Drag-on's) seemed to be weaving all over the place, so I guess we'll just have to chalk it up as a hazard of the course. But we got the advantage and powered through to a strong finish. Yay! One more shiny new trophy $10 Sportslink gift voucher to display on my desk. Hmm... maybe I'll use the $10 to buy my own trophy?

Q-tip had a memorable day too. My willing dogsitters, Belinda and NBS took her around the park to meet people, lots of people, too many people. Had to put on her PR face at 110% while her stupid owner went Dragonboating. How exhausting.

Lunched with Aggie and NBS at New York, New York, AMK Hub. They have a gorgeous, meaty mushroom Swiss, drippingly juicy, and a decently sized portion too. It's great for cramming into the mouth and taking hefty bites out of, knowing there's plenty more where that came from. The ladies were tempted but declined dessert, as did I. That experience will be for another day.

Resting back at home now. Gotta go collect the Wongs from the airport tonight.

Dispensing with black-belted kids in rubber suits, this latest TMNT movie opts for straight animation. Makes sense, as the action is a lot less clumsy and the movie doesn't get hamstrung by bad acting. Still, the plot is horrendously full of gaping loopholes, the kind you usually end up with when you mix a 3000 year-old plot to take over the world with sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Apparently, when a bunch of stars align 3K years back, some megalomaniac gains immortality, but his kin turn to stone and 13 monsters get unleashed to wreak havoc on the world.

Cut to present day where aforementioned megalomaniac has become a corporate magnate and finds a way to reanimate his long-petrified brethren, who unfortunately, still have rocks for brains. Meanwhile, the Turtles have had a major falling out with each other and are struggling to find the groove that once made them the total kick-ass crew we know and love. And the 13 monsters must have taken a 3 millennia vacation 'cos until they show up in NYC a day before the stars realign, no one's ever seen them before. Odd, since judging by their size and violent tendencies, they're kind'a hard to miss.

Anyway, we don't care if the plot doesn't make sense. There's plenty of fighting set to a pulse-pounding heavy rock, occasionally hip-hop beat. The Turtles are edgy and emo, with a thrilling fight sequence between Leo and Raph; Casey and April (who's since learned to fight too) lend a hand; and the Foot make their presence felt with their new female leader. TMNT is a pure adrenaline rush -- just leave your brain at the door first. Oh, did I mention that there's plenty of fighting? :D

I'd say ties between the Arts and the English Depts have never been closer. The breakfast table these days is not as well defined as before. Likewise the dinner table tonight, where we gathered in one of the air-conditioned upper rooms of the Cafe de Caire in honour of Wayne's birthday.

From the Arabic menu, we ordered a selection of dishes: humus, kebabs, 'shrooms, mixed grill, and an assortment of dipping gravies for our flat bread and rice. The portions were on the smallish side, and didn't look like they would satisfy our table for 9. But the dishes kept coming in and after just a couple of rounds we were already full.

For the first time, I actually enjoyed a mint tea. The taste was cleanly tea-and-mint which is much more pleasant than the tea-bag type that tastes like hot diluted toothpaste.

The cake was from 3 Monkeys, chocolate which is always a good choice. This one came in an almost solid chocolate shell with a couple of fresh strawberries on top. Nice touch, though I noticed no-one ate them. Think we were at about max capacity by then.

Attendance list: Mel, Bong, Josh, Audrey, birthday boy, Linc, Amy, HP, me, in that order around the table. Absent with apology: Sha; absent through no fault of her own: Belinda.

My unstable wireless set-up at home finally collapsed and I went offline last night. I was seriously considering taking all my hardware back to Harvey Norman's and kicking up a big fuss about it, but it was already quite late and I was lazy. So for one last time I carted my desktop back out into the living room to reconfigure my router, calling customer support for any advice they could offer. Helpfully, they suggested switching the power off the cable modem and router before reconnecting both back to my desktop. Nothing I hadn't already done several times before. Duh.

Oddly enough, for once the router configured itself perfectly on my last attempt, the whole process finishing without interruption. Now everything's up and running again, as stable as it ought to be. As usual, no idea what I did right.

If anyone thinks I'm a tech whiz, I tell them the truth: it's just serendipity.

Edit 01:
Just realized I didn't have to move my entire desktop outside to configure my router. I have a laptop, don't I? Doh!

I feel like I've just been blogging for the sake of blogging the last week or so. Short, pithy entries, few details, awfully self-indulgent, and I'm not even sure if it's all been all that coherent either. Thing is, I've been getting very tired at night lately, and it's hard even to think straight.

I've been falling asleep earlier -- though not necessarily going to bed earlier. Whether I'm in my study marking or surfing, or whether I'm watching TV in the living room, my brain disengages at some time, and it's off to la-la land for the next couple of hours. When I wake up, it's already past midnight and then I have to drag myself off to bed for another couple of hours of sleep.

My sleep cycle is obviously severely disrupted and seriously needs to be reset. Starting tonight.

Back to wearing glasses again, probably for the rest of the week. I suppose that's better than having my eyelid grab my contact lens and dragging it up into the upper part of my eyeball every so often. Leow confirmed it's because I have a minor eye infection and confiscated my lenses. Said he'll have to keep them for cleaning and I should be able to collect them on the weekend. Meantime, I'm on anti-bacterial eye-drops 3X a day.

June left on her annual family vacation early this morning. They drove here in a cab to collect her at 0445 enroute to HK. Again. Have a good trip!

Today's service incorporated the first Enrollment Service of the 106th Junior Brigade of which SAC has become a sponsor. Their chaplain was our guest speaker, and part of his message was that though adults are frequently tempted by the little monsters to commit infanticide, ultimately children will turn out to be our most important investment in time to come. I think he must have been trying to recruit more volunteer officers to help run the company.

Let me think about that for a moment... nah.

The air-con unit in my bedroom had a surprise for us when we woke up this morning. When I turned it off, there was a small waterfall coming out of the vents, drenching my headboard. Then it made some odd cracking noises that went on for more than a minute, which prompted an investigation. As I lifted off the faceplate, a glorious sight greeted me. Completely covering the vents and sealing the filters in place was a layer of pristine white frost, smooth and perfect like the first snowfall. My air-con literally froze up overnight, and I'm at a loss as to how it happened, and whether it could happen again.

Should I call the maintenance guy again?

M2 went into Mazda for his 40,000 km servicing. Replacing engine oil, brake fluid, coolant, spark plugs and battery, plus doing all the other routine maintenance jobs cost nearly $400. Just thought all you non-car owners out there would like to know.

This week has been good for food and company. Tonight a section of our dept and Wayne went to the newly opened Punggol Choon Seng for a seafood dinner. This outlet is supposed to have survived from one of the original seafood joints at Punggol Point (well, that's the impression I got, anyway).

They serve an outstanding mee goreng, which I think is cooked with some chili crab gravy. It's moist and has a hint of crab flavour that whets the appetite for their house speciality, um, chili crab. For our table of 8, we ordered 3 medium crabs and 2 plates of mantou (June described them as 'cute', Josh just said they were 'small'). Juicy, fresh, fleshy crabs swimming in a generous dollop of chili gravy.

As Mel said, it's so seldom that we get to enjoy a 3-hour meal together. Tonight's non-celebration was special. Rounding out the table: Amy, HP, Belinda.

Met Jen for dinner at Le Point de Vie, a little French restaurant on Waterloo Street. June brought Pam, her friend from work, and Adrian made up a table for 5.

It's good to be among these guys 'cos they remind me what working outside of academia is like. Their responsibilities are immense, and their job-scope seems to be ever-expanding all the time. Keeps what I do in perspective, and I'm grateful.

