Fullmetal Alchemist

Abortion - Just Plain Wrong

2009-08-24T23:31:00.000+08:00

Social Commentary (2)

The human being we know today is no longer as simple as the man on the street, or the lady in the shopping mall. Our understanding of the sanctity of human life has brought us to a point of accepting that a foetus, or even an embryo, should be given its due rights as a human being.

If this is the case, then when does a foetus acquire the status of a human being? Is it at conception, at birth or somewhere in between? Can we, as fully-grown humans, if you will, truly perceive weak, tiny, unborn organisms as our rightful, respectable equals?

Pro-life activists who oppose Obama’s support of abortion rights and embryonic stem cell research have recently protested against Obama’s visit to Notre Dame University, a catholic institution. Cardinal Francis George of the Catholic Church himself expressed that the invitation was an ‘embarrassment’ to ‘many, many Catholics’.

A recent poll conducted by Pew Research Centre shows that it is not just the Catholics who are unhappy with this. 46% of the respondents were not in favour of legalizing abortion, a large drop from 54% respondents the previous year.

Abortion is an intentional destruction of human life by another human. Murder is the intentional killing of a human, committed by another human. The age of that human does not matter; murder is still a crime. Then why is it the case that abortion is legal in America?

The basis of America’s principles lies on liberty, or the freedom of choice. If abortion were to be made illegal, then it would limit the choice of the woman bearing the child, and thus go against America’s social and political beliefs. At the same time, however, this is negating the unborn child’s rights to choose and to life.

Social justice and the protection of human rights begin in the womb, not at birth. A human at the age of 1 month is not any ‘less’ human than a human at 90 years of age. Genetic similarity across 90 years of age is more than 99%. Based on the principle of equality, both persons should be granted the same rights as a human being.

However, if a person’s rights infringes on another’s right to life, then the latter’s rights should override the former’s rights. One cannot compromise the right to life with any other rights except when both persons’ lives are on the line.

This brings us to consider exceptions where in which abortion may be allowed. Cases where the bearing of the child potentially endangers the life of the mother can be taken into consideration.

However, we must always have in mind the sanctity of life and respect all human life, regardless of age, ability or appearance. Every human being from conception deserves this right to life. The rights of a parent do not extend so far as to decide whether or not he/she can take this right away from the child, born or unborn.

A life is a life, period.

500 words

Work Piles

2009-07-15T06:16:00.005+08:00

I've pretty much been going through a rather bad time of not doing much at home. Not because of laziness but I sleep halfway through reading my History of Medicine and Black Death notes, and I get absolutely no work done at all. I simply can't plan to wake up at midnight and continue reading for a very dumb reason. Apparently someone switched it off, but I won't go into the details. More importantly I've got tons of homework on me:

1) Black Death Peer Teaching (of which I don't seem to have the worksheet, and thus can't do it)
2) Social Studies Essay on Democracy (which is online and is due to be submitted this week
3) CRP Assignment (which I only read the book online two days ago and couldn't do anything yesterday because I was sleeping)
4) Lit Essay on a Poem (which is due this Friday
5) Du Zhe test (which is next week on Monday)
6) History Readings (a whole pile, and I've only read a bit)
7) Lit Peer Teaching (which is due next week)

It's utterly retarded. How in the world am I supposed to finish 3 essays, read a stack of readings, do these Peer teachings things all in such a small amount of time. Luckily, today, I may be able to go off early because of RE, so the moment I get back I'm going to do the CRP Assignment and Lit Essay. I'll probably read History readings during RE. Black Death Peer Teaching is pretty much scr3wed I don't how that will go because it's in a group, I don't have the task sheet (or I can't find it) and I can't do anything. ANd then tomorrow I'll have to complete the SS Essay, which I probably can't because we're going to the science centre and coming back pretty late. Lit Peer teaching can wait until Friday, and the Du Zhe test is left to the dogs.

I'm not even including the worksheets that I'm supposed to do, these are just the major workpieces that I have to complete. And it's insanely difficulty hard to do so.

Quotable Quotes

"Who is the one who said 'Leon Lai is coming!'? If not I just pick a random index number. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1... ok Nigel."
-LL, notice how he didn't pick an index number

"Is it your parents buy for you, or you stole it?"
-LL, to Nigel

"If they see you look too old then too bad, so Naishad, I'm sorry, cannot."
-LL, about getting student discounts at IT malls

"Number 27, where are you?"
-LL, calling out random index numbers to torture them
Wei Tai raises up his hand
"Ha HA!"
-LL, pointing at him

"But some of you did very badly, Very Badly, VERY BADLY!"
-LL, about the Philo test

"Girls have better handwriting. I'm not saying he's a girl, I'm just saying he's a guy who should be a girl."
-LL, about NC's handwriting

"So ang moh la, chen chen."
-LL, about Ms Chen

"Sick boy."
-LL, to Samuel

"But yours is a Casio. I want Seiko and above."
-LL, about checking which watch brand is good

"What the heck?"
-Yan Chao, when he say DT in class during CLE lesson

"But, there's a big butt. Ok that didn't come out right. Let me rephrase that: But..."
-PLim
"There's a bigger butt."
-Nigel

"Where do personality problems come from?"
-PLim
"They come from the Human Condition."
-Ern Xu

"我没有读稿，我refer to稿."
-Basil, about using notes for oral

"你们是D都不知到，D是Donkey."
-KKE, on what 'D' stands for

"Zi Jie, how about you? You look a bit sick. I mean, you just look sick."
-JT

"The quarantined classes are 3G, 3T, and one more was recently added..."
-MDC
"3M."
-Nigel

"It was used as an emphasis to emphasize."
-Ryan, explaining a literary device

"Did you all work on it?"
-MDC
"Special powers."
-Yi Hua, explaining how they worked on it
"Special powers fail!"
-MDC

Missional Frost

2009-07-12T21:33:00.002+08:00

So I've been singing for 4 weeks straight, but I don't really mind. It's quite fun anyway, although it does take up quite a lot of time with all the practices and such. I still don't know why we couldn't use the Worship Center for the Missions Seminar by Michael Frost, because I think definitely the acoustics on the 3rd Floor is much better than the one on the 2nd, which is already very good. Apparently, Daniel and Loo Juin were heard very well and played very well on Saturday. It's of no issue to me that I was the youngest person on that team, but I sure wish there would be like some enthu Sec 1s and 2s who would join the worship team. I know of people who have expressed interest, but somehow they don't seem to appear, perhaps in some hidden, secret training sessions, I don't know. I have pretty much no details of how worship training for interested people works at all.

Professor Michael Frost gave some very interesting points about what it is about being missional, and challenged our church with alot of hard stuff, that I could sense that our senior pastor was felt very spoken to after the messages.

There are four basic functions of the church:
1) Worship
2) Fellowship
3) Discipleship
4) Mission

What many churches have been doing is that they have used Worship as the organizer for all the other three functions. Not to say that Worship is the top priority, but to say that through worship, the other three are satisfied. How is that so?

When Christians come together to meet on Sundays to worship, that would be fellowship. And in between songs, there would be bible readings, so that would be discipleship. And as for mission, the guy at the front tells his congregation, "Go and invite your friends down for next week's worship." From here you can clearly see how worship becomes the medium where all 3 other functions are met.

Instead, a missional church would be a church where mission organizes everything else. How can this be possible? Well, when we send people out to the mission field, we send them as a group, and so that is fellowship. Even in the mission field, we worship in other languages, but it is the same God and so that is worship. And at the same time, we continue to encourage one another, build one another up and teach the bible to the people there, and so that is discipleship. As a missional church, we are called, in fact: sent, to go out and make disciples of all nations.

Michael Frost is a very inspiring speaker, and I'm just wondering right now how is it going to be possible for me to reach out to my classmates, friends, who probably don't want to have anything to do with religion, or the gospel, or already have their own religion. Sure, it's all about making the friendship, being friendly and happy and a good testimony and all that, but either nobody is seeing it or nobody bothers about it. Joash's apologetics course is very useful, because we study argumentative tools and so on, but everyone in my school takes Philosophy, and we've all studied Moral Theories, Logical Fallacies, Soundness and Validity and more. So it's nothing new to us, and everyone is more or less aware of it.

Still, it is good to keep reading up on Apologetics material to answer FAQs that my friends may have. I'm considering setting up a blog solely for the posting of Christian-related stuff, and answering all the people who ask me questions about Christianity on the tagboard, or in the comments. I think it's a pretty good idea, provided that I can keep it up to date, and that people actually read the blog. I'm still looking for a prayer group in the school, so if you are in a prayer group please kindly inform me, I'll join immediately as long as the meeting times suit my schedule.

I always thought that Boarding would be the medium for Evangelism, but instead, school is. Perhaps I should realize that. But everytime I go to school, instead of feeling like it's a wonderful opportunity to share the gospel with everyone around, I feel more like downhearted because it's full of homework and all that stuff. The moment I step into class and OMG I forgot to do this piece of homework and that project and didn't read this book and have to go and buy this book and need to ask for extension for CRP from Mr Lim, but the point is there are so many things that busy up my mind that I simply tend to forget everything about what happened during the weekends.

Everything about sharing the gospel and blessing people, and reaching out to friends just vanishes in an instant. So I just want to ask everyone who is reading my blog now: Can I share with you the gospel the next time I meet you? I wonder if it's okay to share it in a group because either it can get awkward or it can get very distracted and deviated because people like Nigel like to do that kind of stuff. Anyway, I feel uneasy sharing in groups because it's like not personal enough. But as Ps Dave said a few weeks back, what's wrong with being surrounded by non-believers? We're Christians, we're supposed to be surrounded. Like d'uh.

Still, it is difficult, somehow. I'm pretty much loaded with so much work I can't concentrate very well. SS Essay, Social Advocacy Reflections, all the tests, and I'm definitely going to need an extension for CRP, because I haven't even got the book yet... I can't find it in the bookstore, the NLB somehow fails to get me anything, and the HML is closed over the weekends, and only open during recess I believe... that's like the only access I ever get, and remember that I never eat recess so it's hard to make a mental note to go down there during recess, especially when I've got worksheets to do and feel very tempted to make use of recess time to complete them.

I did finish Math Assignment and the Chem Worksheets though, and I still have a lot more to go...

L4D Issues

2009-07-11T07:12:00.002+08:00

So far I've been playing L4D since the last time we went LAN and played it. Great game. Really fun, and requires a lot of teamwork. I usually play on Versus games unless I want to get achievement, in which case I will create my own campaign map and play, with sv_cheats ON. You can get achievements as long as you turn it off whilst you are doing the achievement, turn it on again after and continue. So like if you want the Crownd achievement, you noclip to a place with a witch, noclip OFF, sv_cheats OFF, and then blast the witch before doing an sv_cheats ON and noclip ON again. I usually use cheats for 'Survive a campaign' kind of achievements.

