abluewhale

 I spent a good part of my day today in the school library trying to finish my work. The fortunate people reading this post may be surprised that the school was even open and fully functioning but believe or not, school was about as filled as it was on a normal day. The library was typically table-less and the benches were more or less occupied as well. I guess this kind of reflects the current muggerness of Law school and sadly my own muggerness since I was there too. 

Oh dear. 

Anyway, I spent the most part of the day searching for Halsbury Australia's edition on religion which I couldn't find anyway because some jerk took it for the entire day it seemed. Actually, screw that.

WHOEVER YOU ARE THAT TOOK BOTH HALSBURY AUSTRALIA AND ENGLAND, I KNOW YOU TOOK IT FOR THE WHOLE DAY BECAUSE I SPENT THE WHOLE DAY IN THE LIBRARY UNTIL THEY LOCKED THE TOILETS AND STARTED PLAYING THAT ANNOYING ELEVATOR MUSIC TO CHASE PEOPLE AWAY.... ANYWAY, I DON'T KNOW WHO YOU ARE SO I er... can't do anything about it so... just don't do it again.... pretty please? 

Ahem.

In other news,, my plan to sleep early today was foiled by my neighbour dying  er I mean the wake going on right outside my window is kind of noisy so I'll probably have to wait until they all leave before I get any sleep. Of course I can't just go up to them and say "Excuse me, you are being a public nuisance!!" because well, it is a wake and someone did just die. Who do YOU think the courts are going to rule in favor?

Is it just me or does the word "died" seem so... I don't know, dead? Its like someone saying, "My goldfish died." as opposed to "My goldfish passed away". The former makes me think that you might have had it for dinner and the later like you reserved a place of honor next to your grave for it. I know both words have more or less the same meaning but still... 

 Hello world. Yes, contrary to popular belief, I am alive and somewhat kicking. I haven't had many weird dreams recently except maybe the one where I dream that I had to find my research for history on Lawnet. 

Anyway speaking of Lawnet, some freaking idiot forgot to log off it and now no one can get in. WHERE AM I GOING TO GET SPANDECK FROM? HMMM??!!

Seriously though, people keep on telling me the year 1s seem to be mugging so much but we have so much work, I have no idea how you can even finish it, if you don't spend most of the day working on it. I'm currently in a slacker club but this cannot bode well for my future grades because for whatever reason, EVERYONE else seems to camp in school to study. Which means that when I enter class, they keep on spouting stuff from random cases and I, on the other hand, am left very confused. 

I shall try not to whine too much because its not that the subject is a pain or anything. Just that  don't think I expected the kind of work we would be getting the first 3 weeks of school. 

Looking back on this piece, I don't even think it makes much sense but I can't think now because my brain is sufficiently fried so lets just leave it at that shall we?

Kenyan Man Proposes to Chelsea Clinton 
Taken from the BBC.
"He's Godwin Kipkemoi Chepkurgor, a Kenyan man who told the BBC how happy he is that Mrs Clinton has agreed to convey his marriage offer to her daughter.

In 2000 he wrote to Mrs Clinton's husband Bill, then US president, offering 40 goats and 20 cows for Chelsea Clinton's hand.

In Kenya on the first leg of her African tour, Mrs Clinton was informed by a journalist of the proposal.

"My daughter is her own person. I will convey this very kind offer," she said.

"I feel very good for her [Mrs Clinton] to have answered - almost in the affirmative," Mr Chepkurgor told the BBC's Network Africa programme.

"She promised that she will take the proposal to the daughter and I am now waiting," he said."

Hello friends. Our first graded assignment of the semester three days into the start of school.

Facts: The plaintiff's daughter Dorothy, a pious but stupid girl, suddenly joins an abbey, which in actual fact is a cult owned by, in the judges words, a "megalomaniac" couple (from now on known as the defendants). The defendants for whatever reason think that the British government's plan to get kids to work in factories because of the war is slavery, which they are against. Because of that, they kindly decide to brainwash Dorothy to join their abbey to save her from the slavery and also, by the way, make her their servant, so they and the other nuns can plot their evil plan to do evil stuff like ingest the hearts of children. The plaintiff, a workman, was bloody pissed that he couldn't see his daughter anymore.

Procedural Posture: The plaintiff, sued for damages because his daughter could not longer brush his teeth and tie his shoe-laces, (insert annoying and pretentious Latin phrase) per quod servitium amisit or, "since I'm your Dad and you bloody well serve me!"

Reasoning: Children have no rights and therefore must spend their lives until they are 21, as free servants for their parents and no, you sadly aren't allowed to brainwash people to join your cult. 

Outcome: In favour of the plaintiff with ten years of servitude from the defendants as damages.

Word Count: 219

 All the introduction lecturers tell us that we'll be drowning in work and readings. Well, two days into school and I already am!!