For us, uninitiated in French cuisine as we are, we ordered a variety of starters to share: the brie salad (my fave cheese), the king-prawn salad (nothing new here), and escargot (flavourful with garlic goodness). We each ordered our own main course. As I was feeling adventurous, mine was the pork belly served with a large oyster mushroom. It didn't take much to fill me -- the pork belly had a layer of fat that made feel real full real fast. Dessert was another decentralized affair. We shared a hazelnut torte, a souffle in Bailey's sauce, a molten chocolate cake and what looked like a cocktail of nata de coco mixed with some high-class lychee jello.

Bill came up to $80 per person (excluding June whom we insisted shouldn't pay for her own birthday dinner).

Tonight's production of the Madhatters was quite a treat, considering we haven't been to the theatre in such a long time. The Madhatters are an improv comedy club that play their shows through a series of "games" somewhat similar to TV's Who's Line is it, Anyway?

We went to support Tina who sort of leads the group, but also because the show is a guaranteed good time. Based on suggestions from the audience -- and they sometimes can get quite outrageous -- and within a given set of rules per game, the company spins a story completely unrehearsed. Because it's all imagination and play (as in fun-and-games play) the humour is always unexpected as the performers switch scenarios and play different characters on the fly.

Tonight, in the game of "old job, new job", from suggestions from the audience, we had a scene in which a sex-worker turned dentist performs an unforgettable tooth extraction on an "unsuspecting" dental patient.

The improv musical numbers put the performers to the test as they have to sing about various audience members, given only their names and other small bits of personal information, and rhyming the couplets as they go. One song was about a Roberto from Milan who was an engineer but wanted to be a mountaineer instead. This song was particularly difficult as the performers could only take turns to sing one word at a time.

And as an unexpected tribute, thanks to Tina, June and I got our lives as a couple turned into an opera as the grand finale to tonight's show. Of course, the story was made up, but there were occasional flashes of "yeah, that is so us!" amidst all the hilarity. Bet Tina had always wanted to roast us ever since our wedding. But she behaved herself then, and tonight, she let her creative licence reigned unfettered.

Glad Mel pushed for us to go tonight, and Wayne too. A fitting reward for being good and marking my quota of scripts over the last couple of days.

Actually quite proud of myself having pia-ed through my vacation marking and completed it all in the last weekend. And, no, I didn't scrimp on my comments on the kids' essays either. Everyone got their fair share of unintelligible red gel-ink scribblings in the margins and wherever there was space.

Had to be done. Got another load of essays today from the block test, and another tight deadline to meet. Brain a bit fried now trying to read essays about the "relevance of moderation in today's society"... who came up with that question, anyway?

Kids keep saying that there are certain behaviours that need to be moderated or else terrible things will happen to the individual or to society. Therefore moderation is relevant today. Sure. Fine.

But this answer quite misses a major facet of the question. Why does the question put the focus on today's world? Obviously, there has to be some comparison between then and now. Has the world since changed in such a way that moderation seems no longer valid? or useful? or even advisable? What have these changes been and how have they altered our view on the concept of 'moderation'? Implications of and effects these changes have had on our lives? Well, something like that, anyway. Ok, really too fried to think coherently any more...

150 grams of pure beef in a hand-packed patty. Covered over with a layer of melty mozza cheese. Topped with sauteed shitake 'shrooms. Served on a bun with onion rings, tomatoes and lettuce; a mountain of fries on the side. Welcome to the Botak Burger, set meal edition.

Made the mistake of ordering 2 sets and dessert. There was more food there than June and I could finish. Or we're just getting to the age at which our appetite outstrips our capacity to consume. If we had ordered just 1 set and 1 additional burger, that would have been perfect.

Anyway, that was the first phase of June's birthday dinner. Jen's trying to put together phase 2, maybe Wednesday.

300 is the ultimate NE movie for adults. In an age that's fashionable to portray teenage nancy-boy GIs whining for mommy while they're leaking blood and guts all over the countryside, Frank Miller reminds us once again what "dulce et decorum est, pro patria mori" means.

It's been a long while since there has been a movie featuring a bunch of soldierly-type fellows so eager to die for king and country. The volunteer civilian army packs up and leaves first sign of trouble, but to the Spartans, "no retreat, no surrender" is the code they grimly lay their lives down for.

And for what? After all, Xerxes did promise to leave Leonidas warlord of all Greece if only Leo would acknowledge Xex as Grand Poobah Overlord of Everything. Bit of an expedition Xex has mounted just to make the Greeks call him "uncle," I'd say.

But Leo would rather die a free man than a puppet king of a larger empire than he knows what to do with. And that's the price of freedom, fought over and paid for in blood. What? And you thought your freedom was a basic human right?

Our move towards developing clean energy and the attempt by investors to buy over and redevelop the Goodwood Park grounds. These two stories on the ST cover today tell me one thing: no one gets rich using their own money. The clean energy article says that applicants will get funding for their research amounting to millions of dollars. The Goodwood Park article says a little-known investment company will "work with property giants -- from Singapore and HK -- to fund [the project]."

To get rich, we have to convince other people that we know how to spend their money better than they can. So to those of you asking how to scrape up enough capital from your meagre savings to start your own company, the answer is, you don't. Leave your own money alone, go borrow from other people get others to invest in you instead.

Or you could just be satisfied with your "steady" income. That's what kids train for in school, isn't it? Do your job, get a grade. Do a lousy job, get a lousy grade and probably a scolding as well. Ahh... the life of a salaried worker.

The word "wireless" is a bit misleading. What it means is that the mass of intestines connecting devices to each other is hidden away, sometimes not very skillfully either. Anyway, I have successfully made my house into a wi-fi hot spot, and hopefully that will make my wi-fe think I'm a hot spot too.

As usual, my problems boiled down to something inconsequential that I either did or didn't do. In this case, it was because I was using the wrong passcode to log into my own system. Having to remember so many passwords will eventually addle the brain. Duh.

Glad I still had time to go cycling at ECP with Amy, Belinda, JY and HP. 1 hour of physical exercise clocked in for the week. Wayne joined us for dinner, a carnivore's delight, at the ECP food centre. As JY said, it was good to get out and be silly with people after so many days of being cooped up, considering this was a holiday week.

Don't be surprised if I go offline temporarily. I'm attempting to set up a wireless network at home, but so far the process has been driving me nuts! I'm following the manuals step by step, and so far I've been very successful at setting up the cable modem and apparently, the wireless router. The fact that I can use my laptop to make this entry shows how amazingly successful I've been so far.

Now, why won't my desktop work??? Gaaaaaa!!! (and before you ask, yes, I did get a wireless adapter for Mr L33t).

A new study shows that exercise and smarts, particularly memory, are closely linked. The Greeks and Romans already knew that: "mens sana in corpore sano," a healthy mind in a healthy body. This means mandatory PE lessons for KI students! Let me go talk to Head PE to make the arrangements... heh heh...

Amy's suggestion to catch a movie a day is wonderfully optimistic and deserves a big grin. It's great to aim high, though the reality of our situation is that we really are swamped with work that demands our attention this week -- either deadlines that must be met, or face the prospect of an insurmountable backlog when term begins again next week.

Nevertheless, today we put her audacious plan in action. HP had a coupon for a 1-for-1 deal on the mixed grill at Billy Bombers, Cathay. The meal plus a side of coleslaw fed 4 of us, Amy, HP, Josh and me, quite adequately. Cost effectively, too.

After lunch, we watched "The History Boys". It was somewhat lighthearted, though not quite the comedy that the promos promised. 3 teachers tutor 8 promising young lads in the Oxford/Cambridge entrance exam History paper. Each teacher provides a different perspective of History and the boys struggle to make sense of it all. Much of the time, the boys don't see the point of some of the learning activities -- including improvised role-playing in the French language (even though they don't require French on the exam), singing silly songs, memorizing copious amounts of recitation, and opening up in free-for-all debates with no resolution. But they engage in the activities anyway, motivated as they are because they really are bright kids.