But talking more about the gameplay, I use Garena and play in Singapore Room 1, mostly only those in the friend's list, which I assume are players who live around my area. The objective of the versus game is to either, if you are a human, get all surviving humans into the safe room at the end of the map, or, if you are a special infected, incapacitate or kill all the humans. Humans have really high HP, and they also have medkits, so they are a formidable force to be dealt with. Luckily, the special infected are not your ordinary zombies but mutant-zombie beings who have the ability to render a human immobile during attack. That is, only the human you are attacking. That is why the rest of the humans are supposed to protect the human by killing the attacking special infected. It's simply a case of sticking together blasting anything that comes you or anyone else's way.

Special Infected also have perks to help them in their quest such as the Tank and Witch, both of whom can do great damage. A witch is quite useless, but if used well, can act as a very good distraction or incapacitating force. In one hit, any player that gets hit by it will become incapacitated for sure. The Tank is a playable race that comes out only once in a while and only in certain maps. It's simply this large humongous gray hulk thing that can whack objects at people, throw stones at people, or simply just whack people and send them flying. It can turn the tide between winning and losing. In a maximum of three hits, a tank can incapacitate a person, and with a 5000+ HP bar, it is no easy kill. Humans, however, can exploit an infected's weakness which is that once caught on fire, it will never stop losing HP until it dies. So if a tank is hit by a Molotov, which is a fire grenade, his effectiveness will decrease by four times.

The best would be simply to dodge all the human's molotov's, which is quite hard, you have to be quite a distance away and hope that the human throws it blindly. Or, you could pretend to charge at the human, wait until he visibly takes out a molotov then quickly move to the side. But the molotov's has quite a large area of effect, so either way you have to be careful and fast. Also, work with the rest of the special infected since they will usually use the confusion you create to their advantage.

Zombie hordes, blood, gore, guns, vomit and scary witches, it was no doubt I didn't like it at first. I thought that it was just disgusting, and totally not fun when I watched Raveen playing it in school. He was playing with bots I guess. Anyway, I had the same idea as my dad did last night, when he told us both (Me and my bro) to stop playing because it 'spoil your mind', apparently. I pretty much had that same initial idea that it would 'spoil your mind', but then again, my mind is quite hard to spoil, although it can get influenced. What made me overcome this first impression that L4D was disgusting and shouldn't be played?

Well, that would have to be the LAN session, but we didn't really work well as a team, I guess. Nobody ever made it to the safe room, but when I play on Garena, I find that it actually is possible for humans to make it to the safe room, whilst I always thought that the infected had the upper hand. There are advantages and disadvantages on both teams, but I guess it's quite a fair game altogether, although I don't really know how to calculate the fairness of a game.

So what was it that made L4D so interesting and fun? To start off, zombie fighting isn't fun, but it sure is interesting. Blowing their heads up can be seen as violent computer gaming, but if my Dad has no trouble with Counter-Strike then he probably wouldn't have any trouble with that either. He is probably against the idea of 'zombie' and 'hordes' and 'infected' and blood I guess, which are the exact things I was against when I said I didn't like L4D initially.

The thing that changed my mind was how unbelievable hard it was and how much a team has to cooperate in order to succeed in the mission. For example, the special infected have generally low HP, so heading it out on your own would be suicide. Every special infected on the team has got to attack at the same time in order to maximize the damage done to the humans at every point in time (the special infected respawns every 40 seconds, humans don't). For humans, everyone has to stick together and cover one another as they move through the map. Hiding in corners is also an excellent way to fight off the horde. There are several 'Alert the horde' points throughout the campaigns so you have to camp and kill the hordes of zombies off before progressing. Of course, the special infected are still present at that time, so camping together is the best way to do it. Shotguns, Uzis, Auto-Shotguns, M16s, Snipers and Dual Pistols firing at the same time in the same direction, nothing can stand in your way, not even a tank.

But I can't exactly explain how L4D is actually a good social interacting platform which educates children and youth on how to work together and effectively together, as a team. That would just be a preposterous idea, especially to my Dad, who would be just as stubborn as a my brother to refuse to give up his beliefs, and instead impose it on his children. I don't blame him though, I guess its a genetic make-up thing. Haha. Everyone in my family is rather stubborn in one way or another, so we're quite used to that. It will take some time for my Dad to understand why L4D is not such a bad game that 'spoils your mind'. Perhaps it will happen someday. Perhaps never. In any case, I can't play it forever, now can I?

DMP Cancelled

2009-07-10T06:36:00.002+08:00

Great. When Ms Tang broke the news to me in History RA lesson yesterday, I almost cried. No I'm kidding, I didn't cry. Not even almost. But hey I was really disappointed, and perhaps really annoyed as well with the way the school handled the H1N1 thing. So here's a few measures that they've already put in place.

1) Temperature Taking
Ok, so this is not a bad thing, but it's still irritating anyway. Both for teachers and students who have to take time off lessons recording a daily 2 temperatures a day. Then again, it's not very useful. Because it's relatively easy to know whether or not oneself is ill simply by placing your hand on your forehead or checking for dizziness/head pain (which are necessary symptoms for a fever), the point of temperature taking is really not there. Who cares about the trigger temperature of 37.6 degC when he has a temperature of 35.4 degC? He's nowhere close, and after several temperature checks, he's bound to feel that the exercise is pointless, and just fake his temperature. Not because he didn't bring his thermometer, but because he's simply too lazy and fed up with the current system of doing pointless temperature checks. Come on, we're RI, we're smart people. At least give us the dignity to check whether or not we're sick by ourselves. Ok, guaranteed there are some stupid and dumb people, but the smart people make up for it and can always check to see if the dumb people are feeling okay. Overall, I still think this issue is quite controlled and okay. After all, if it takes time off lessons, then it benefits the overall student community right?

2) No Morning Assembly
Excellent for people who are coming late. Everyone gets around 5 minutes extra to get to school because the form teachers aren't that early. This should be implemented throughout the entire term since DMP is cancelled anyway.

3) Assembly cancelled
Another good implementation here. No one wants to bother to keep on falling asleep during lectures and would rather just do that in class. Either that or play Chinese Chess during PDI (particularly Chinese Caram Chess).

4) DMP Cancelled
One of the worst decisions ever possible. Cancelling DMP, as Mr Kwok has already pointed out, is a massive disappointment to both teachers and students. It does not benefit the community in anyway. Seriously, how in the world would it benefit our community? It's not just cancelling DMP, but also replacing it with normal lessons. Okay look here, MOE, what the heck do you mean by 'mass gatherings'? Is that why we cannot have DMP? Everyday normal lessons is more of a mass gathering than DMP. Not the entire student body does DMP, but the entire student body does have normal lessons, most of them eat in the canteen, use the same toilets and etc. It would be preposterous to think that whilst DMP is too dangerous to be held, normal curriculum school is not dangerous enough to be cancelled. I find that incredibly unreasonable, and simply robs us of our 3 weeks of utter happiness and learning new things out of curriculum. Basically, I better get my beatboxing back (alliteration, shows that I've been learning Lit this morning for the comparative essay), or else. Anyway, for thsoe of you who agree with me, feel free to join the Facebook Group: RI students want our DMP back!

This H1N1 is seriously all just media hype. Can't we just use this as an excuse to close school instead of closing our cool activities?

Epic Passes and Failures

2009-07-02T06:22:00.002+08:00

It came very much as a surprise when I received the English Commentary piece back. 20/30? Epic Fail. Apparently, I lost 5 marks in the sentence structure and mechanics, when I only made two slight mistakes, which if the marker was less picky, wouldn't have counted them to be mistakes in the first place. I don't know why I got marked down for my tone, but I guess some people just prefer a certain tone while writing commentaries. I shall comment on why Teck Wei got full marks when everyone else epic failed it. It's simple. He's a debator. Case Solved. What? You don't believe me?

It's just so obvious that DCruz shows favouritism to debator's style of writing. Note that I didn't say show favouritism to debators, but to their style of writing, which includes their tone, sentence structure and all of that. Not saying that it is wrong to do that, but it does bring a negative connotation. At this point in time if DCruz was reading this, she would first justify that there is nothing wrong with that, and then state that a debator's style of writing is exactly what an English teacher is looking for. And then I would say that everyone has a different style of writing, and not necessarily a debator's style, and especially in commentaries, a debator's style is what you need. So in effect, anyone who has no prior experience in debating will lose out on the marks. Thus, it is unfair. And since it is unfair in one part, it is completely unfair. I rest my case.

I don't even have to start an argument about DCruz's handwriting, while in the meantime she marks us down for being unable to read our handwriting, when our peers can read it just fine. And no one can read hers. No one at all. You must be some uber expert in the field like Yao Yuan in the field of listening to screaming. But never mind, alot of people failed for this one.

The second horror/shock was when I got back the Lit CRP, and I was like totally surprised because I hadn't expected such a low mark of 12/20. Yes that is a just pass kinda thing, so I was surprised. I can't say shocked, because usually for CRPs and ERPs I always get that kind of mark, and I've never really got down to understanding why. I did the Jew of Malta, so it was pretty familiar to me, seeing as it was very close to the Merchant of Venice minus quite a few other elements. But either way, I wasn't feeling very good with taht mark, although I must say that quite a few others failed, so I have to remain thankful. And Wei Tai likes suanning people because he got a 16/20, I think the only one who got GP4.0?

Then comes the first surprise when I got back the Lit Macbeth Quiz. It was amazing. A super zai/zhun score of 15/30! A pass! It was super cool. Ok, so it was a 50%, but so what? It was super cool! I passed a Quiz which was like impossible to pass. Just to give a bit of background info, the Macbeth Quiz is basically a Quiz which requires you to drill and drill and memorize the exact text in Macbeth, and has 30 marks in it. Many failed this Quiz, and its not surprising at all. I told DCruz about it and she congrautlated me. I was so happy. Haha. Anyway, I know that Wei Tai got 22-half but even that isn't a GP4.0 yet... so I'm not complaining, lol. But I must say that my Lit marks will get pulled down quite an unfair bit. I say unfair because the very existence of the quiz is unfair.

The second surprise was when I got back the Physics Paper. I was already feeling very worried about the Physics paper for several reasons.

1) I didn't finish the paper
Yup, that's true. I completely left the last section of the last question blank. And that was worth two marks. I didn't solve the bonus question either. Didn't even attempt, in fact. There was simply no time. I had no time to check as well, so I was like super sure that I would never get anywhere far from the passing mark. It was upon 30, by the way. I knew that I would make many careless mistakes, because it's Physics and I always make careless mistakes in Physics. And also perhaps in every other subject but that's besides the point.

2) Desmond Tan seemed rather worried too
Yup, he didn't even give us back the paper before the holidays out of fear that we would cry and have a very bad start to the holidays. Instead, it was pretty much a trembling in fear and trepidation for many of us, because of the massive suspense built up. He already stated that we did very badly in the test as a cass, and so we knew that the marks would be bad, but since we didn't know our marks, that suspense increased. Nobody wanted to know their marks, or even look at the paper, just in case somehow they might figure it out.