Why do they have to give us reading list the day before they are due? ):

 I did a stupid thing today which I doubt anyone else will find amusing but myself but since I want to remember my stupidity, I shall post it here anyway!

So I was in the car listening to the BBC when I heard a report that Muhammad Yunus had died after being arrested and admitting to his crime of instigating violence in North Africa. I was pretty shocked when I heard that because I thought that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, not some terrorist from Nigeria.

Well turns out they were referring to Muhammad Yusuf the leader of an Islamic sect in Nigeria! I was so sad at first when I though that Yunus had died because he pioneered lots of amazing things for the world (which I won't write out so as to not bore the few people who come here). Anyway, moral of the story is, listen closely. (: 

In my dream, I dreamt that I was having a dream about a school being blown up. It all looked very similar to those terrorist awareness MRT advertisements with the bad computer animation of an exploding MRT train except in this case, the scene was the exterior of a classroom. Nevermind the classroom for a moment though because I had a dream within a dream! In my dream, I knew I was dreaming and I "woke up" knowing that I was having the dream. Is that not the coolest thing ever? There must be some sort of philosophical thought experiment in this somewhere. Like the man who dreamt he was a butterfly but wasn't sure if he was instead a butterfly dreaming he was a man.

After doing some research, I found out that was I was having is what is known as a "lucid" dream which is a mixed state of consciousness so in a sense, I have some sort of control over my dream.

Going back to those MRT ads though, I think they've kind of traumatised a small part of my psyche because now every time I see someone with a huge luggage bag (this is surprisingly common. I saw two sets of people with them on the way to Tampines) I picture the train exploding and me along with it! This causes me to panic slightly in my head and I look around to see if anyone else has noticed said object and has the strength to approach the person or press that the red button that ominously promises a $1000 fine for its misuse -no one does apparently. Anyway, so far I've managed to survive so they haven't turned out to be terrorist yet. Still though, why must they insist on bringing a large and suspicious object onto the MRT! If your bag is a luggage bag, do the rest of us a favour and cause a taxi driver agony instead!

After a lull in strange dreams, I had a whole string of bizarre dreams last night.

First off, I was taking part in a race but while everyone was running on foot, I was luckily on horseback (but I sill didn't win). If that wasn't weird enough, my horse could talk and guess what his name was! Bernard Madoff! Yup, my horse was named after Mr-Sentenced-to-150-years-in-jail-for-the-biggest-Ponzi-scam-ever-in-US-history. After the race, we all ended up in a pool and my horse jumped in and started swimming around in it.   

Next, I ended up in a school in Korea where I was supposed to retake my A levels with some A level equivalent that the school offered. One thing I remember about the school was that it was huge and everyone was speaking English which probably meant that it was an international school. This makes absolutely no sense but I was in Korea alone attending the school while the rest of my family were in Singapore. Which really makes you wonder why I had to travel to another country to retake an exam I could take any time of the year here. Also, this more or less proves how traumatic A levels was for me since it still seems to be weighing on my mind 3 months from the release of results and more than half a year after taking the paper.

So in the dream, I remember asking my mother, "Why I had to go to another school to retake the paper since I was already in law?! To go to Harvard? (yes, I'm aware that NUS law isn't remotely close to Harvard anything but it was a dream so allow me to use some hyperbole for a moment.)"

To which she replied, "... oh yah."

So at the end, I ended up not going to the school but my parents lost $500,000 because they had (stupidly?) already paid for the school fees.

Winner of the Berlin short film award.
 

 I'm a relatively late convert to Facebook and up till now I don't really find it to be the kind of addictive social networking site everyone finds it to be. For one thing, the whole process just seems to magnify any sort of strange social problems you have since its online for everyone to see.

Firstly, there is the process of getting friend request. I don't know about you but the during the period where Facebook started getting big and me getting an account, I used to get 3 friend request a day in my email from people. Which always puzzled me because I have no idea how some of these people even got my email or why they thought to add me since most of them hardly talked to me when I was in "semi-contact" with them, i.e. when we were both in school together. I use that term very loosely because often I find myself seriously trying to recall who on earth the person is, especially if the person has a common name. It is only when I look at the list of mutual friends do I gain some sort of recollection about the person but even then its mostly vague. 

This might mean that I've just got terrible memory and if that is true, I sincerely apologize to any past friends who come across this and future friends who may be insulted by my memory loss in the future. However, I think the situation is probably something like this: Through some strange means, they found my email and one fine day thought to themselves that they ought to reinforce our bonds of friendship which were not very present in the first place. After which they never followed up from that request when I finally added them back and our existence to each other has remained equally inconsequential - yes, it is as bizarre as it sounds. This is especially so when recently, I've been getting request from a whole bunch of random people that I don't know, who added me because of one mutual friend or through friend finder (again, I have no idea how they got my email. I think I ought to seriously consider my internet privacy).