The boys also hit the library often, borrowing armsful of dusty old books to write essay after essay which get critiqued not for their knowledge content, but rather for the banality of their presentation. After all, the kids know their stuff, but they need to use their knowledge to intrigue the top brains in the top colleges in the UK if they are to stand a chance of getting in.

It turns out that through all the work the boys put in, they do become smarter than their teachers, and accomplish that which their teachers could not do -- read History at Oxford/Cambridge.

Of course, there's a little more excitement in the plot, but all I could focus on was how much I want KI to run like this History class. Activities function to practice and apply the knowledge the kids bring into class with them, and not merely teach for content sake alone. The onus is on the kids to do their research and their readings, to come up with questions to ask and debate over, and to decide what the agenda for the class will be for the day.

The movie wasn't so inspirational as it was a glimpse into what things could be like. The boys aren't perfect, and neither are the teachers, but they believe in the big picture and find a way to work together for the same goal.

Not sure what the rest of the week is gonna be like, but today's programme was a much needed morale-boost in its novelty. Much appreciated!

How did a little old lady end up at the AMK-CTE turnoff knocking on car doors and asking for help to get home? It was quite surreal watching her and her umbrella practically wandering along the turning lane in the twilight, knowing that eventually it'll soon be my turn to be thus supplicated.

And so it was that I opened my driver's side window and asked her what was up. She had overshot her bus stop and had no idea where she was. Fortunately, she didn't live too far away. With my sis-in-law at a loss to interpret her strange dialect, the old biddy handed over her i/c to show us her address. Cross-referencing it with the street directory, we figured out she lived at AMK Ave 10, just a U-turn away from the big intersection where we were.

Thankfully, she recognized her block when we pulled up to it. It was quite a relief seeing her totter home. Better a short detour than to be left forever wondering whatever happened to the crazy old lady we left stranded on the side of the road, and feeling guilty if something untoward had happened to her.

In the local news, the practice of "dropping subjects" in schools these days has generated quite a bit of excitement. People are indignant that teachers have become so concerned about school rankings, or their rankings, that they are advising students to drop their weaker subjects and concentrate on their stronger subjects so that there will be fewer failures and more 'A' grades produced at the end-of-year exams.

While scoring 'A's seems to be a positive thing for a child's academic records, people are upset that dropping subjects at secondary level effectively closes off options in fields of study at tertiary level. A dropped subject means a prerequisite lost for certain uni courses. Because Little Ah Huat dropped A. Math, he'll never become an engineer, and Little Suzie will never become a doctor because she dropped Bio. So despite the fact that they scored multiple 'A's in their other subjects, it's all meaningless because they can never be the doctor, lawyer or engineer their parents always dreamed they would become one day.

Which has got me thinking about our KI selection process and wondering if we've been over-selective with our kids. Granted, at this point, there's little advantage taking KI other than for its prestige. KI certainly isn't a prerequisite course for anything at the uni, at least not for the moment. It really is a lot of pain -- not the subject itself, but the burden of requiring extra time on the timetable to accommodate the extra subject, the time spent on additional assignments, and all for the dubious distinction of being able to say, "I took KI instead of GP at JC." Wouldn't the kids find it more profitable to go out and play instead, like any other regular kid?

I have a lot of respect for those who are tenacious enough to still want to take KI though, and I welcome them with open arms. KI was not meant to be an elite subject. In fact, I'd like to believe that we're pioneering a subject that will eventually be open to all comers. It's no use to us having just a tiny core group of thinking Singaporeans when all Singaporeans need to learn how to think, and not just replicate.

Still, last year's experience scared us a little, when a third of our first KI group dropped out of college because they couldn't handle the stress. This year, we wanted to protect the kids, and perhaps ourselves as well, hence the stringent selectivity the applicants went through. But really, if they really, really want to take KI anyway, who are we to stop them before we've had a proper trial period -- within what our limited resources can provide, that is.

But after the trial, we do need the right to determine if the student is suitable or not to continue. No one questions the probation period as an HR policy, so I don't see why anyone should question this whole "dropping subject" thing. Like everyone else, kids need to prove themselves capable of taking and keeping a subject. Showing a lack of interest, not submitting work, not being prepared for discussions, little evidence of wanting to improve, all these symptoms show a lack of aptitude in a subject. It's a sad fact of life everywhere: Sorry, kid, you're the weakest link. Goodbye.

Once again we've reached another term break. One week in which to catch up on neglected administration, clear the marking backlog and plan for the next assault on our next educational objectives. Somewhere in there, there are plans for a little R&R time with the department folk and friends as well.

It certainly has been a busy first term, in the sense of working hours and output -- and it's just the beginning of the year. Much of the work has been quite fulfilling. Things needed to be done, and there's a great feeling of accomplishment on completion, and despite working longer hours this year, I feel the time hasn't gone to waste.

Still, I detect a darker tone underlying my entries since the year began. I seem to be writing less about my friends, and more about my peeves and things that stupid people say that tick me off. Or about work. There's little time these days to go explore new places or try out new experiences to write about. Our movie watching record has been pathetic so far. Or we're too tired and simply wanna go home 'cos we too frazzled to do anything else. This applies to June as well as myself (oh, btw, June worked things out with her management so she's still got her job after all).

This really does look like the year of hard labour. I need a vacation.

Finished finalizing the new batch of J1 KIds. We set the bar high this time (no offense, Taily & co.) and selected 6, about 50% of our applicant list. It's tough making such a painful decision, but we think in many cases we're being cruel to be kind. The demands of taking 4 H2 subjects are not to be underestimated, so having learned from last year's experience, we're choosing to be more conservative this year.

I admit the selection process isn't 100% infallible. But we had to make the best decision we could under the circumstances. We turned away kids who took KI in other colleges and I'm sure they're gonna be sore about that for a while to come. They need to understand that we lined everyone up at the same starting line again. We tried not to let any preconceived notions bias our decision, even if they had prior experience in the subject (and had a recommendation letter from their previous instructor).

There are no guarantees in a situation like this, but we'll have to live with our decision and make the best of it now that the die is cast.

Today's taping session turned out not to be a straight interview as I expected. I walked onto a makeshift set of a talkshow. Me, Mel and Linc on one side representing the Arts; KW, Pio and Mich on the other representing the Sciences. I certainly wasn't prepared to debate the merits of one over the other, considering my position on the value of both. Thankfully, although our hosts began the show by trying to drive a wedge between our faculties, cooler heads prevailed and both sides steered the argument towards affirming that both the arts and sciences need each other.

Glad we could use the opportunity to clear up some misconceptions people have about our respective faculties. We ended up advising our mostly year 2 audience not to get locked into their labels, to follow their hearts and their passions, and not rely on textbooks as the only guide to life. Pio offered a nice analogy: textbooks are like travel guides, useful for acquiring a rough idea of the place you are about to visit; but having read the guide alone, you can't say you've been there if you never actually went.

Does it matter if a person is educated in either the arts or science faculties? Campus TV news wants to interview me on this topic... not that I'm any authority on the matter. I just agreed to it out of professional courtesy to a fellow campus news organization. Indulge me while I think aloud in preparation for tomorrow's taping.

As a general overview, both disciplines are essential to a person's educational development. The sciences help us understand our environment thereby allowing us to harness natural phenomena and employ them for our benefit. The arts help us to understand ourselves as human beings, and give us the ability to express ourselves and organize our relationships with each other and the world around us. So in a sense, the sciences look at us from the outside in, while the arts look at us from the inside out.