And that was exactly what happened. Many people just passed and even failed, because I think there was too little time for the test. Definitely. But other than that, the curious thing is that everyone took their paper, purposely looked away, held it back facing up, and then when they got back to their table, they would slowly flip it page by page from the back to the front, looking at all the red crosses, and then anticipate their mark before they looked at it. The class was noisy despite the fact that most of us didn't feel well enough to speak. That was because of the surprising small minority of us who didn't do too bad at all. I received my paper, and I was feeling very nervous that entire time, but when I looked at my marks, it was a whopping 24/30! That's a GP4.0! An A1 on a paper that I didn't even complete!

Omigosh! I quickly scanned through the paper, and looked at where I made my mistakes. Yes, all of them careless mistakes, but it was incredible beacuse that only amounted to four marks lost, and if you include the two marks out of the last unfinished question, that would be six marks lost! Although I probably should have been minused marks for alot of other things, the teachers had decided to make the marking more lenient, seeing as there would be countless more failures if they did not. They weren't 'cheating' to decrease the number of failures, but they were 'covering up' for the mistake of putting too little time for the paper. I hope they increase the time for further physics tests.

The next paper was the practical one, which was a so-so. I didn't expect to get anything lower than full marks, but hey, someone didn't like my weird scale, and I got minused marks for some significant figure thing. So in the end it was a 13/15, which wasn't too bad because it was a GP4.0, so I didn't complain much. It was quite satisfactory, but then again, all practical tests are satisfactory because they are so easy.

So anyway, the first PE lesson of the week is today. Lol, finally. And I wonder if MIA is still taking us. I hope he is, coz he's a nice guy. Nice in terms of his character. :D Ooh Basketball or Handball today?

Semester 2 Beginnings

2009-06-30T22:22:00.002+08:00

Haven't been posting for too long a time. Too many things have happened I guess.

First, there was the Orientation Service where many of us FLers went to for a free dinner. It wasn't much, just a look around and then testing of the time taken for the offerings and the holy communion to be carried out in the new uber cool awesome gigantic-sized worship hall.

Second, for those who are unaware, I shall no longer be using the term 'TM' or 'TMers' or 'TM412', our new name 'Frontline Youth' has already been launched and will be termed together with 'FLers' (Frontliners, according to Ps Dave). Whether or not this will change to FLYers, which still sounds corny, I don't know, but we'll see what catches on this couple of weeks.

Third, there was also the first FLYFellowship at the new church building with seriously the best worship I've ever sang in for the past 2 years (with the new sound system and all). Still need some more time for the AV crew to get up to date and in sync with all the tools, but I think they'll make it. Ian led the worship for that day, and it was pretty much awesome. Although we did have to have two worship practices, one on the Wednesday before, and another one starting from 11am right before FL. Ian was nice enough to buy lunch :D We had like 6 vocalists during all practice and the actual thing itself. Kezia came on Wednesday and Loo Juin replaced her on Saturday. I didn't know Kezia was in the worship team, really, I haven't been seeing her for quite a long time. Well, at least now I know.

Fourth, right after the first Youth Fellowship in church, there was the Prayer Dedication Service in church where we had another awesome worship. I think I lost my voice after that weekend because I was singing too hyper-ly loudly. It was a very new, cool experience because we were like seeing both in Chinese and English and it was awesome. It was like the church in China which was bilingual and even had services in two languages (English and with Chinese translation).

Fifth, the next day was the first official opening of the church with the first adult church service starting at 10am. The worship hall was completely full, all 1124 seats filled up by people who were visiting or were members of the church. Anyway, there was the commissioning of two new pastors: Pastor Tony Ng and Lay Pastor Iris Lee. Ps Tony will be in charge of the Young Adults as well as the CGs. There was also this orchestra during worship which consisted of Grace Teo, Matthew Goh, Isobel, Gladys Wie, Nathanael, Nichola, Rachel, Tze Cin and some others at the back I couldn't quite see. Ian and Chris were both playing guitars. And Shufen sang as usual, including a solo section. So it was pretty cool.

Sixth, we went LAN right after that service and I played for the first time with the rest of my FL Sec 3 batch, CounterStrike 1.6 (not Source because apparently in LAN shops some computers can't work Source properly). I also played L4D for the first proper time (the actual first time wasn't much of playing because I actually stopped halfway saying I didn't want to play) and I only thought that the Smoker was actually doing anything useful. And of course, the hunter, but the Boomer was just lame. The tank was cool though, I used it once and decapitated like 3 people before dying, I never got to use the witch. Yup, so now at least I know some of the L4D game play. The humans grab weapons and advance to checkpoints, fighting off the infected and the horde along the way, and restocking on health and ammo at all the various checkpoints. The infected try to stop them from advancing these checkpoints by killing all of them. But humans have super high HP, so they are quite hard to kill.

And lastly, school begins again with H1N1 on the loose so for this week all classes end at 1.35pm sharp on all the days, I'm not sure about Friday, but I think that is as per normal. Not sure if Chinese Remedial is on that day. The 500+ boarding people have been quarantined in the complex and thus RLP has been postponed and the boarding is no longer next week. Hurrah! It's also not yet confirmed if it will be two weeks from now, so hopefully the alert goes higher so it will get pushed back more.

And finally, the moment we've all been waiting for: The return of Quotable Quotes, newly-packed with Mr Lim's funnyness during CLE class!

Quotable Quotes

"Your [Unit X] not as interesting as my..."
-Mr Lim, our new CLE teacher, replacing KYap
(soon he will be termed PLim)
"Not as interesting as what, sir?"
-Nigel
"Uhh... nevermind."
-Mr Lim

PLim at this point in time asks everyone in class to do a trivia of RI, coz he hasn't been here in three years. So everyone must tell him something he doesn't know about what happened in RI.

"Uhh... RI and RJC has merged."
-Samuel, for his trivia
"Oh woow! I didn't know that!"
-PLim

"RI is interesting now."
-Ern Xu, for his trivia

"Moor is exco. No, Moor sucks."
-PLim

"Our class people makes up []% of people in RLP."
-Ern Xu
"Show-off, lah."
-PLim

"Why are you SMSing in class?"
-PLim, to Ryan
"Because Benedict is SMSing me, so I have to reply."
-Ryan
"Why is Benedict SMSing in class?"
-PLim, looks at Benedict who is right in front of him

"Why is it a closed Rafflesia?"
-PLim
"Because you need to close your... nevermind."
-Nigel

"The fastest way to cut from one corner of RI to the other corner is to cross the swimming pool."
-Edmund
"And why do I have to cut from one corner to the other?"
-PLim
"Things happen."
-Edmund

"If you're hiking, how do you fall asleep?"
-PLim
"Have you met Gregory?"
-Nigel

H1N1 Outbreak

2009-06-15T09:27:00.002+08:00

In this widely spreading outbreak, personally I feel only aggravated by people stubbornly going overseas to high-risk countries (such as the US and several others), there lies a great hope to Singapore students that there may be a closing of all schools in Singapore. For me, that will not only mean no school, it will mean quite a big chunk of boarding would have to be refunded as well. :D Yup, so hope that this happens (without the loss of lives, of course). In much more recent news, today, there was an article in the Straits Times (I wonder why it wasn't on the front page, but then again I guess rioters in the Middle East get higher priority, lol) reporting that an additional 13 cases had been confirmed over the weekend. Out of these one included a 17-year-old RI(JC) girl. Apparently, a certain wedding in Melbourne caused 6 out of the total of 13 cases confirmed. That's also bad news because my sister stays in Melbourne, and so does many more of my relatives.

Link to Article:
Wedding leaves 6 with flu by Nicholas Yong

Nowadays, it is really dangerous to go overseas, not just because of the countries you go to, but because on aeroplanes, you can't really be sure whether or not the dude next to you comes from Mexico or something. I feel quite sorry for air stewards/stewardesses but I guess they would be armed with hand sanitizers of ultimate bacteria cleansing and all wear microfiltration face masks.

Still, we have to keep these people in prayer. Not just the people we know, but I guess the whole of Singapore. For me, those related to me would be my family members in Melbourne, and the RI(JC) girl. Same school, so you can't shy away from that affiliation. I wonder what our Principal will say at the start of school (or perhaps she'll be in the JC side, in which case I wonder what our SDHM will say). I'm still in hopes of school closing down, although it is a rather selfish hope. And it's rather fat too, seeing as the outbreak doesn't seem to be incurable anymore, unlike the SARS Pandemic we had all those years ago. It'll probably be like Bird Flu, without any disruptions in lessons because it wasn't that "outbreak"ish.

In any case, keep your heads high, and look out for people who look like pigs, make oink oink noises, have curly tails, wear pink clothing and are fat, those people are probably those you have to be extra careful with, just in case they may have contracted the flu. No, I'm kidding. You only have to watch out for yourself and make sure you don't get it, from anyone. It could be anyone. Earthling, Moon-men, Martian, Monkey, Pig, Autobot, Decepticon, Angels & Demons. By the way, the new movie is totally crap. They should stop making silly Dan Brown movies when Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen is going to rock the sales tenfold! :D (although I have this feeling that sequels don't seem as good as the original)

Perhaps we might have a scheduled mass school outing to visit the sick RIJC girl in hospital :O What a dumb thought.

More seriously, I have put up two more videos on YouTube and these two are the first two episodes of Code Geass Abridged! ... without any voice-overs. I'm not really expecting you to like it, it's pretty much low-class using Windows Movie Maker, so...

Code Geass Abridged Episode 1 (Stages 1 and 2)

Code Geass Abridged Episode 2 (Stages 3 and 4)

NCC Gold Wing Course

2009-06-11T13:53:00.002+08:00

Pretty much the same thing as last year. Go there, stone for about half an hour waiting, then go in. Fall in, surrender handphones and stone. Fall in on a bigger level then march to the lecture theatre. Sit down in one whole row as a school, stone and do roll call. After several retries, finished then start lecture and taking down notes. Go for lunch and then come back to take down more notes. Fall in outside and march to basketball court. Retrieve handphones from guardhouse before leaving. Take bus 94 to the first bus stop after the turn and then take bus 45/93 back home. The good thing is, this entire procedure lasted only two days, last year it lasted three days.

The test was also damn easy on the second day. It was like pretty much know every single question so after 5 minutes of completing, check through, managed to find two careless mistakes and then went to sleep for the other 30 minutes. Lol. Confirm get Gold Wing Badge either way because Mr Yap just gives us the badge without checking the marks.

I managed to learn something from the others' Spec Course last week though, and that is there were many girls and I think all of them have weirdo names. Have you heard of a name called Tiziana? Well I haven't. Apparently, there is a dude called Tiziano who was a famous Italian painter in Venice. But enough about him. More interestingly, there was a girl called Jaclyn Fong, who is Jack Foong's wife-to-be. Research shows that both of them are from SCGS, so I think SCGS ppl have weird names now. Lol.