I don't mean to be overly harsh since I'm sure that this isn't true in all cases but this to me shows desperation and a need to be given worth by the number of pseudo friends on Facebook. This certainly isn't a new phenomena and it was the reason why I left Friendster but the problem seems more widespread in Facebook.

Next, we have the whole requesting for friends problem. This might just be me but I'm always strangely uncomfortable with requesting friends in Facebook, probably because of my own assessment of people who do that. I don't want to appear desperate yet at the same time, I do it anyway because everyone else I know if XX's friend so why the hell not? So yeah, clearly I'm hypocritical.

Ultimately though, despite the various perils I have faced, I still continue to keep my account because everyone is on it. I don't mean that I feel the need to comply with the herd, although I'm sure there is that too but rather, it has become a really convenient medium to do practical things. It really is easier to share photos, plan outings or engage in a bit of voyeurism (not strictly most appropriate word but currently the best word I can think of) with that way too self-indulgent self-portrait album that XX put up. So for now at least, I'm sticking to my Facebook, although it is telling that many of my real life good friends were added late to my account or not added at all.

 kristi says: (11:17:49 AM)
Ok anyway turns out her daughter was named Renesmee which no one could pronounce so they ended up calling her Nessie. Precisely proving my point!

 I had a dream I caught a purple fairy and in order for my wish to come true, I had to eat it. When I looked closer at it however, it started to resemble a dragonfly which just made me sick. So I ran around trying to figure out whether or not I had enough courage to gulp it down. 

Want to know what my wish was? 

To make The Sims 3 run on my computer. xD

You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this. I think I must have checked the online portal three times a day since the interview but at least its in. So it looks like lots of people from A11 are ironically going to NUS although we will be in different campuses.

Application status You have been offered Law in academic year 2009 - 2010. The details of the offer will be stated in the offer letter. Your letter of offer was sent on 01-Jun-2009. For acceptance of the NUS course that has been offered to you, please refer to the instructions enclosed in your offer package.

 

Good bye Australia!

On Sunday, my family decided to catch Transformers Salvation so of we went to the cinema to watch it. If anyone is interested in knowing whether or not the movie is worth catching, take my advise and go and watch it on the big screen. Christian Bale is amazing of course but so are the rest of the cast and the action sequences are pure adrenaline pumping excitement - basically everything that you'd want in a Terminator movie. Even if you have little or no knowledge of the movies, its pretty easy to catch on as well. I think I may have watched the first Terminator but I can't even remember if I had so basically I had minimal knowledge of the events of the prior movies but I caught on quickly anyway.

On another note, the Terminator movies contain a lot of time travel and this movie was no exception. However, time travel can be pretty confusing and paradoxical at time so I found myself literally spending the entire afternoon trying to explain the whole time travel thing to my parents.

( An Explanation of Time Travel and its Complexities by Krist )

Notice how none of the problems had anything to do with my beautiful explanation of time travel or anything mind bogglingly complicated for that matter. Hmm... parents are weird but so funny. xD

On a side note, if Cheryl thought my previous post was beyond geeky, then I have no idea what she'll say to this one.

Ever since I bought some philosophy of science books from Amazon, I keep on getting emails from Amazon about books I might be interested in. Unfortunately, most of the books they recommend are similar to the ones I bought so basically I have absolutely no interest in them at all. This week's gem was a wonderful book called "Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life" by Kaushik Sunder Rajan. If the fact that the title itself was incomprehensible to me (I mean where else have I ever had the need to know about and use words like Biocapital and Postgenomic before?), the product description was an even scarier affair.

" Biocapital is a major theoretical contribution to science studies and political economy. Grounding his analysis in a multi-sited ethnography of genomic research and drug development marketplaces in the United States and India, Kaushik Sunder Rajan argues that contemporary biotechnologies such as genomics can only be understood in relation to the economic markets within which they emerge. Sunder Rajan conducted fieldwork in biotechnology labs and in small start-up companies in the United States (mostly in the San Francisco Bay area) and India (mainly in New Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bombay) over a five-year period spanning 1999 to 2004. He draws on his research with scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and policymakers to compare drug development in the two countries, examining the practices and goals of research, the financing mechanisms, the relevant government regulations, and the hype and marketing surrounding promising new technologies. In the process, he illuminates the global flow of ideas, information, capital, and people connected to biotech initiatives.

Sunder Rajan’s ethnography informs his theoretically sophisticated inquiry into how the contemporary world is shaped by the marriage of biotechnology and market forces, by what he calls technoscientific capitalism. Bringing Marxian theories of value into conversation with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics, he traces how the life sciences came to be significant producers of both economic and epistemic value in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first."