Both disciplines are important because they function best in partnership with each other. The arts power the imagination from which science draws the inspiration to seek new knowledge. But the arts also remind us of our humanity, which puts a brake on science, preventing us from going too far too quickly for our own good.

It's unfortunate that Education has split the arts and the sciences into diverging learning paths. The impression on us is that the two are pretty much mutually exclusive. The arts appear to us as idealistic and impractical, while the sciences seem rigidly pragmatic and insanely boring. Who in their right minds would want to be educated if these were the only two possible choices?

Usually, the deciding factor for students (or their parents) is in determining which course of study will lead to the more lucrative outcome. So rather than acquiring knowledge for its own sake, these poor kids chase an elusive price tag that exists only as a promise somewhere in the distant future.

For some reason, there's the impression that there's more money to be made in the practical sciences than in the airy-fairy arts. Hence the gross imbalance in the numbers of science vs arts students. And this imbalance fuels its own myth: more people are lining up for science than arts, therefore science must be better. It's the bandwagon fallacy operating on a societal scale.

Going solely on the which-makes-more-money premise, I would say that the most successful (I mean wealthiest) self-made capitalist pig-dogs (self-made to eliminate inherited money) are usually those who have integrated their appreciation for both the arts and sciences. They are 'artsy' in that they know how to work relationships with other people and sell them on story-like promises, but they are also 'scientific' in that they've been able to develop products to sell. It helps when their products work well too.

Gates. Jobs. Spielberg. Beckham. Branson. Trump. Or look at any world-famous brand-name. Arts or science? Smart money will say arts AND science.

Sadly, at JC level, students are already segregated according to their faculty of study. But that doesn't mean that they're set for life as "arts" or "science" people. As long as they don't rely on their textbooks to tell them how to live life, but rather learn to live life by living, I think they'll do just fine.

Just as I was saying NYconneX needs a bit more recognition, campus comms has decided to explore the possibility of helping increase our print run to double what we were producing last year. It's reassuring that people are starting to take notice and see the potential in us. In that, my journos have been instrumental. Without them, I really wouldn't have the confidence to believe in what we're doing, and continue finding new ways for us to grow. 'nuff said about that for now.

Last night's clan outing took us to a $15 per head buffet at the All or Nothing Cafe in Geylang. I think it was more for curiosity that we chose the location. We wanted to see where my bro was working at, and what he actually did there. So 3 generations of family descended upon him, at his invitation, of course.

The cafe is mostly a front for an outreach programme catering to the lost and wayward in Geylang. It aims to befriend the people on the street and offer a beacon of hope in one of the darker areas in our city. The locals have already checked the place out, and have deemed it harmless. Some have even offered business advice and friendly intel about the neighbourhood.

The organization employs ex-cons, a la the Yellow Ribbon project. The cooking staff are also walk-ins, and before last night's dinner the night chef walked out, leaving a crisis in the kitchen that had to be resolved one way or another.

There's so much potential for clash and conflict in this real-life scenario that if they had a good scriptwriter observing their operations for a week, a new local sit-com will be making its way to prime-time TV very soon.

Not an ex-con himself, my bro takes his job there as a full-time CIP. His job-scope is to do whatever's necessary. Waiter, receptionist, dishwasher, cashier, stage-actor, whatever. He was also prepared to take over the kitchen in place of the departed night chef, but thankfully the day chef was persuaded to take the night duty as well.

Dinner isn't usually buffet style. The cafe is more used to a la carte zi-cha, but last night was a celebration in honour of Purim. During dinner, the staff dramatized the biblical story of Esther to explain how this Jewish festival came about. Let's just say they have very little experience with theatre, and leave it at that.

It's nice that the family could get together again so quickly after the chili crab incident. Gatherings of the paternal clan are always fun.

How significant is a teacher's contribution to a student's success? The following represents the equation I referred to in the last entry:

Let x be the effort of the student.
Let y be the effort of the teacher.
x(y) = Z, where Z = the result of the course of study.

So for increasing values of x and y > 0, Z increases exponentially.

No tricks, no secret techniques, no shortcuts. Teachers can only value-add to the effort students put into their studies. No value multiplied by 0 can increase the value of 0. Both have to work together to achieve a desirable Z.

I daresay success breeds success. The shock and awe of the 2006 results showed us that great results can be achievable. That should give 2007 the confidence that working our collective arses off will indeed bring considerable returns in the end.

College is celebrating 'cos our 2006 batch has done amazingly well in the As, pulling in one of the best results in our history. While we are all pleasantly surprised and are speculating about what we actually did right last year, I would say that the biggest contributor to our success was that the kids got serious and studied. It's such a simple equation, there's no other way to explain it.

Guess I should be happy with my students' results, though for them I really do subscribe to the idea that they worked hard for their own acheivements. Congrats to you all!

Of course, despite the success, there will always be casualties and I can't help thinking about and empathizing with them. The Career Guidance team organized a briefing session immediately after the release of the results for these students, but perhaps 'immediate' was a bit premature. Only a handful of students showed up, while the others couldn't bring themselves to attend it.

Usually, a period of self-reflection would be what the students need the most first, and once the initital emotional baggage has been dealt with, then they can start thinking about what their next step could possibly be. With a clear head, new options become easier to see.

A level results out tomorrow. As always, it's tense even for us teaching staff 'cos we hope and pray for the best results for our students too. Regardless of whether they were monkeys or angels last year, we do want them to be happy and move on in life. So, A6 and S6A, I'm holding my breath in anticipation for y'all!

To keep our spirits up today, Staff Welfare arranged for a mass lo-hei lunch. No raw fish (to avoid mass food poisoning), but the salad and condiments were piled high ready for tossing. Cynth catered a rather non-traditional variety of buffet food items including pizza, quiche, hotdog wieners and Swedish meatballs, but I doubt anyone will complain 'cos it was quite delish. The mini-eclairs were heavenly, if limited in supply.

But I must hand it to Management which really knows how to make staff happy. Many of us have been labouring with laptops that were getting slower and slower with each new upgrade to the campus network. Our laptops had actually passed their use-by dates in January this year, and, lo, the Israelites lamented and wailed, decrying the horrendous lag that was the curse of system obsolescence. But today, only after a mere month of expectant resignation, we who had the oldest laptops got issued spanking new ones that promise all sorts of droolsome bells and whistles begging to be played with and explored. There's no unhappiness that can't be solved with the right technology. Yes.

My new lappy.

I've taken charge of the Debate squad over and above the journos this year, in case people don't know it yet. These 2 aspects of my now consolidated CCA are a world of difference from each other. Even I, Master of Compromise, am somewhat at a loss as to how the 2 could possibly work together without me suffering some kind of schizophrenic damage to my psyche.

For the moment, I've got more journos than debaters, though the CCA is generally referred to as 'Debate'. The journos have been putting out more visible, tangible impact on campus due to our weekly updates of campus news in NYconneX, though I don't really know how wide the reach actually is among our student body. NYconneX isn't likely to win any awards 'cos there aren't any awards out there to be won for our product (are there?). God knows, we need some recognition.

On the other hand, Debate takes the lion's share of my annual budget because debate coaches don't come cheap. The coach we've taken on can't come on Wednesday, so a concurrent CCA day is not possible for both segments. We've taken on the coach by faith as currently we don't actually have a debate team yet, while the existing JC1s are in 1st term transition. I don't know what the appeal of Debate is for the new batch, so I have no guarantee that I will recruit a team once term 2 begins.

So, yeah, huge worries for my consolidated yet fractured CCA that I sometimes wonder if anyone else besides myself cares about.