Nothing much to say except that I have been playing SuddenAttack alot so far in the first week... and now is like coming to the end of the second week and I'm right now doing the 专题作业 with Hubert online. Still got a lot of work to do. Tomorrow we're going to see the new church as a worship ministry! And the next day I'll be singing for worship again :D

Captain of Glory '09

2009-06-07T13:45:00.002+08:00

Yesterday's Sports Outreach was named differently, perhaps foreshadowing the change in name that our entire Youth Ministry will undergo. TM412 will cease to exist, and will become FrontLine Youth (that's FLY for you), and Sports Xtreme became Captain of Glory. Scrapping the entire soccer idea, the competition was only on Captain's Ball. Apparently, everyone already had teams, so me and Matt went to join Seth's upper category boys team.

But before that, there were some announcements and Benedict the preacher went up to share the gospel for 5 minutes or so, followed by Ps Dave who spoke for about another 5 minutes. Then, it was a briefing on the rules and match-ups. There were 4 teams each for Upper Category boys and girls, and 10 teams in total for the lower category. And since there were 3 prizes for each category, it would mean that almost all the upper category teams would get a prize simply for participating, whereas for the lower category the odds were much stacked.

Since Matt Chan and I were underage and playing in upper category, it is to no surprise that we lost all our matches and didn't win any prize. But that was not the highlight of the event. Anyway, Bryan and James Liew's teams were too big and good so we didn't stand a chance. The prizes were similar to the previous year's sports events, $75 Cafe Cartel for 1st, $65 Sakae Sushi for 2nd and $50 Swensens for 3rd. (correct me if I'm wrong). But the last time it was a $100 Waraku voucher for 1st place.

Enough is said about the prizes, and now to move into the teams for lower category.

AllStars: Marcus, Benedict, Davidson, Lizzie, Zhi Ting and Pei Ru
All of them wore red shirts and someone brought two pieces of red cloth with white stars on them. Zhi Ting was their captain for all the games. Davidson was the defender for all the games.

SC Netball: Pong, Nicole, Audrey, Claire, Sandy, Tata
All of them are in SCGS Netball team and wore the same blue singlets. They have played before in our previous Sports Outreach programs. They pretty much had no defender.

Kai Yuan is Fat: Andrew, Joel, Joel's Friend, Jia Jun, Nicole, Rachel
Three of them are from HCI, and so is Kai Yuan, who wasn't there, but is fat nevertheless. Joel was the defender for all their games.

Dexter: Dexter, Benedict, Sunshine, Ruth, Cherie, Wei He
All of them are in Dexter's school class, 3B, except for Sunshine. They wore the same class shirt with TKSS spelled out and all their names at the back.

Dexter's Friends: Chermaine, Jia Neng, Luan Yin and two more of Dexter's Friends
Dexter had some more friends who wanted to play so they had to form another team.

RGS Rain: Anne, Vanessa, Rain, Xaviera, Yi Rong and Grace
All of them are in RGS except for Grace, who is part of RJC Alumni. I don't know if the second part of their team name has anything to do with the team member.

Keith: Keith, and some other people
This is a Sec 2 team.

Rubidium: Some people
I think this is a Sec 1 team.

And two other teams who appear to have escaped my notice.

Don't blame me I'm not in Outreach Team so I don't know much of the line-ups. I was playing in upper category anyway, so not that much time to analyze all of the teams.

Since it was a spar between 10 teams, it would be too long so they split the teams up into two divisons and played amongst one another. The top two of each division would then battle it out in the semi-finals. SC Netball and AllStars were the top two in the first division, and Kai Yuan is Fat and Dexter's Friends were the top two in the second division. This meant pretty much that the Sec 3 level had koped all the prizes for themselves, lol.

There was an intense semi-final match, with everyone giving consensus to playing two games each instead of one. AllStars was up against Kai Yuan is Fat whilst SC Netball went against Dexter's Friends. Kai Yuan is Fat and SC Netball defeating both their opponents to make it two the finals, whilst the other two teams fought for the Swensens vouchers. It was AllStars who finally overcame their opponents to get the Swensens vouchers. The final match between Kai Yuan is Fat and SC Netball was pretty close.

It started with one point scored by Kai Yuan is Fat, and then SC Netball equalized. Fat scored another point, and that was equalized as well. SC then scored a point, which was equalized a few minutes later by Fat. Fat scored a point, and that was also equalized. They were now at a 4-4 close game. Then, Fat used the weakness of SC to gain an advantage and a lead of 6-4, and Joel wouldn't let any ball get past him. The final score is unknown to me, and it was the Kai Yuan is Fat team who emerged champions of the lower category.

That won them $75 worth of cafe cartel food vouchers. Then, there was a fun match between FrontLine Youth AllStars (aka older than 16 ppl) vs James Liew's champion team. The result was James' 5-4 win over the FLY AllStars. Then there was a prize-giving ceremony followed by a really great dinner.

What happened was that because there were only $75 up for grabs, not all of us could eat at Cafe Cartel, so in the end, only 9 of us, out of an initial 15 went for it: Rachel, Joel, Joel's Friend, Jun Hao, Kenneth, Samuel, Me, Jia Jun and Andrew. And all of us at delicious St Louis Pork Ribs in large portion except for Kenneth, who settled for a Root Beer Float and something else. I never realized that the Pork Ribs would be so much, but managed to miraculously gobble it down nonetheless, even after eating a free flow of bread at the start.

Somehow, everyone else came crowding around to watch us eating St Louis Pork Ribs, since we were sitting outside and could be seen by just about anyone at TM412 (I mean FLY, but it hasn't been launched yet). The other 6 of us went to eat at S11, after walking all the way up to the Food Court, realizing that it was to crowded, coming back down, walking past the Cafe Cartel people and going to S11.

The most interesting part of our meal was not so the meal itself. I mean, it was scrumptious, but when we had to settle the bill, it was the most hilarious part. So Joel reiterated twice (yesterday and this morning) that his first calculation was that everyone except Kenneth would pay $8 each. Then there were some disputes with calculation between him and his friend, and later on Jun Hao as well. Then it became $7, and then upon recalculation, everything became so messy that they had to recalculate 3 or more times. I wanted change for my $50 note, so I needed $42 change. There was $42 change on the table, but luckily I didn't take it because if I did, nobody would know whose money went to my pocket and who didn't pay yet.

They had to take back their money and account for $8 per person before I could change the $50. A smart move. And it was finally settled. Joel went to pay and returned with 5 cents asking, "How do we split the change?" Anyway, all of us had full stomachs so we didn't go for dessert at Swensens afterwards, and I went straight home. It was rather late anyway, and there would be a PRO Meeting today.

And I will have to spend some time following up with all the new friends! :O :O

Beatboxer Stitch

2009-06-01T22:02:00.001+08:00

It was quite a surprise when we were told that we would have Beatboxing session for Assembly. Even TCY was impressed and said that it was the best assembly he'd ever been to. This way, he was suanning all the other previous Headmaster's Assemblies that he had been to. On a more lighter note, he remarked, after being cheered on to beatbox, "I don't beatbox, I beat students."

Beatboxing Lesson - Sec 3 Assembly
by Beatboxer Stitch (Charles Wong)

Colour Your World with Words #9

2009-05-29T06:31:00.002+08:00

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
by F Scott Fitzgerald

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the
first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of
a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger
Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in
the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a
hospital. Whether this anachronism had any bearing upon the
astonishing history I am about to set down will never be known.

I shall tell you what occurred, and let you judge for yourself.

The Roger Buttons held an enviable position, both social and
financial, in Antebellum Baltimore. They were related to the This
Family and the That Family, which, as every Southerner knew, entitled
them to membership in that enormous peerage which largely populated
the Confederacy. This was their first experience with the charming old
custom of having babies--Mr. Button was naturally nervous. He hoped it
would be a boy so that he could be sent to Yale College in
Connecticut, at which institution Mr. Button himself had been known
for four years by the somewhat obvious nickname of "Cuff."

On the September morning consecrated to the enormous event he arose
nervously at six o'clock dressed himself, adjusted an impeccable
stock, and hurried forth through the streets of Baltimore to the
hospital, to determine whether the darkness of the night had borne in
new life upon its bosom.

When he was approximately a hundred yards from the Maryland Private
Hospital for Ladies and Gentlemen he saw Doctor Keene, the family
physician, descending the front steps, rubbing his hands together with
a washing movement--as all doctors are required to do by the unwritten
ethics of their profession.

Mr. Roger Button, the president of Roger Button & Co., Wholesale
Hardware, began to run toward Doctor Keene with much less dignity than
was expected from a Southern gentleman of that picturesque period.
"Doctor Keene!" he called. "Oh, Doctor Keene!"

The doctor heard him, faced around, and stood waiting, a curious
expression settling on his harsh, medicinal face as Mr. Button drew
near.

"What happened?" demanded Mr. Button, as he came up in a gasping rush.
"What was it? How is she" A boy? Who is it? What---"

"Talk sense!" said Doctor Keene sharply, He appeared somewhat
irritated.

"Is the child born?" begged Mr. Button.

Doctor Keene frowned. "Why, yes, I suppose so--after a fashion." Again
he threw a curious glance at Mr. Button.

"Is my wife all right?"

"Yes."

"Is it a boy or a girl?"

"Here now!" cried Doctor Keene in a perfect passion of irritation,"
I'll ask you to go and see for yourself. Outrageous!" He snapped the
last word out in almost one syllable, then he turned away muttering:
"Do you imagine a case like this will help my professional reputation?
One more would ruin me--ruin anybody."

"What's the matter?" demanded Mr. Button appalled. "Triplets?"

"No, not triplets!" answered the doctor cuttingly. "What's more, you
can go and see for yourself. And get another doctor. I brought you
into the world, young man, and I've been physician to your family for
forty years, but I'm through with you! I don't want to see you or any
of your relatives ever again! Good-bye!"

Then he turned sharply, and without another word climbed into his
phaeton, which was waiting at the curbstone, and drove severely away.

Mr. Button stood there upon the sidewalk, stupefied and trembling from
head to foot. What horrible mishap had occurred? He had suddenly lost
all desire to go into the Maryland Private Hospital for Ladies and
Gentlemen--it was with the greatest difficulty that, a moment later,
he forced himself to mount the steps and enter the front door.

A nurse was sitting behind a desk in the opaque gloom of the hall.
Swallowing his shame, Mr. Button approached her.

"Good-morning," she remarked, looking up at him pleasantly.

"Good-morning. I--I am Mr. Button."

At this a look of utter terror spread itself over girl's face. She
rose to her feet and seemed about to fly from the hall, restraining
herself only with the most apparent difficulty.

"I want to see my child," said Mr. Button.

The nurse gave a little scream. "Oh--of course!" she cried
hysterically. "Upstairs. Right upstairs. Go--up!"

She pointed the direction, and Mr. Button, bathed in cool
perspiration, turned falteringly, and began to mount to the second
floor. In the upper hall he addressed another nurse who approached
him, basin in hand. "I'm Mr. Button," he managed to articulate. "I
want to see my----"

Clank! The basin clattered to the floor and rolled in the direction of
the stairs. Clank! Clank! I began a methodical decent as if sharing in
the general terror which this gentleman provoked.

