I've let Mel and Tina persuade me into taking up a walk-on role in NYeDC's production of Othello. This, among everything else I'm working on. Tina's cut some of my lines, but that's a relief 'cos I don't have all that much time to rehearse long scenes with long orations. I get to play the Duke of Venice, quite a straight-laced, uptight kinda' guy, which isn't surprising since he's busy planning a war campaign.

A bit rusty with the stage-presence thing with the script looking rather static for now. But it's best to take Shakespeare slowly and pick up on his nuances first, before getting creative with it. Here's a first, anyway -- I've never done Shakespeare before, so I am a little envious of Johnny (Brabantio) and Ben (Iago): they get to be screwballs on stage while I just maintain order like some stuffy old patriarch, which I am supposed to be, of course. Still, no time to learn their parts, so break a leg, fellas!

By our 2nd debate training session held today, the bleeding seems to have been cauterized and my membership is holding at 6 JC1s. The rest appear to have no stomach for this sort of contest and have fled the field already. Huh. Young people!

Met the Robinsons. They're an oddball family who exist sometime in the future. Each family member has his or her own eccentricities, but they accept each other with mutual love and respect regardless. Such eccentricities include minor dementia, schizophrenia, belief in the anthropomorphism of amphibians, delusions of grandeur, extreme sibling rivalry, and psychomotor disability. Exhibiting any one of there traits could land an individual in an institution, but collectively united by blood and heart they pull together as the Ideal Family.

In fact, the only trait that poses any danger to anyone is typical teenage irresponsibility, and even then, Wilbur Robinson does his best to rectify the grave error he has committed.

The Robinsons are quirky enough to extend an invitation to orphan boy, Lewis, to join the family despite having their house nearly wrecked by a rampaging tyrannasaur as a result of his arrival (take it as it is, it's too complicated to explain). But when they discover that Lewis is from the past, they freak out and withdraw their invitation, insisting that he return to his own time.

The movie deals with the themes of failure and rejection. The Robinsons themselves celebrate failure -- the more spectacular, the greater the rejoicing. Or rather, they celebrate the learning that failure brings, while downplaying success which doesn't teach a whole lot. Hence the Robinson motto: Keep moving forward.

Lewis is himself a bright young man who has many great ideas, but his inventions often fail in their execution. He also has to face rejection several times over as his imagination and his devotion to science fail to endear him to the prospective foster parents who come to the orphanage to interview him. Apart from Mildred who looks after him in the orphanage, the Robinsons actually offer Lewis a home and a family, so it's especially heartwrenching when they eventually reject him too. But they have a good reason to send him back to their past.

The future is both predestined, yet it isn't set in stone. The choices we make in the present set a chain of events in motion that lead to the future. Conversely, the future depends on the choices we make in the present. The critical choice in this movie is Lewis's. One thoughtless incident is all it takes to change the idyllic utopian future into a horrific nightmarish one. He has to learn what that moment is, and make the right choice or end up irrevocably destroying the Robinson family of the future.

The plot sounds quite serious, but the comic relief comes in the form of the Bowler Hat Guy, arguably one of the worst evil villains to ever take up a career as an evil villain. He is the result of living a life of failure, yet never learning anything from his experience. His evil plans fail because he seriously lacks vision, knowledge and follow through. He is pure impulse who has unspecific goals, and no idea how to achieve them. It's hilarious when his plans fail. He deserves to fail because he doesn't think ahead or learn from his past mistakes. Resilient and persistent but neither resourceful or innovative, BHG is just pathetic.

Lewis, on the other hand, is driven by his desire to find his birth-mother. He studies through the night, attends university lectures uninvited -- and still dares to question the lecturer for more information -- and applies his learning to create a device that will help him achieve his goal. All he needs is encouragement and a realization that his many failures are necessary stepping stones towards the success that has so far eluded him. The bigger the goal, the more steps it takes. Lewis we root for, and hope that he will eventually find the belonging he so desires.

Perhaps it's because I don't earn a million bucks a year that's why I'm thinking: if I'm already earning a million bucks a year, how could the prospect of earning another half-million or so possibly motivate me any further to work harder, or be any less corrupt than I already am?

Sure, I'm grateful for my own pay rises and annual increments, but then I have room to upgrade and improve my lifestyle. But once we reach a certain tax bracket, how much further up can we possibly go? By then, we should have been able to afford all the creature comforts we could want, and then where does all the extra cash go? What good could so much money do, once we already have everything?

It's all a matter of perspective, though. We constantly tell ourselves that if we earned $x more, we would be happy, satisfied and have no worries about our future any longer. So when it comes to considering pay rises for our Ministers, we're all agape at how much more they'll be getting. While already comparing with their original pay, our salaries are a pittance. We think that already at their original salary, they should be contented because we are convinced that WE would be if we earned that much.

But perhaps asking the Ministers themselves if they are happy with their good fortune, or if the people are happy for them are the wrong questions to ask. The real question should be: now that we know how much our Ministers are earning, has 'politician' now become a viable job opportunity? Not too long ago, nobody wanted to get into politics. We'd rather abdicate ourselves and let the 'gahmen' make the decisions and solve our problems for us. But then, no one wanted to be the 'gahmen'. "No money in it," they'd say. But now that there's going to be plenty of money in it, I wonder if we're still going to be squeamish about getting into politics? If people still hesitate, then the pay rise would have been for nothing.

Big Boss calls our vocational institutes the 'jewel' of our education system. I wonder if the rest of our population would agree, and finally put to rest the stereotype that vocational study is where the Epsilon semi-morons of our society end up to train to do the necessary but menial jobs that no one else would want to do.

In my 2 years of vocational training, even as far back as '83-'85, the VI was certainly no dumping ground for cannot-make-it kids. Believe it or not, I was there to study Accountancy. The textbooks were thick and detailed, the tutorials no less gruelling than the ones we conduct in JC, and the fact that we all felt like bottom-of-the-barrel kids motivated us to study harder to prove that we weren't.

CCAs were free and easy, but they attracted quite a few talented students. I, unsurprisingly, got myself involved in Drama, and Debate, and was ed-in-chief of the institute's newsletter (omg, I just realized that in over 20 years, nothing's changed!).

These days, the institutes are pretty much equivalent to N American Community Colleges that offer diplomas and degrees in vocational skills. Both are run in Uni-like campuses, though I think only we have an image problem. Giving our institutes more recognition is a good move, and a timely one too.

Some other bits of personal trivia:
In the 2 years I spent in the institute, I was determined not to get involved with anyone so I could concentrate on studying and getting my Accounting qualification. Irony #1: I flunked the course and didn't get my cert after all. In 2 years, I simply couldn't learn to count, a fatal disability for a career in Accounting. Irony #2: a couple of years after I left, June arrived at the institute to study Secretarial duties. Despite my intention not to get involved with my classmates then, I married a fellow alumnus of the institute anyway.

Funny, the curveballs life throws at us.

Nice to see that old things can still be useful, even in a reduced capacity. Watson, my old desktop PC, once dead but now revived, had been lying around dormant for months already. Ever since Mr L33t replaced him, there wasn't much I needed Watson to do besides collect dust in the corner.

Today, Watson has a new lease of life. I donated him to the All or Nothing Cafe, my bro's workplace. So Watson can't play murderous, violent, bloodthirsty games anymore, but he can live out the rest of his retirement as a cash register for a Christian outreach centre.

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.