Still, in attending Debate training sessions for the remnants of our JC2 debaters, I've found the debaters to be committed, self-reliant, motivated and organized. And they haven't given up yet. Without a coach today, they trained themselves, and I learned enough to see that debate training can actually be quite good even for the weaker GP students. Debating is systematic, logical and structured, mature and critical (in the critical thinking sense), everything we hope our GP kids to be. Could there be some way to turn this observation into something practical and useful...?

We finally got to watch Ghost Rider after a couple of aborted attempts in the last week. Marvel's supernatural heroes have a niche audience, and GR is no exception. This movie, however, isn't going to turn him mainstream anytime soon.

The dour Day-Walker, Blade, made quite a credible transition to the movies by focusing the trilogy on lots of hard-hitting, tightly choreographed fight sequences, giving the audience at least a visual treat even if we didn't buy the plot. Sadly, GR is one Marvel character that can't make the transition without the use of CGI, and even CGI can't help a character whose head is a skull and is therefore virtually expressionless regardless of his circumstance.

So what to do? Call in Nick Cage to play Johnny Blaze, GR's human side. But though Cage plays tortured souls quite well, his skeletal other-half behaves with too much kiddish glee that the 2 sides don't mesh believably. While Blaze has to live with the consequences of his choices, "forsak[ing] friends, family and love," the stuff of human drama, GR is so invincible, so powerful that there is little that can threaten him and keep us on the edge of our seats.

It's even less thrilling when GR's nemeses, Blackheart and gang, fall so easily as GR takes them out one by one. That Blackheart himself falls due to his own stupidity makes this plot more worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon than it has potential for. Of course, dealing with the ultimate baddie, Mephistopheles, is another story. Literally.

A safe, kid-friendly rendition of a classic conflicted hero. The image of a demon on the side of the angels, a flaming skeleton in black leather-and-chains astride his All-American chopper looks cool but, like GR himself, this movie needs more meat on its bones.

Sometimes I wonder if I'm being fair to the people who write in to the ST forum pages, in the way I select easy targets to pour my bile over. But some people's peeves are so badly argued, they really get my goat. Case in point:

Heng Cho Choon, who took the trouble to write in today in response to Roni Roberts, another forum writer from last week. This is truly a case of a knee-jerk reaction to a misreading of a phrase in Roberts' letter without any comprehension as to what Roberts was talking about in the first place:

I REFER to the letter, 'Important to take the time to understand a culture before making judgments' by Mr Roni Roberts (ST, Feb 16) in which he commented on whether HDB flat dwellers should or should not keep pets as 'an integral part of the family unit'.
If you read Roberts' letter, Roberts was simply relating survey data collected from HDB dwellers themselves about how they view their pets. He was not advocating anything of that nature either way.

Some people keep pets because they truly love them and care for them with utter devotion. They do not mind spending a fortune to take their pet to see the vet whenever it is sick. Some keep pets because they are childless and want to drive out the silence and monotony of the home.
Sounds supportive of pet owners at first, but attempts to be clever with sly digs at how pets are a waste of money and are no real substitute for children.

I once visited a friend who lives on the second level of a block of HDB flats. On the ground floor is a pet shop which sells birds and hamsters. Residents nearby have to put up with the noise, smell and mess 365 days of the year. With the spread of bird flu, I wonder if it is safe to live in such an environment.
Wow. He has a friend who actually lives in HDB housing, whom he took the trouble to visit once. I guess with the noise and smell and mess of the pet shop, he's never visited his poor friend again. This kind of prejudice has caused more animal deaths than bird flu has caused human deaths, if you think about it.

He goes on to talk about how people can be cruel to animals, and how we should have an animal cruelty police force to show that he is actually quite the humanitarian.

He then suggests that if we want our kids to have contact with animals, we should take them (the kids, not the animals) to the zoo or to the farms in Choa Chu Kang, anywhere as long as it's not in his own back yard....

How far off on a tangent can this guy get? If this was an Application Question response to Roberts' letter, it shows very poor comprehension skills, a high level of bias and prejudice, hijacking the question and running his own agenda, and little coherence in how his ideas flow from para to para. Fail, lor. And embarrass himself in public some more.

I'm worried for our GP kids because they constantly exhibit the same errors in their AQs. If we don't fix the problem quickly, the long-term effects could be devastating. The local papers might soon be filled with half-baked arguments like this one.

Just to be fair, Heng's letter is here.

ST's "Mind Your Body" section has a story on how a bed-ridden Mr Lu, who's suffering from ALS, is being helped through his ailment by the 6 cats who live in the house with the family. The cats keep his mind off his worries, and their tendency to snuggle up to whomever they like and trust also give him some relief from his physical pain as well.

The same cats have helped the younger Lu through an episode of depression, and cope with his O levels.

Despite there being 6 cats, there is no mess. They just require food and water, and a clean sandbox. Not bad for low cost, low maintenance family healthcare.

Only 1 thing I can say about this story: I bet they don't live in an HDB flat.

Had a reunion of sorts with Anthony and Vince at the CSC lanes. As a team, we're out of practice though it didn't take too long for us to find our rhythm again.

I had an unusual starting game, hitting a turkey and a 4x4 for a total personal high of 227. Guess I had quite a bit of aggression to get off my chest first. Satiated after taking it out on the pins, I settled back into my usual scoring bracket for the rest of the game.

It was quite a fair match in that out of the 5 games we played, each of us won at least 1 game apiece.

Nice to catch up with the Boyz again. We're all struggling to clear our respective marking backlogs, so knowing that everyone is equal in our workload is quite comforting.

Day 2 of CNY means dim sum breakfast with the Wongs. We wanted somewhere other than our usual this year, so we made a reservation at Spring Court in Chinatown. No problem getting a table, we could even pick and choose which one we wanted since we were early.

We did, however, forget one crucial detail: no dim sum on the menu today, just a selection of CNY set meals at rather unappetizing prices. No thanks.

So the Wongs and I upped and dashed back across the street to Yan Palace, but because we hadn't made any reservation there, the place was already packed, no room for us. For the first time since I married into the family, we had to set our sights a little lower this year, and have our family brekkie at... McD's. Quite a break from tradition, and perhaps the start of a new one.

Still, we made up for our disappointing breakfast by having a late lunch at the Marche in Vivo. OK, also not particularly traditional, but at least they were open, and they could manage a table for 9. And their shopping.

The pix shows (L-R) M-i-l, s-i-l and wife pigging out on seafood paella, minestrone and deep-fried calamari. Not bad, though the variety at this Marche is limited, compared with the one that used to be at the Heeren.

Last night's reunion dinner was slightly different from the traditional 10-course. The clan met at the Chinese seafood place on Casuarina Road (the staff wear red Ts with"SWIFT" printed in front) for our annual feast. Apart from the now-mandatory new year lo hei, the other dishes were house specialties.

One thing about reunions is that occasionally we discover that our family tree extends further than we think. I found myself sitting next to Vince's CT/GP kid from a couple of years back, name of Rudy. He called my cousin "auntie", which makes me his uncle, sort of, twice removed, by marriage, that sort of thing. His mom said that it was fortunate I didn't teach him, else I'd have lots of stories to tell about how naughty he was. I was thinking, vice versa.

In my usual fashion, I blessed our newfound family togetherness by showering him with crab shell and gravy from an ineptly applied nutcracker to a large, tasty pincer. From the corner of my eye, I could see his mom discreetly picking stuff out of his hair. Oops.

Oh well, happy year of the pig, people!

Had a bit of an identity crisis with NYconneX about the latest update this week. I had assigned a reporter to cover the story about the band and choir CCAs leading the college in the flag-raising ceremony on Wednesdays. The report that came back was that a few students were critical of the new ritual and wanted it cut back.