"I want to see my child!" Mr. Button almost shrieked. He was on the
verge of collapse.

Clank! The basin reached the first floor. The nurse regained control
of herself, and threw Mr. Button a look of hearty contempt.

"All right, Mr. Button," she agreed in a hushed voice. "Very
well! But if you knew what a state it's put us all in this
morning! It's perfectly outrageous! The hospital will never have
a ghost of a reputation after----"

"Hurry!" he cried hoarsely. "I can't stand this!"

"Come this way, then, Mr. Button."

He dragged himself after her. At the end of a long hall they reached a
room from which proceeded a variety of howls--indeed, a room which, in
later parlance, would have been known as the "crying-room." They
entered.

"Well," gasped Mr. Button, "which is mine?"

"There!" said the nurse.

Mr. Button's eyes followed her pointing finger, and this is what he
saw. Wrapped in a voluminous white blanket, and partly crammed into
one of the cribs, there sat an old man apparently about seventy years
of age. His sparse hair was almost white, and from his chin dripped a
long smoke-colored beard, which waved absurdly back and forth, fanned
by the breeze coming in at the window. He looked up at Mr. Button with
dim, faded eyes in which lurked a puzzled question.

"Am I mad?" thundered Mr. Button, his terror resolving into rage. "Is
this some ghastly hospital joke?

"It doesn't seem like a joke to us," replied the nurse severely. "And
I don't know whether you're mad or not--but that is most certainly
your child."

The cool perspiration redoubled on Mr. Button's forehead. He closed
his eyes, and then, opening them, looked again. There was no
mistake--he was gazing at a man of threescore and ten--a baby
of threescore and ten, a baby whose feet hung over the sides of the
crib in which it was reposing.

The old man looked placidly from one to the other for a moment, and
then suddenly spoke in a cracked and ancient voice. "Are you my
father?" he demanded.

Mr. Button and the nurse started violently.

"Because if you are," went on the old man querulously, "I wish you'd
get me out of this place--or, at least, get them to put a comfortable
rocker in here,"

"Where in God's name did you come from? Who are you?" burst out Mr.
Button frantically.

"I can't tell you exactly who I am," replied the querulous
whine, "because I've only been born a few hours--but my last name is
certainly Button."

"You lie! You're an impostor!"

The old man turned wearily to the nurse. "Nice way to welcome a
new-born child," he complained in a weak voice. "Tell him he's wrong,
why don't you?"

"You're wrong. Mr. Button," said the nurse severely. "This is your
child, and you'll have to make the best of it. We're going to ask you
to take him home with you as soon as possible-some time to-day."

"Home?" repeated Mr. Button incredulously.

"Yes, we can't have him here. We really can't, you know?"

"I'm right glad of it," whined the old man. "This is a fine place to
keep a youngster of quiet tastes. With all this yelling and howling, I
haven't been able to get a wink of sleep. I asked for something to
eat"--here his voice rose to a shrill note of protest--"and they
brought me a bottle of milk!"

Mr. Button, sank down upon a chair near his son and concealed his face
in his hands. "My heavens!" he murmured, in an ecstasy of horror.
"What will people say? What must I do?"

"You'll have to take him home," insisted the nurse--"immediately!"

A grotesque picture formed itself with dreadful clarity before the
eyes of the tortured man--a picture of himself walking through the
crowded streets of the city with this appalling apparition stalking by
his side.

"I can't. I can't," he moaned.

People would stop to speak to him, and what was he going to say? He
would have to introduce this--this septuagenarian: "This is my son,
born early this morning." And then the old man would gather his
blanket around him and they would plod on, past the bustling stores,
the slave market--for a dark instant Mr. Button wished passionately
that his son was black--past the luxurious houses of the residential
district, past the home for the aged....

"Come! Pull yourself together," commanded the nurse.

"See here," the old man announced suddenly, "if you think I'm going to
walk home in this blanket, you're entirely mistaken."

"Babies always have blankets."

With a malicious crackle the old man held up a small white swaddling
garment. "Look!" he quavered. "This is what they had ready for
me."

"Babies always wear those," said the nurse primly.

"Well," said the old man, "this baby's not going to wear anything in
about two minutes. This blanket itches. They might at least have given
me a sheet."

"Keep it on! Keep it on!" said Mr. Button hurriedly. He turned to the
nurse. "What'll I do?"

"Go down town and buy your son some clothes."

Mr. Button's son's voice followed him down into the: hall: "And a
cane, father. I want to have a cane."

Mr. Button banged the outer door savagely....

2

"Good-morning," Mr. Button said nervously, to the clerk in the
Chesapeake Dry Goods Company. "I want to buy some clothes for my
child."

"How old is your child, sir?"

"About six hours," answered Mr. Button, without due consideration.

"Babies' supply department in the rear."

"Why, I don't think--I'm not sure that's what I want. It's--he's an
unusually large-size child. Exceptionally--ah large."

"They have the largest child's sizes."

"Where is the boys' department?" inquired Mr. Button, shifting his
ground desperately. He felt that the clerk must surely scent his
shameful secret.

"Right here."

"Well----" He hesitated. The notion of dressing his son in men's
clothes was repugnant to him. If, say, he could only find a very large
boy's suit, he might cut off that long and awful beard, dye the white
hair brown, and thus manage to conceal the worst, and to retain
something of his own self-respect--not to mention his position in
Baltimore society.

But a frantic inspection of the boys' department revealed no suits to
fit the new-born Button. He blamed the store, of course---in such
cases it is the thing to blame the store.

"How old did you say that boy of yours was?" demanded the clerk
curiously.

"He's--sixteen."

"Oh, I beg your pardon. I thought you said six hours. You'll
find the youths' department in the next aisle."

Mr. Button turned miserably away. Then he stopped, brightened, and
pointed his finger toward a dressed dummy in the window display.
"There!" he exclaimed. "I'll take that suit, out there on the dummy."

The clerk stared. "Why," he protested, "that's not a child's suit. At
least it is, but it's for fancy dress. You could wear it
yourself!"

"Wrap it up," insisted his customer nervously. "That's what I want."

The astonished clerk obeyed.

Back at the hospital Mr. Button entered the nursery and almost threw
the package at his son. "Here's your clothes," he snapped out.

The old man untied the package and viewed the contents with a
quizzical eye.

"They look sort of funny to me," he complained, "I don't want to be
made a monkey of--"

"You've made a monkey of me!" retorted Mr. Button fiercely. "Never you
mind how funny you look. Put them on--or I'll--or I'll spank
you." He swallowed uneasily at the penultimate word, feeling
nevertheless that it was the proper thing to say.

"All right, father"--this with a grotesque simulation of filial
respect--"you've lived longer; you know best. Just as you say."

As before, the sound of the word "father" caused Mr. Button to start
violently.

"And hurry."

"I'm hurrying, father."

When his son was dressed Mr. Button regarded him with depression. The
costume consisted of dotted socks, pink pants, and a belted blouse
with a wide white collar. Over the latter waved the long whitish
beard, drooping almost to the waist. The effect was not good.

"Wait!"

Mr. Button seized a hospital shears and with three quick snaps
amputated a large section of the beard. But even with this improvement
the ensemble fell far short of perfection. The remaining brush of
scraggly hair, the watery eyes, the ancient teeth, seemed oddly out of
tone with the gaiety of the costume. Mr. Button, however, was
obdurate--he held out his hand. "Come along!" he said sternly.

His son took the hand trustingly. "What are you going to call me,
dad?" he quavered as they walked from the nursery--"just 'baby' for a
while? till you think of a better name?"

Mr. Button grunted. "I don't know," he answered harshly. "I think
we'll call you Methuselah."

3

Even after the new addition to the Button family had had his hair cut
short and then dyed to a sparse unnatural black, had had his face
shaved so dose that it glistened, and had been attired in small-boy
clothes made to order by a flabbergasted tailor, it was impossible for
Button to ignore the fact that his son was a excuse for a first family
baby. Despite his aged stoop, Benjamin Button--for it was by this name
they called him instead of by the appropriate but invidious
Methuselah--was five feet eight inches tall. His clothes did not
conceal this, nor did the clipping and dyeing of his eyebrows disguise
the fact that the eyes under--were faded and watery and tired. In
fact, the baby-nurse who had been engaged in advance left the house
after one look, in a state of considerable indignation.

But Mr. Button persisted in his unwavering purpose. Benjamin was a
baby, and a baby he should remain. At first he declared that if
Benjamin didn't like warm milk he could go without food altogether,
but he was finally prevailed upon to allow his son bread and butter,
and even oatmeal by way of a compromise. One day he brought home a
rattle and, giving it to Benjamin, insisted in no uncertain terms that
he should "play with it," whereupon the old man took it with--a weary
expression and could be heard jingling it obediently at intervals
throughout the day.

There can be no doubt, though, that the rattle bored him, and that he
found other and more soothing amusements when he was left alone. For
instance, Mr. Button discovered one day that during the preceding week
be had smoked more cigars than ever before--a phenomenon, which was
explained a few days later when, entering the nursery unexpectedly, he
found the room full of faint blue haze and Benjamin, with a guilty
expression on his face, trying to conceal the butt of a dark Havana.
This, of course, called for a severe spanking, but Mr. Button found
that he could not bring himself to administer it. He merely warned his
son that he would "stunt his growth."

Nevertheless he persisted in his attitude. He brought home lead
soldiers, he brought toy trains, he brought large pleasant animals
made of cotton, and, to perfect the illusion which he was
creating--for himself at least--he passionately demanded of the clerk
in the toy-store whether "the paint would come oft the pink duck if
the baby put it in his mouth." But, despite all his father's efforts,
Benjamin refused to be interested. He would steal down the back stairs
and return to the nursery with a volume of the Encyclopedia
Britannica, over which he would pore through an afternoon, while his
cotton cows and his Noah's ark were left neglected on the floor.
Against such a stubbornness Mr. Button's efforts were of little avail.

The sensation created in Baltimore was, at first, prodigious. What the
mishap would have cost the Buttons and their kinsfolk socially cannot
be determined, for the outbreak of the Civil War drew the city's
attention to other things. A few people who were unfailingly polite
racked their brains for compliments to give to the parents--and
finally hit upon the ingenious device of declaring that the baby
resembled his grandfather, a fact which, due to the standard state of
decay common to all men of seventy, could not be denied. Mr. and Mrs.
Roger Button were not pleased, and Benjamin's grandfather was
furiously insulted.

Benjamin, once he left the hospital, took life as he found it. Several
small boys were brought to see him, and he spent a stiff-jointed
afternoon trying to work up an interest in tops and marbles--he even
managed, quite accidentally, to break a kitchen window with a stone
from a sling shot, a feat which secretly delighted his father.

Thereafter Benjamin contrived to break something every day, but he did
these things only because they were expected of him, and because he
was by nature obliging.