Ok, basically anything that describes itself as a synthesis of "Marxian theories of value in conversion with Foucaultian notions of biopolitics" is asking for trouble. To be fair, I'm sure its a highly interesting and informative book for people interested in it along with other arresting books like "The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century" and "Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism". Unfortunately, I don't belong to that group and so I suppose I'll have to resign myself to deleting emails from Amazon entitles "The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978-1979".

Early Christmas gift? Anyone?

I'm not sure about this:  http://www.thebreakupalbum.com/

Ok, Scarlett Johansson (by the way, both her names are a spelling error) singing? The first time she tried that it had disastrous results. This time round, she has the benefit of another voice on the record. Another voice that sounds like an actual professional singer and not like some bad impression of Brandi Carlile. At the same time though, I have a feeling that it it wasn't Scarlett Johansson, I might actually like the song. She's a terrible actress and a mediocre at best singer yet somehow she is EVERYWHERE.



Ok wait, I forgot that she was hot. 

So anyway, I'm so not sure about the song. On one hand, its got a nice beachy kind of vibe to it which I like and Tom Yorn, the collaborator sounds good. On the other hand, Scarlett Johansson sounds bad as always and her voice makes up about 50% of the song so thats a minus.

Which then begs the question, why didn't some record company exec think, "Ok, Scarlett Johansson is hot but she sounds like crap. Lets put her face and name clearly on the album cover and use our synthesizer on her voice."? That might have made the whole thing work better, I mean look at Hayden Penettiere's (her name is also a spelling error. What it with these celebrities!) song. Yes its generic pop but its inoffensive. Instead of that, we have The Break Up album cover where you can hardly see her face and her boobs (arguably her best asset) and a song where her voice is way to present. 

 I had a super mundane dream recently where I planned to buy a cattle ranch and a few restaurants. From which, in an uncharacteristic show of magnanimity, I was going to give out free food to people. Meh. Very strange dream that didn't make any sense at all.

On another day, I dreamt that I had a part time job working at a show that sold video games and kaya balls - those small round pancake like spheres that have kaya inside (if you know their proper name, tell me!). Don't know why a video game shop would also sell food as well.

Anyway for some strange reason I could never report to work on time even though the shop was really really near my house but I never got in trouble for it. So anyway, I was working in the shop for a while when I came across the brilliant idea to revamp the show to offer a game renting service as well. Then I woke up and I never learnt if my brilliant idea was successful. Hmm, perhaps this is a sign that I should go into entrepreneurship! 


By the way, entrepreneurship is such a strange word.

 Recently, I have had two, slightly related dreams. I'm not sure if it was the influence of shows like Mei-Chan Shitsuji, Boys over Flowers and Goong but this week, I had two dreams where I was engaged to a prince. Of course when I finally woke up I felt so disappointed that there was no castle and no fabulous people around.

Interestingly enough, I have absolutely no recollection of what said Prince looked like. Dreams are strange in the apparent lack of detail. I assume when I was dreaming he had a face and a body to go along with it but as of now, I'll have to assume that he looked like an amalgamation of Jonathan Rhys Meyer, Mizushima Hiro and any other good looking celebrity.

Anyway, my first dream was one that took place at a party at the castle. I can't recall what was the party for or who was there but I can remember the layout of the place where it was held. At the entrance way there was a buffet table on the left and a stack of umbrellas next to it (although it wasn't raining so who knows what all the umbrella's were for) and on the other side, a kind of reception desk (again, I have no idea why  a castle would have a reception deck, its not a hotel!). There were three levels in all and on each level, a flight of stairs that would bring you to the next floor and they were constructed in such a way that from the top floor, you could peer down the railings to see all the other floors as well. So anyway, I just walked around, looking at the food which I was planning to eat and strangely noticing that there were a lot of bodyguards in the room. 

The next dream I had took place in the same kind of premise as Goong. Namely, I was somehow contracted to marry the prince against my will so I suddenly found myself in a strange country where they spoke another language. So anyway, I started my dream in what seemed like a cafeteria (again, why would any place a prince went to have a cafeteria?! Very weird) and I was sitting down to eat. Then the Prince sits down opposite me and starts to try to teach the national anthem of his country to me. I fail terribly and then he teases me about something. 

When I woke up, the first thing I thought of was that the language of the national anthem was Serbian. Which is strange because I don't know anything about Serbia except that Novak Jokovich is from there. 

Ok, so what would Frued say about the dreams. One obvious thing is that both dreams contain lots of food hmm... Ooh maybe I'm a princess in a parallel world! Haha that would be nice.

Pretty normal dreams by my standard!

 I have lots of strange and vivid dreams that I seem to be able to remember relatively clearly when I wake up. So, I have decided to try and chronicle them for myself to remember as well as to allow for others to see how weird I can be.