The article drove me ballistic because -- freedom of the press and anti-censorship sentiments aside -- firstly, that wasn't the story I had asked to be covered; and secondly, the story was unrepresentative, biased and lazy in the way that it laid out a critique without trying to understand the situation first.

NYconneX plays a delicate balance between showcasing our students and their CCAs, while simultaneously drawing feedback from the students about the goings-on on campus. Our job isn't to be partisan either way (sound familiar?) but to just report things as they are, to provide a behind-the-scenes view that is not usually obvious to the student body. That means we have to be fair to all parties and give everyone a hearing in our stories.

If anyone's going to be critical about anything we write, that's what we have Haloscan and our tagboard for. We don't provoke, but we do lay down a platform for students to discuss issues among themselves, using our stories as a stimulus. Or they can email us and suggest story ideas to cover.

So what did I do about the offending story? I took some time to interview the staff in charge of the band and the choir to get their perspective of the matter and used that info to balance out the story. By right, the reporter should have talked to the student leaders of the CCAs who are actually in a position to offer knowledgeable commentary from the students' perspective, rather than just some random student-in-the-parade-square with some uninformed off-the-cuff quip.

We don't want to be shut down by the powers-that-be, but neither do we want to lose our credibility as a student 'paper. It's a bind that ST is often criticized for, and I'm starting to appreciate that unenviable position.

Anyway, the Officially Ammended, Politically Sanitized article is now up for public consumption. Click here to see a conflicted press in action.

Valentine's Day is exchanging gifts with me getting caught forgetting to remove the el cheapo price tag from mine (how did I miss that?). We make plans over dinner to finish off the last of our spring cleaning before the CNY weekend, and to polish off the last of the chocolate-banana cake before it goes bad. Plans go seriously awry when the both of us spend the rest of the evening passed out on the living room floor in front of the TV.

If that isn't love, what is?

June's back from KL again. It's become routine now, like taking an overnight bus trip up north and then back the next night. Guess this will be her last trip up for this company, which probably explains why she lugged back 48 cans of premium cat food and 3 slices of chocolate-banana cake from Secret Recipe. The cats and I are grateful!

It's true that KI is a damned demanding subject, especially considering that it's a compulsory 4th H2 which adds on the workload. Most normal people take only 3 H2s, which makes for a saner timetable and an overall easier life.

ST interviewed a KI kid who's struggling with his readings and coming to grips with 'alien concepts', which makes me wonder if collectively we've run amok with the content of the subject and forgotten the spirit and purpose to which it was conceived in the first place?

In terms of content, we examine the history of ideas, how knowledge is built up block by block, how knowledge diverges according to the different branches people have taken to discover how things work and how we can use our knowledge to our best advantage. We discuss the rightness and wrongness of the acquisition and application of knowledge, and determine what methods are most reliable for ascertaining The Truth, giving recognition to such a thing as a Universal Truth but at the same time discerning that truth is also a shifting conglomeration of conclusions drawn from imperfect and subjective interpretations of observations and other stimuli.

All that is already quite a headache, though fortunately we've got a considerable number of eminent thinkers in our history who've already written about their thoughts about human thinking and so, voila, people to read up like Plato, Hegel, Heidegger, Newton, Freud and other scarily-named personages whose brains we make our business to pick.

But if that's all there was to KI -- learning who said what about which obscure aspect of some esoteric theory about human thought -- then we've missed the point... again. We can never get enough content -- our brains are voracious, bottomless pits of information storage -- but to overemphasize content without purpose makes smart kids dumb.

KI students need to know the history of their subject because in their turn they will also be adding on to that illustrious history by being thinkers after their academic predecessors. So just reading the manuals is really only for background information -- to see how they did it in the past. But like a gongfu practitioner only becomes skilled through practicing the Master's moves, likewise the KI student also needs to practice thinking, and sparring through debate and discussion with fellow students.

We don't need KI students who hide in the library all day, we need KI students who treat the library only as a pit-stop for food for thought then, having prepared themselves, come back out into the sunlight with a just and worthy cause to pursue.

In a sense, all we want is for our KIds, like Newton, to "[see] further... by standing on the shoulders of Giants." But if the KIds have to name every bush, tree and rock along the way, they'll never reach the summit in time for their exam. And they won't appreciate the view once they arrive either.

Ban pets from eating places

I AM concerned that some pet lovers take their pets along to eating places.

These people love their pets but are not concerned about their fellow diners.

Can the authorities comment on whether it is all right for people to carry their pets and occupy seats in eating places?

Recently, I saw a sign at a Toa Payoh hawker centre stating prominently: 'No smoking, no touting and no dogs'.

Why not extend this ban to all eating places?

I hope dogs lovers are aware that many people would be inconvenienced by their pets.

Ng Soon Hwee

Dog in a manger Human in a seat

Dear Mr Ng

You want to ban us from all eating places? As it is, already there are so few places that we are welcome at because most eating establishments value your almighty dollar more than they care for our happiness at keeping our owners company.

We don't see that you have any real grounds for requesting to ban us, other than somehow you are "inconvenienced" by our taking up a seat. Let's consider that claim for a moment: how likely are you to want to share a table with our owner, even if we were not in the picture? Given you appear slightly xenophobic by your request, you'd probably want a table all to yourself, so you'd leave the seat we'd be occupying vacant anyway.

If you are worried about our hygiene, please remember that we are house pets, kept clean and groomed by our owners. We travel in carriers among you humans, so we sit in our carriers without any direct contact with the chairs you seem to be indignantly protecting. Furthermore, we are at least as clean, and perhaps only as noisy as your children; though through proper training, often better behaved in public.

In any case, cutting off contact with beings other than yourselves has become extremely unhealthy for our planet. You have become selfish and insensitive to the flora and fauna of the earth in the way you toxify our environment and encroach on our habitats to expand your so-called "civilization", and now you won't even let us -- a tiny proportion of what has survived your onslaught -- have a seat at your eating place in this concrete nightmare that you've built around us?

So before you open your mouth, think and get a little perspective. Who has "inconvenienced" whom? It's fine if you all want to kill yourselves with all the environmental havoc you've caused, but it isn't our choice to do likewise. But for the sake of your own health, it's good to be reminded that you humans don't -- and can't -- exist alone on earth. Even if it's just a brief encounter with us at an eating place.

Q-tip and Mimi

The pix for last night's show are up on Flickr. They've been shot by NYconneX journo, Khadija and friend, who did quite a good job capturing the excitement of the evening. Notice what I mean about performers not finding the light. Click here.

Tonight was the big musical talent show on campus. We had some very game contestants and a hopelessly partisan audience, who showed their unreserved support for their favourites, no matter what.

While the audience will always remember the judges' comments as truthful but insensitive (and that's not really my story to tell), for me I was looking at the overall presentation of the show, and I think another week's preparation and rehearsal time was necessary if we were to give everyone a fighting chance to win.

A week's prep would give time for the contestants to get advice on their performance and to get some stage experience, instead of just being handed a mike and shoved onstage to sing in front of a highly animated crowd. As it is, the performer's energy has to top the audience's otherwise it can get quite intimidating there on stage.

1 week and those of us staff with some performing experience might have had the time to give the contestants a few pointers that would up their stage-presence and confidence a little.

So performing cold, they made rookie mistakes like not finding the light, being stiff and unsure of their gestures and traffic patterns, hiding their faces, turning their backs to and/or retreating from the audience, and so on. My usual bugbears. Though these aren't things that our audience would actually pay attention to, I admit, a show needs time to polish in order to showcase its talents as best as it can.

And as usual, the opening and closing of the curtains between each contestant drove me nuts, sitting there in dead-air time. Frequent blackouts suck the energy right out of the stage and the inertia they leave behind makes it difficult to build the excitement for what's supposed to be onstage. No one likes to sit in the dark for too long.