When his grandfather's initial antagonism wore off, Benjamin and that
gentleman took enormous pleasure in one another's company. They would
sit for hours, these two, so far apart in age and experience, and,
like old cronies, discuss with tireless monotony the slow events of
the day. Benjamin felt more at ease in his grandfather's presence than
in his parents'--they seemed always somewhat in awe of him and,
despite the dictatorial authority they exercised over him, frequently
addressed him as "Mr."

He was as puzzled as any one else at the apparently advanced age of
his mind and body at birth. He read up on it in the medical journal,
but found that no such case had been previously recorded. At his
father's urging he made an honest attempt to play with other boys, and
frequently he joined in the milder games--football shook him up too
much, and he feared that in case of a fracture his ancient bones would
refuse to knit.

When he was five he was sent to kindergarten, where he initiated into
the art of pasting green paper on orange paper, of weaving colored
maps and manufacturing eternal cardboard necklaces. He was inclined to
drowse off to sleep in the middle of these tasks, a habit which both
irritated and frightened his young teacher. To his relief she
complained to his parents, and he was removed from the school. The
Roger Buttons told their friends that they felt he was too young.

By the time he was twelve years old his parents had grown used to him.
Indeed, so strong is the force of custom that they no longer felt that
he was different from any other child--except when some curious
anomaly reminded them of the fact. But one day a few weeks after his
twelfth birthday, while looking in the mirror, Benjamin made, or
thought he made, an astonishing discovery. Did his eyes deceive him,
or had his hair turned in the dozen years of his life from white to
iron-gray under its concealing dye? Was the network of wrinkles on his
face becoming less pronounced? Was his skin healthier and firmer, with
even a touch of ruddy winter color? He could not tell. He knew that
he no longer stooped, and that his physical condition had improved
since the early days of his life.

"Can it be----?" he thought to himself, or, rather, scarcely dared to
think.

He went to his father. "I am grown," he announced determinedly. "I
want to put on long trousers."

His father hesitated. "Well," he said finally, "I don't know. Fourteen
is the age for putting on long trousers--and you are only twelve."

"But you'll have to admit," protested Benjamin, "that I'm big for my
age."

His father looked at him with illusory speculation. "Oh, I'm not so
sure of that," he said. "I was as big as you when I was twelve."

This was not true-it was all part of Roger Button's silent agreement
with himself to believe in his son's normality.

Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his
hair. He was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own
age. He was not to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street.
In return for these concessions he was allowed his first suit of long
trousers....

4

Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first
year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of
normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of
fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm,
his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy
baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take
examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed his
examination and became a member of the freshman class.

On the third day following his matriculation he received a
notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his
office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror,
decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye, but
an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye
bottle was not there. Then he remembered--he had emptied it the day
before and thrown it away.

He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar's in five minutes.
There seemed to be no help for it--he must go as he was. He did.

"Good-morning," said the registrar politely. "You've come to inquire
about your son."

"Why, as a matter of fact, my name's Button----" began Benjamin, but
Mr. Hart cut him off.

"I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I'm expecting your son here
any minute."

"That's me!" burst out Benjamin. "I'm a freshman."

"What!"

"I'm a freshman."

"Surely you're joking."

"Not at all."

The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. "Why, I have
Mr. Benjamin Button's age down here as eighteen."

"That's my age," asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.

The registrar eyed him wearily. "Now surely, Mr. Button, you don't
expect me to believe that."

Benjamin smiled wearily. "I am eighteen," he repeated.

The registrar pointed sternly to the door. "Get out," he said. "Get
out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic."

"I am eighteen."

Mr. Hart opened the door. "The idea!" he shouted. "A man of your age
trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well,
I'll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town."

Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a dozen
undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him curiously
with their eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned around, faced
the infuriated registrar, who was still standing in the door-way, and
repeated in a firm voice: "I am eighteen years old."

To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of undergraduates,
Benjamin walked away.

But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk to
the railroad station he found that he was being followed by a group,
then by a swarm, and finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The
word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance
examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of
eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless
out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined
the mob, professors' wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of
position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a
continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of
Benjamin Button.

"He must be the wandering Jew!"

"He ought to go to prep school at his age!"

"Look at the infant prodigy!" "He thought this was the old men's
home."

"Go up to Harvard!"

Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would show
them! He would go to Harvard, and then they would regret these
ill-considered taunts!

Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the
window. "You'll regret this!" he shouted.

"Ha-ha!" the undergraduates laughed. "Ha-ha-ha!" It was the biggest
mistake that Yale College had ever made....

5

In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalized his
birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button & Co.,
Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began "going out
socially"--that is, his father insisted on taking him to several
fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and his son
were more and more companionable--in fact, since Benjamin had ceased
to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared about the same
age, and could have passed for brothers.

One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their
full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins' country
house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening.
A full moon drenched the road to the lusterless color of platinum,
and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air
aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The open country,
carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the
day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty
of the sky--almost.

"There's a great future in the dry-goods business," Roger Button was
saying. He was not a spiritual man--his aesthetic sense was
rudimentary.

"Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks," he observed profoundly.
"It's you youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great
future before you."

Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins' country house drifted into
view, and presently there was a sighing sound that crept persistently
toward them--it might have been the fine plaint of violins or the
rustle of the silver wheat under the moon.

They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were
disembarking at the door. A lady got out, then an elderly gentleman,
then another young lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost
chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of
his body. A rigor passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his
forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first
love.

The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the
moon and honey-colored under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch.
Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow,
butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of
her bustled dress.

Roger Button leaned over to his son. "That," he said, "is young
Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief."

Benjamin nodded coldly. "Pretty little thing," he said indifferently.
But when the Negro boy had led the buggy away, he added: "Dad, you
might introduce me to her."

They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the center. Reared
in the old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes, he might
have a dance. He thanked her and walked away--staggered away.

The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged itself
out interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable,
watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they
eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their
faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy!
Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a feeling equivalent to
indigestion.

But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the
changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his
jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow. Blind
with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.

"You and your brother got here just as we did, didn't you?" asked
Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes that were like bright blue
enamel.

Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father's brother, would it
be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he
decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be
criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of
his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are so
idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and
how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to
appreciate women."

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he
choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she
continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to be
pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole
cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is
the mellow age. I love fifty."

Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be
fifty.

"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a man
of fifty and be taken care of than many a man of thirty and take care
of him."

For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a honey-colored
mist. Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they discovered that
they were marvelously in accord on all the questions of the day. She
was to go driving with him on the following Sunday, and then they
would discuss all these questions further.

Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when the
first bees were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the cool dew,
Benjamin knew vaguely that his father was discussing wholesale
hardware.

".... And what do you think should merit our biggest attention after
hammers and nails?" the elder Button was saying.

"Love," replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.

"Lugs?" exclaimed Roger Button, "Why, I've just covered the question
of lugs."

Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was
suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the
quickening trees...

6

When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to
Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say "made known," for General
Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce
it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The
almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth was remembered and sent out
upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was
said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was
his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was John
Wilkes Booth in disguise--and, finally, that he had two small conical
horns sprouting from his head.

The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with
fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached
to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He
became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But
the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation.

However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was "criminal"
for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to
throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain
Mr. Roger Button published Us son's birth certificate in large type in
the Baltimore Blaze. No one believed it. You had only to look
at Benjamin and see.

On the part of the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So
many of the stories about her fiance were false that Hildegarde
refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General
Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty--or,
at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the
instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen
to marry for mellowness, and marry she did....

7

In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were
mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the
fifteen years between Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and his
father's retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled--and this
was due largely to the younger member of the firm.

Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its
bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law
when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his History of the
Civil War in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine
prominent publishers.

In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It seemed
to him that the blood flowed with new vigor through his veins. It
began to be a pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk with an active
step along the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his
shipments of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in 1890 that he
executed his famous business coup: he brought up the suggestion that
all nails used in nailing up the boxes in which nails are shipped
are the property of the shippee, a proposal which became a
statute, was approved by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button
and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred nails every
year.

In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more
attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing
enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of
Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his
contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health
and vitality.

"He seems to grow younger every year," they would remark. And if old
Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a
proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what
amounted to adulation.

And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to
pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that
worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.

At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son,
Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage
Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her
honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her
eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery--moreover, and, most of all,
she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too
anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it
been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners--now
conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without
enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to
live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the
Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that
he decided to join the army. With his business influence he obtained a
commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was
made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to
participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. He was slightly
wounded, and received a medal.

Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement of
array life that he regretted to give it up, but his business required
attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He was met at
the station by a brass band and escorted to his house.

8

Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on the porch, and
even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that these
three years had taken their toll. She was a woman of forty now, with a
faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The sight depressed
him.

Up in his room he saw his reflection in the familiar mirror--he went
closer and examined his own face with anxiety, comparing it after a
moment with a photograph of himself in uniform taken just before the
war.

"Good Lord!" he said aloud. The process was continuing. There was no
doubt of it--he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of being
delighted, he was uneasy--he was growing younger. He had hitherto
hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his age in
years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth would cease
to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him awful,
incredible.

When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She appeared
annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered that there was
something amiss. It was with an effort to relieve the tension between
them that he broached the matter at dinner in what he considered a
delicate way.

"Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I look younger than
ever."

Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. "Do you think it's
anything to boast about?"

"I'm not boasting," he asserted uncomfortably. She sniffed again. "The
idea," she said, and after a moment: "I should think you'd have enough
pride to stop it."

"How can I?" he demanded.

"I'm not going to argue with you," she retorted. "But there's a right
way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be
different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I
really don't think it's very considerate."

"But, Hildegarde, I can't help it."

"You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want to be
like any one else. You always have been that way, and you always will
be. But just think how it would be if every one else looked at things
as you do--what would the world be like?"

As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no reply,
and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them. He wondered
what possible fascination she had ever exercised over him.

To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered headway,
that his thirst for gaiety grew stronger. Never a party of any kind in
the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with the prettiest of
the young married women, chatting with the most popular of the
debutantes, and finding their company charming, while his wife, a
dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons, now in haughty
disapproval, and now following him with solemn, puzzled, and
reproachful eyes.

"Look!" people would remark. "What a pity! A young fellow that age
tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger than
his wife." They had forgotten--as people inevitably forget--that back
in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this same
ill-matched pair.

Benjamin's growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by his many
new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of it. He went
in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at "The Boston," and in 1908
he was considered proficient at the "Maxine," while in 1909 his
"Castle Walk" was the envy of every young man in town.

His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with his
business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for
twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his son,
Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.

He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for each other. This
pleased Benjamin--he soon forgot the insidious fear which had come
over him on his return from the Spanish-American War, and grew to take
a naive pleasure in his appearance. There was only one fly in the
delicious ointment--he hated to appear in public with his wife.
Hildegarde was almost fifty, and the sight of her made him feel
absurd....

9

One September day in 1910--a few years after Roger Button & Co.,
Wholesale Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe Button--a
man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman
at Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make the mistake of
announcing that he would never see fifty again, nor did he mention the
fact that his son had been graduated from the same institution ten
years before.

He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent position
in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than the other
freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen.

But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football game
with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with such a
cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen
field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to
be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was the most
celebrated man in college.

Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able to
"make" the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and it
seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as tall
as before. He made no touchdowns--indeed, he was retained on the team
chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would bring terror and
disorganization to the Yale team.

In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown so
slight and frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores for a
freshman, an incident which humiliated him terribly. He became known
as something of a prodigy--a senior who was surely no more than
sixteen--and he was often shocked at the worldliness of some of his
classmates. His studies seemed harder to him--he felt that they were
too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas's, the
famous preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared for
college, and he determined after his graduation to enter himself at
St. Midas's, where the sheltered life among boys his own size would be
more congenial to him.

Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his Harvard
diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde was now residing in Italy, so
Benjamin went to live with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed
in a general way there was obviously no heartiness in Roscoe's feeling
toward him--there was even perceptible a tendency on his son's part to
think that Benjamin, as he moped about the house in adolescent
mooniness, was somewhat in the way. Roscoe was married now and
prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal to creep out in
connection with his family.

Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the debutantes and
younger college set, found himself left much done, except for the
companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the
neighborhood. His idea of going to St. Midas's school recurred to
him.

"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over and over that I
want to go to prep, school."

"Well, go, then," replied Roscoe shortly. The matter was distasteful
to him, and he wished to avoid a discussion.

"I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll have to enter me
and take me up there."

"I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. His eyes narrowed and
he looked uneasily at his father. "As a matter of fact," he added,
"you'd better not go on with this business much longer. You better
pull up short. You better--you better"--he paused and his face
crimsoned as he sought for words--"you better turn right around and
start back the other way. This has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't
funny any longer. You--you behave yourself!"

Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.

"And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors are in the house
I want you to call me 'Uncle'--not 'Roscoe,' but 'Uncle,' do you
understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my
first name. Perhaps you'd better call me 'Uncle' all the time,
so you'll get used to it."

With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away....

10

At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered dismally
upstairs and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for
three months, but he could find nothing on his face but a faint white
down with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle. When he had first
come home from Harvard, Roscoe had approached him with the proposition
that he should wear eye-glasses and imitation whiskers glued to his
cheeks, and it had seemed for a moment that the farce of his early
years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched and made him
ashamed. He wept and Roscoe had reluctantly relented.

Benjamin opened a book of boys' stories, The Boy Scouts in Bimini
Bay, and began to read. But he found himself thinking persistently
about the war. America had joined the Allied cause during the
preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but, alas, sixteen was
the minimum age, and he did not look that old. His true age, which was
fifty-seven, would have disqualified him, anyway.

There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared with a letter
bearing a large official legend in the corner and addressed to Mr.
Benjamin Button. Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the enclosure
with delight. It informed him that many reserve officers who had
served in the Spanish-American War were being called back into service
with a higher rank, and it enclosed his commission as brigadier-general
in the United States army with orders to report immediately.

Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with enthusiasm. This was
what he had wanted. He seized his cap, and ten minutes later he had
entered a large tailoring establishment on Charles Street, and asked
in his uncertain treble to be measured for a uniform.

"Want to play soldier, sonny?" demanded a clerk casually.

Benjamin flushed. "Say! Never mind what I want!" he retorted angrily.
"My name's Button and I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you know I'm good
for it."

"Well," admitted the clerk hesitantly, "if you're not, I guess your
daddy is, all right."

Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was completed. He
had difficulty in obtaining the proper general's insignia because the
dealer kept insisting to Benjamin that a nice V.W.C.A. badge would
look just as well and be much more fun to play with.

Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and proceeded by
train to Camp Mosby, in South Carolina, where he was to command an
infantry brigade. On a sultry April day he approached the entrance to
the camp, paid off the taxicab which had brought him from the station,
and turned to the sentry on guard.

"Get some one to handle my luggage!" he said briskly.

The sentry eyed him reproachfully. "Say," he remarked, "where you
goin' with the general's duds, sonny?"

Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War, whirled upon him with
fire in his eye, but with, alas, a changing treble voice.

"Come to attention!" he tried to thunder; he paused for breath--then
suddenly he saw the sentry snap his heels together and bring his rifle
to the present. Benjamin concealed a smile of gratification, but when
he glanced around his smile faded. It was not he who had inspired
obedience, but an imposing artillery colonel who was approaching on
horseback.

"Colonel!" called Benjamin shrilly.

The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him with a
twinkle in his eyes. "Whose little boy are you?" he demanded kindly.

"I'll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!" retorted
Benjamin in a ferocious voice. "Get down off that horse!"

The colonel roared with laughter.

"You want him, eh, general?"

"Here!" cried Benjamin desperately. "Read this." And he thrust his
commission toward the colonel. The colonel read it, his eyes popping
from their sockets. "Where'd you get this?" he demanded, slipping the
document into his own pocket. "I got it from the Government, as you'll
soon find out!" "You come along with me," said the colonel with a
peculiar look. "We'll go up to headquarters and talk this over. Come
along." The colonel turned and began walking his horse in the
direction of headquarters. There was nothing for Benjamin to do but
follow with as much dignity as possible--meanwhile promising himself a
stern revenge. But this revenge did not materialize. Two days later,
however, his son Roscoe materialized from Baltimore, hot and cross
from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans
uniform, back to his home.

II

In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the attendant
festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to mention, that
the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of age who played
around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature circus, was the
new baby's own grandfather.

No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was crossed
with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his presence was a
source of torment. In the idiom of his generation Roscoe did not
consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him that his father, in
refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a "red-blooded
he-man"--this was Roscoe's favorite expression--but in a curious and
perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for as much as a
half an hour drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe believed that
"live wires" should keep young, but carrying it out on such a scale
was--was--was inefficient. And there Roscoe rested.

Five years later Roscoe's little boy had grown old enough to play
childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of the same
nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same day, and
Benjamin found that playing with little strips of colored paper,
making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs, was the most
fascinating game in the world. Once he was bad and had to stand in the
corner--then he cried--but for the most part there were gay hours in
the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in the windows and Miss
Bailey's kind hand resting for a moment now and then in his tousled
hair.

Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a year, but Benjamin
stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy. Sometimes when other
tots talked about what they would do when they grew up a shadow would
cross his little face as if in a dim, childish way he realized that
those were things in which he was never to share.

The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third year to
the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand what the
bright shining strips of paper were for. He cried because the other
boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The teacher
talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could not
understand at all.

He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her starched
gingham dress, became the center of his tiny world. On bright days
they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great gray monster and
say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after her, and when he was
being undressed for bed that night he would say it over and over aloud
to her: "Elyphant, elyphant, elyphant." Sometimes Nana let him jump on
the bed, which was fun, because if you sat down exactly right it would
bounce you up on your feet again, and if you said "Ah" for a long time
while you jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.

He loved to take a big cane from the hat-rack and go around hitting
chairs and tables with it and saying: "Fight, fight, fight." When
there were people there the old ladies would cluck at him, which
interested him, and the young ladies would try to kiss him, which he
submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long day was done at five
o'clock he would go upstairs with Nana and be fed on oatmeal and nice
soft mushy foods with a spoon.

There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no token
came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering years when
he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only the white, safe
walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to see him sometimes,
and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at just before his
twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun went his eyes were
sleepy--there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt him.

The past--the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan Hill; the
first years of his marriage when he worked late into the summer dusk
down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he loved; the days
before that when he sat smoking far into the night in the gloomy old
Button house on Monroe Street with his grandfather-all these had faded
like unsubstantial dreams from his mind as though they had never been.
He did not remember.

He did not remember clearly whether the milk was warm or cool at his
last feeding or how the days passed--there was only his crib and
Nana's familiar presence. And then he remembered nothing. When he was
hungry he cried--that was all. Through the noons and nights he
breathed and over him there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he
scarcely heard, and faintly differentiated smells, and light and
darkness.

Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that moved
above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out altogether
from his mind.

Colour Your World with Words #8

2009-05-24T22:56:00.001+08:00

The End of the Party
by Graham Greene

Peter Morton woke with a start to face the first light. Rain tapped against the glass. It was January the fifth.

He looked across a table on which a night-light had guttered into a pool of water, at the other bed. Francis Morton was still asleep, and Peter lay down again with his eyes on his brother. It amused him to imagine it was himself whom he watched, the same hair, the same eyes, the same lips and line of cheek. But the thought palled, and the mind went back to the fact which lent the day importance. It was the fifth of January. He could hardly believe a year had passed since Mrs Henne-Falcon had given her last children's party.

Francis turned suddenly upon his back and threw an arm across his face, blocking his mouth. Peter's heart began to beat fast, not with pleasure now but with uneasiness. He sat up and called across the table, "Wake up." Francis's shoulders shook and he waved a clenched fist in the air, but his eyes remained closed. To Peter Morton the whole room seemed to darken, and he had the impression of a great bird swooping. He cried again, "Wake up," and once more there was silver light and the touch of rain on the windows.

Francis rubbed his eyes. "Did you call out?"' he asked.

"You are having a bad dream," Peter said. Already experience had taught him how far their minds reflected each other. But he was the elder, by a matter of minutes, and that brief extra interval of light, while his brother still struggled in pain and darkness, had given him self-reliance and an instinct of protection towards the other who was afraid of so many things.

"I dreamed that I was dead," Francis said.

"What was it like?"' Peter asked.

"I can't remember," Francis said.

"You dreamed of a big bird."

"Did I?"

The two lay silent in bed facing each other, the same green eyes, the same nose tilting at the tip, the same firm lips, and the same premature modelling of the chin. The fifth of January, Peter thought again, his mind drifting idly from the image of cakes to the prizes which might be won. Egg-and-spoon races, spearing apples in basins of water, blind man's buff.

"I don't want to go," Francis said suddenly. "I suppose Joyce will be there ... Mabel Warren." Hateful to him, the thought of a party shared with those two. They were older than he. Joyce was eleven and Mabel Warren thirteen. The long pigtails swung superciliously to a masculine stride. Their sex humiliated him, as they watched him fumble with his egg, from under lowered scornful lids. And last year ... he turned his face away from Peter, his cheeks scarlet.

"What's the matter?"' Peter asked.

"Oh, nothing. I don't think I'm well. I've got a cold. I oughtn't to go to the party."

Peter was puzzled. "But Francis, is it a bad cold?"

"It will be a bad cold if I go to the party. Perhaps I shall die."

"Then you mustn't go," Peter said, prepared to solve all difficulties with one plain sentence, and Francis let his nerves relax, ready to leave everything to Peter. But though he was grateful he did not turn his face towards his brother. His cheeks still bore the badge of a shameful memory, of the game of hide and seek last year in the darkened house, and of how he had screamed when Mabel Warren put her hand suddenly upon his arm. He had not heard her coming. Girls were like that. Their shoes never squeaked. No boards whined under the tread. They slunk like cats on padded claws.