Unsurprisingly, the one with the most performing experience won, hat's off to him. But the others never really had the chance to close the gap even a little. The talent was there, but time wasn't on their side, at least for this competition.

ST's cover page honours S'pore women documentary film-makers. It tells of how courageous and adventurous our women are, shooting stories in uncertain, exotic locations around the world. Their work is of such high standards that if they aren't up for some award, some big-name distributor wants to screen their films, and their audience reach is continuing to grow.

One reason for their success is because they are "patient" with their stories, often looking at the softer side of how people deal with the practical concerns of their particular situation. They are able to gain the trust of their subjects, and tell their subjects' stories without running a personal agenda of their own.

I quote from ST, "This trait of giving voice to the unheard and marginalised, the forgotten and neglected, is something that recurs in the women's work." Something I have to impress on my own journos at NYconneX.

And then, on the same page, there's another story of another aspiring documentary film-maker shooting in another strange and unfamiliar location, using creative camera techniques to capture a difficult subject. For his passion, this medical professional gets fired from the hospital he works for.

A case of intolerant Management? Rampant sexism in the workplace? Well, if this guy is dumb enough to get caught using a hidden camera to shoot his female colleagues in the shower, what do you expect?

Men. It's a wonder our women still put up with us the way they do.

Put on one more new hat today. Because of the college's big upcoming shindig, someone had to mail out all 13,000 invitations to our guests. So we packed 29 crates of invites into Gerald's tiny van, and with me in the cargo compartment and Boss-lady riding shotgun, we drove off to the big post office in Paya Lebar to get our bulk posting done.

With the unsecured crates sliding unpredictably around my delicate person, it was a bit hair-raising as we bumped towards our destination.

The bulk mail section is so unlike the civilized regular mail side of the post office. It's a place of motorized raising platforms and pallet trolleys, and big, friendly deliverymen who informed us that the bay we parked in was for the BIG trucks and that was why we couldn't get the raising platform to work for our dinky toy van. Another stout fellow showed us how to assemble a large trolley that looked like a cage on wheels into which we loaded our mail, crate by crate.

Among all the machinery, muscles and men, I was feeling way out of my element. Bet there were eyes on me thinking, "white-collar trash". And then, humiliation of humiliations, the guy at the counter wouldn't process our mail because despite there being three of us, no one brought our college's rubber stamp to make our transaction official.

Stupid, can't-even-get-it-right, white-collar trash!

And so we mark the demise of the Demented Equine in S'pore. It was an experiment that never really had a chance to succeed and, after less than a year of prancing and high-kicking, it's gone. I can't say I'm surprised.

The sad thing was, someone had thought that bringing underdressed fillies from Paree into stuffy S'pore was a license to print money.

On the surface, it does look like a lucrative venture -- bringing into the market a rare and tempting treat means the entrepreneur should be able to charge the sky for the commodity, and there'll still be a crowd snaking around the block for it anyway. And in S'pore there's nothing rarer than the opportunity to throw off our restrictive taboos without the fear of serious repercussions as a consequence. Unfortunately, this show just wasn't of the sort to break the piggy bank for.

First, the show didn't know what it actually wanted to be. It purported indecency by S'pore standards, and yet sold itself as an aesthetic experience, which literally whitewashed over the taboos our potential audience might have wanted to ogle break in the first place. No taboo, no product. No product, no consumer. Simple.

Conversely, if there's no chance of getting into trouble, there's no point to breaking a taboo anyway. Strike two.

Admission was too prohibitively expensive for the audience who might actually have wanted to go see the show, aesthetics be damned. A ticket to a Chinatown movie house is way cheaper and promises more excitement anyway, so there's no incentive for the old guys with umbrellas to move their tastes up a notch because they're already quite satisfied where they are. And they're just the offline market, 'nuff said.

The show did not have the critical mass that it had in Paree. Here, it had 1) no competitors to constantly keep it sharp and fresh, and 2) neighbours that provided neither complementary nor relevant products or services; making it 3) stand out like a sore thumb awaiting a mercy amputation, which has finally occurred.

Ultimately, the show that promised thrills for the multitudes of deprived S'poreans (and equally depraved regional tourists) only turned out to be a freak show -- which might have worked if they actually did show freaks. Instead all that was on display were gorgeous, talented, coordinated, articulate(d) human beings who ruined the show, and the box office, for everyone.

A nugget of Hokkien business wisdom succinctly and graphically sums up the state of our market: ai chee, ai pee, ai tua liap nee, which loosely translated means, "stupid customer, you can't have everything!"

Call me a fair-weather fan. After all, so many of us are when it comes to S'pore soccer. I caught tonight's cup final match on the one hand to see how our boys would fare under international pressure, and on the other to see if the game would degenerate into an international incident 'live' on TV. Fortunately, the only excitement remained confined to the pitch, and no more.

Watching our team play still doesn't give me much confidence, even though they were resilient enough to struggle past Malaysia in a hard-fought semi. We were still scrappy, unable to hold possession of the ball, slow to move forward and lack an imaginative midfield layer. Not particularly impressive.

We won tonight's game simply because our opponents couldn't capitalize on their chances at goal, while we happened to knock one in right against the run of play. Taking nothing away from Amri, but his goal was more a flash of personal brilliance than it was a team effort. And while that's all that counted in this game, the team really has to gel better together if we really want to move up the international rankings [Ed. Ok, lighten up, We won!].

Spent the morning at the local U at a forum organized by the SD Club. I don't know much about the club -- other than that NBS once hung out with them -- but they sure know how to pick their guest speakers.

The forum was about freedom of speech in S'pore and the speakers brought in their expertise from politics, the press and blogging. The Opposition guy who opened the session was a bit hesitant. He didn't look like he'd prepared any material, preferring to speak off-the-cuff from his own experiences at the last elections. According to him, it's ok to be an Opposition politician; difficult, but not impossible, as long as you keep your nose really clean and not do or say anything stupid that might get you sued after the elections.

The press speakers included my old school chum, Cherry G., of whom I will always accuse of scarring me for life in one of the games I mentioned in my previous post, but I do have a great respect for him nonetheless because of his critical eye on local politics, and his gumption for telling it like he sees it.

He said that whatever danger we perceive in becoming an activist for a cause we feel strongly about is only an excuse for apathy if it prevents us from doing something about it. But we do have to choose our battles wisely, in terms of our timing and the manner in which we fight them. He, himself, has had several times run afoul of the authorities for his scathing commentaries in ST. Yet, he is still a respected ex-journo and academic, and hasn't had the pants sued off him yet. The difference, he says, is that his bosses didn't panic easily, whereas Mr B was unfortunate to have a boss who overreacted when the government exercised its right to rebuttal.

Blogging is still the freest avenue for discourse, according to the speakers on the Internet issue. Most blogs have insignificant circulations anyway (mine is only a daily average of 11, as a case in point) and are hardly worth anyone's attention. Blogs, as I mentioned before, are policed by the blogging community already, so there's no need for the 'outside world' to interfere with whatever we say in our blogs.

Though we've heard of bloggers getting sued or jailed, in the last speaker's experience as a practicing DPP, because the process that an investigation file goes through before it can even be taken up in court is a long and complicated one, that their cases were actually brought before the judge was more of a case of their extreme bad luck rather than the fact that anyone was really out to get them.

The impression then, from today's forum, is that there is more freedom of speech here than we think. Only, the greater the reach, and the more impactful the speech is, we do have to exercise more and more care in what we say and how we say it. And, as the last speaker pointed out, as long as we stay away from the legally protected issues of race, religion and purposely trying to slime our incumbent politicians, we can write anything we want on our blogs and not worry about "disappearing" in the middle of the night.

Still, that's politics and police business. I'd rather be more careful about what my employer thinks about my blog. It's easier to get fired than jailed.

It's been a bad week for my ego and my public image. One whole week being in-between contact lenses, with my old pair damaged and unwearable, and my new pair being shipped in from who knows where. One week of having to wear my goggly spectacles in public, and recalling the names the kids in school used to call me since I was six and needed corrective lenses.

Back then, optical technology was still primitive and for my prescription the thickness of my lenses was in the region of bulletproof. I remember struggling against the specky, non-physical stereotype all through school, and taking it out on my hapless opponents on the soccer field with displays of reckless aggression. Overcompensating, as usual.

It didn't matter if the ball was a regulation size 5, or a cheap plastic ball. At one point we played soccer with a bottle-cap for a ball, our 'field' being a narrow, almost 45-degree concrete slope flanked by a drain on one side and the school wall on the other -- not because we were too poor to buy a proper ball (actually we were) but because it was more dangerous this way.

With my reputation for always being the most mud-caked, grass-streaked, blood-encrusted player left standing, I remember ending my days in school being called the "Mad Professor". That was a step up.

Today, my specs are of the high-index kind. Though my prescription has increased significantly since my schooldays, my glasses are much thinner than they were back then. But they give me a headache when I wear them for too long. So I'm really happy my new CLs have arrived at last, and I can see properly again.

I never gave them much of a chance, but I rooted for them amongst all the other teams anyway. They were always focused on their tasks, always thought their way around their problems, and very seldom did they display any negativity when the odds were against them. They carried with them a childlike wonder at the new and strange experiences their journey had in store for them, and above all, they never did lose their sense of humour, nor their penchant for play.

Congrats to JJ and Zabs on their victory in ARA1! They proved that their personal values of friendship and partnership can overcome the competitive pressure they faced in their climb to the top, and still get there before everyone else did.

They've gone and done it this time! They called June's name so often they wore it out. I won't pretend to know what exactly goes on in the logistics game, but Corporate must have done something spectacularly vexing for June to throw up her arms in despair and tender her notice on the spot.

Whoever can't hold on to June really doesn't know what he's got till she's gone. Few are as willing to work as hard for the little she gets, but even she has her breaking point. Good luck to them trying to replace her. Meantime, it's back to the want ads for a new job and, hopefully, a better working environment.

So there'll be another austerity drive in this household while we are now a single-income family. Since I've already been economizing on meals this year, I guess it won't be difficult to economize on other aspects of our lifestyle, at least until we return to the DINKy demographic again.

It's a better option, anyway, than having my wife worked to death on a cause she derives neither happiness nor meaning from. It's brave of her to put her foot down and declare "enough is enough!" and it's a decision I fully understand and respect. Now, THAT's stickin' it to the man!

Windows Vista is being launched as we speak, and I'm already downloading. Er, wait, I'm not downloading Vista. Let's get other people testing out the new system for a few months under real-world situations first, and if by then they haven't killed their systems yet (or vice versa), then maybe it's time to start thinking about my upgrading options. I may be crazy but I'm not stupid.

Rather, I'm downloading the new "Sam & Max -- Culture Shock (Episode 1, Season 1)" PC game that Neubronner reviewed in today's Digital Life.

This game isn't available in the stores. It's a novel method to distribute game programs by Telltale Games. "Season 1" is a series "episodes" individually downloadable in 6 separate installments. Each episode comes in at a low price and acts as a cheap sampler for the game. Like it, then buy the next episode; don't like it, you haven't lost too much money trying it out.

Having played the first Sam & Max adventure game by LucasArts way back in 1993, and laughed myself silly at the ridiculousness the deadpan dog and suicidal-homicidal rabbit got themselves into, when this latest offering came up last Christmas it was already on my shopping list.

Of course, the question of WHEN I'll have time to play PC games this year will have to be left open-ended. Frankly, I really don't know, but I'm buying my game first. I. Don't. Care. I want. Now.

I'm running my NY conneX staff ragged with my demands for work to be delivered on a regular basis, and I wonder if they only just see it as 'work' or 'obligation', or if they can see past their quotas and understand that there is also a little magic in the stories they are writing?

That magic has to do with making themselves disappear, while simultaneously being the channel that gives their interviewee a voice, and a chance to speak their story to the world. I think that's the driving force behind why journos do what they do, the good ones, anyway.

Seen from this angle, the journo's job is a very human, very compassionate one. It's an aspect of the profession that I hope my staff will pick up on the job.

ST's interviewed a TV journo who seems to have got it right, and whose passion for the job has kept her going for 25 years already:

The television image cuts to the presenter holding the microphone. She is not glamorously dolled-up as some television personalities are wont to be.

Instead, she is wearing a bright orange polo T-shirt and a pair of nondescript cream-coloured pants, her long hair tucked beneath a baseball cap.

There is not much expression on her face, no exaggerated furrowing of the brows or watery eyes.

But the look of concentration as she listens to the woman's story tells you in a subtle yet unmistakable way that she shares - and understands - the pain and loss.

The images change again, showing the presenter going from one flood victim's house to the next, braving the midday sun in search of more heartwrenching tales.

It is all in a day's work for Channel 8 stalwart Chun Guek Lay.

Recounting her assignment in Johor Baru two weeks ago, she reveals she was seriously thinking of wearing a pair of shorts - just in case the floods hit again.

'My job requires me to look good, yes, but I'm a journalist first and foremost,' she says matter of factly.

Excerpt from Mak, Mun San. "Anchor Woman." The Straits Times. Jan 29, 2007.

I'm disturbed by the number of possible ways a guy can get in trouble because of the content he puts up on his blog or website. S'pore bloggers get jailed; Malaysian bloggers get sued, while their PM berates them for spreading lies and sedition; A US teacher gets fired for 'inappropriate content' on his MySpace page, even though he claims a hacker put up the material and he took it down immediately when he noticed it.

It's too easy for a random reader to take offense at a blog, or even a single post, and put in motion a course of action that is totally out of proportion to the situation. It's probably due to the clash between people who don't understand the 'net, and people who use it with ease -- so much so that they forget that the occasional, casual surfer tends to take information posted on the 'net way too seriously. It's probably the same people who are likely to fall for a Nigerian scam email that are also likely to confuse a 'net persona with the real person behind the website.

Taking action in the 'real world' for some offense taken from web content often goes beyond the pale. The web has its own rules about proper 'netiquette, and as such, deals with conduct breaches in its own way. The 'net, after all, is nothing more than a medium of communication, so if someone doesn't like something that's been posted, there is a direct line back to the author through which one can express one's displeasure. That's why bloggers have a 'comment' function at the end of their posts, and some display their email addresses too -- they want to know what people think about the ideas they share.

Commenting opens a door for dialogue and debate, not just between the author and the offended party but potentially amongst a community of interested parties as well who can just as easily voice their views, adding their collective wisdom to the discussion.

It is the community then that will ultimately decide how objectionable the material is, and not just the singular, subjective view of the offended party. And if the content is collectively deemed too objectionable, it can be removed quite easily, unlike, say, material in the print media which once distributed is virtually impossible to retrieve and destroy. In this way, the controversy that arose on the web gets settled on the web without having to spill over into real life.

Still, there's no point for bloggers to ask for trouble and needlessly incur the wrath of the 'real' world. People are more receptive of new (or different) ideas if they are presented politely, mindful of the sensitivities and taboos of 'real' society. We never know who might stumble on our blogs, so while we should feel free to share our thoughts, let's play it smart and try not to piss anybody off from the get go. After all, we blog because we want to communicate, don't we?