When the nurse came in with hot water Francis lay tranquil leaving everything to Peter. Peter said, "Nurse, Francis has got a cold."

The tall starched woman laid the towels across the cans and said, without turning, "The washing won't be back till tomorrow. You must lend him some of your handkerchiefs."

"But, Nurse," Peter asked, "hadn't he better stay in bed?"

"We'll take him for a good walk this morning," the nurse said. "Wind'll blow away the germs. Get up now, both of you," and she closed the door behind her.

"I'm sorry," Peter said. "Why don't you just stay in bed? I'll tell mother you felt too ill to get up." But rebellion against destiny was not in Francis's power. If he stayed in bed they would come up and tap his chest and put a thermometer in his mouth and look at his tongue, and they would discover he was malingering. It was true he felt ill, a sick empty sensation in his stomach and a rapidly beating heart, but he knew the cause was only fear, fear of the party, fear of being made to hide by himself in the dark, uncompanioned by Peter and with no night-light to make a blessed breach.

"No, I'll get up," he said, and then with sudden desperation, "But I won't go to Mrs Henne-Falcon's party. I swear on the Bible I won't." Now surely all would be well, he thought. God would not allow him to break so solemn an oath. He would show him a way. There was all the morning before him and all the afternoon until four o'clock. No need to worry when the grass was still crisp with the early frost. Anything might happen. He might cut himself or break his leg or really catch a bad cold. God would manage somehow.

He had such confidence in God that when at breakfast his mother said, "I hear you have a cold, Francis," he made light of it. "We should have heard more about it," his mother said with irony, "if there was not a party this evening," and Francis smiled, amazed and daunted by her ignorance of him.

His happiness would have lasted longer if, out for a walk that morning, he had not met Joyce. He was alone with his nurse, for Peter had leave to finish a rabbit-hutch in the woodshed. If Peter had been there he would have cared less; the nurse was Peter's nurse also, but now it was as though she were employed only for his sake, because he could not be trusted to go for a walk alone. Joyce was only two years older and she was by herself.

She came striding towards them, pigtails flapping. She glanced scornfully at Francis and spoke with ostentation to the nurse. "Hello, Nurse. Are you bringing Francis to the party this evening? Mabel and I are coming." And she was off again down the street in the direction of Mabel Warren's home, consciously alone and self-sufficient in the long empty road.

"Such a nice girl," the nurse said. But Francis was silent, feeling again the jump-jump of his heart, realizing how soon the hour of the party would arrive. God had done nothing for him, and the minutes flew.

They flew too quickly to plan any evasion, or even to prepare his heart for the coming ordeal. Panic nearly overcame him when, all unready, he found himself standing on the doorstep, with coat- collar turned up against a cold wind, and the nurse's electric torch making a short trail through the darkness. Behind him were the lights of the hall and the sound of a servant laying the table for dinner, which his mother and father would eat alone. He was nearly overcome by the desire to run back into the house and call out to his mother that he would not go to the party, that he dared not go. They could not make him go. He could almost hear himself saying those final words, breaking down for ever the barrier of ignorance which saved his mind from his parents' knowledge. "I'm afraid of going. I won't go. I daren't go. They'll make me hide in the dark, and I'm afraid of the dark. I'll scream and scream and scream."

He could see the expression of amazement on his mother's face, and then the cold confidence of a grown- up's retort. "Don't be silly. You must go. We've accepted Mrs Henne-Falcon's invitation."

But they couldn't make him go; hesitating on the doorstep while the nurse's feet crunched across the frost-covered grass to the gate, he knew that. He would answer: "You can say I'm ill. I won't go. I'm afraid of the dark." And his mother: "Don't be silly. You know there's nothing to be afraid of in the dark." But he knew the falsity of that reasoning; he knew how they taught also that there was nothing to fear in death, and how fearfully they avoided the idea of it. But they couldn't make him go to the party. "I'll scream. I'll scream."

"Francis, come along." He heard the nurse's voice across the dimly phosphorescent lawn and saw the yellow circle of her torch wheel from tree to shrub. "I'm coming," he called with despair; he couldn't bring himself to lay bare his last secrets and end reserve between his mother and himself, for there was still in the last resort a further appeal possible to Mrs Henne- Falcon. He comforted himself with that, as he advanced steadily across the hall, very small, towards her enormous bulk. His heart beat unevenly, but he had control now over his voice, as he said with meticulous accent, "Good evening, Mrs Henne-Falcon. It was very good of you to ask me to your party." With his strained face lifted towards the curve of her breasts, and his polite set speech, he was like an old withered man. As a twin he was in many ways an only child. To address Peter was to speak to his own image in a mirror, an image a little altered by a flaw in the glass, so as to throw back less a likeness of what he was than of what he wished to be, what he would be without his unreasoning fear of darkness, footsteps of strangers, the flight of bats in dusk-filled gardens.

"Sweet child," said Mrs Henne-Falcon absent-mindedly, before, with a wave of her arms, as though the children were a flock of chickens, she whirled them into her set programme of entertainments: egg-and-spoon races, three-legged races, the spearing of apples, games which held for Francis nothing worse than humiliation. And in the frequent intervals when nothing was required of him and he could stand alone in corners as far removed as possible from Mabel Warren's scornful gaze, he was able to plan how he might avoid the approaching terror of the dark. He knew there was nothing to fear until after tea, and not until he was sitting down in a pool of yellow radiance cast by the ten candles on Colin Henne- Falcon's birthday cake did he become fully conscious of the imminence of what he feared. He heard Joyce's high voice down the table, "After tea we are going to play hide and seek in the dark."

"Oh, no," Peter said, watching Francis's troubled face, "don't let's. We play that every year."

"But it's in the programme," cried Mabel Warren. "I saw it myself. I looked over Mrs Henne-Falcon's shoulder. Five o'clock tea. A quarter to six to half past, hide and seek in the dark. It's all written down in the programme."

Peter did not argue, for if hide and seek had been inserted in Mrs Henne- Falcon's programme, nothing which he could say would avert it. He asked for another piece of birthday cake and sipped his tea slowly. Perhaps it might be possible to delay the game for a quarter of an hour, allow Francis at least a few extra minutes to form a plan, but even in that Peter failed, for children were already leaving the table in twos and threes. It was his third failure, and again he saw a great bird darken his brother's face with its wings. But he upbraided himself silently for his folly, and finished his cake encouraged by the memory of that adult refrain, "There's nothing to fear in the dark." The last to leave the table, the brothers came together to the hall to meet the mustering and impatient eyes of Mrs Henne- Falcon.

"And now," she said, "we will play hide and seek in the dark."

Peter watched his brother and saw the lips tighten. Francis, he knew, had feared this moment from the beginning of the party, had tried to meet it with courage and had abandoned the attempt. He must have prayed for cunning to evade the game, which was now welcomed with cries of excitement by all the other children. "Oh, do let's." "We must pick sides." "Is any of the house out of bounds?"' "Where shall home be?"'

"I think," said Francis Morton, approaching Mrs Henne-Falcon, his eyes focused unwaveringly on her exuberant breasts, "it will be no use my playing. My nurse will be calling for me very soon."

"Oh, but your nurse can wait, Francis," said Mrs Henne-Falcon, while she clapped her hands together to summon to her side a few children who were already straying up the wide staircase to upper floors. "Your mother will never mind."

That had been the limit of Francis's cunning. He had refused to believe that so well- prepared an excuse could fail. All that he could say now, still in the precise tone which other children hated, thinking it a symbol of conceit, was, "I think I had better not play." He stood motionless, retaining, though afraid, unmoved features. But the knowledge of his terror, or the reflection of the terror itself, reached his brother's brain. For the moment, Peter Morton could have cried aloud with the fear of bright lights going out, leaving him alone in an island of dark surrounded by the gentle lappings of strange footsteps. Then he remembered that the fear was not his own, but his brother's. He said impulsively to Mrs Henne-Falcon, "Please, I don't think Francis should play. The dark makes him jump so." They were the wrong words. Six children began to sing, "Cowardy cowardy custard," turning torturing faces with the vacancy of wide sunflowers towards Francis Morton.

Without looking at his brother, Francis said, "Of course I'll play. I'm not afraid, I only thought ..." But he was already forgotten by his human tormentors. The children scrambled round Mrs Henne- Falcon, their shrill voices pecking at her with questions and suggestions.

"Yes, anywhere in the house. We will turn out all the lights. Yes, you can hide in the cupboards. You must stay hidden as long as you can. There will be no home."

Peter stood apart, ashamed of the clumsy manner in which he had tried to help his brother. Now he could feel, creeping in at the corners of his brain, all Francis's resentment of his championing. Several children ran upstairs, and the lights on the top floor went out. Darkness came down like the wings of a bat and settled on the landing. Others began to put out the lights at the edge of the hall, till the children were all gathered in the central radiance of the chandelier, while the bats squatted round on hooded wings and waited for that, too, to be extinguished.

"You and Francis are on the hiding side," a tall girl said, and then the light was gone, and the carpet wavered under his feet with the sibilance of footfalls, like small cold draughts, creeping away into corners.

"Where's Francis?"' he wondered. "If I join him he'll be less frightened of all these sounds." "These sounds" were the casing of silence: the squeak of a loose board, the cautious closing of a cupboard door, the whine of a finger drawn along polished wood.

Peter stood in the centre of the dark deserted floor, not listening but waiting for the idea of his brother's whereabouts to enter his brain. But Francis crouched with fingers on his ears, eyes uselessly closed, mind numbed against impressions, and only a sense of strain could cross the gap of dark. Then a voice called "Coming", and as though his brother's self- possession had been shattered by the sudden cry, Peter Morton jumped with his fear. But it was not his own fear. What in his brother was a burning panic was in him an altruistic emotion that left the reason unimpaired. "Where, if I were Francis, should I hide?"' And because he was, if not Francis himself, at least a mirror to him, the answer was immediate. "Between the oak bookcase on the left of the study door, and the leather settee." Between the twins there could be no jargon of telepathy. They had been together in the womb, and they could not be parted.

Peter Morton tiptoed towards Francis's hiding-place. Occasionally a board rattled, and because he feared to be caught by one of the soft questers through the dark, he bent and untied his laces. A tag struck the floor and the metallic sound set a host of cautious feet moving in his direction. But by that time he was in his stockings and would have laughed inwardly at the pursuit had not the noise of someone stumbling on his abandoned shoes made his heart trip. No more boards revealed Peter Morton's progress.

On stockinged feet he moved silently and unerringly towards his object. Instinct told him he was near the wall, and, extending a hand, he laid the fingers across his brother's face.

Francis did not cry out, but the leap of his own heart revealed to Peter a proportion of Francis's terror. "It's all right," he whispered, feeling down the squatting figure until he captured a clenched hand. "It's only me. I'll stay with you." And grasping the other tightly, he listened to the cascade of whispers his utterance had caused to fall. A hand touched the book-case close to Peter's head and he was aware of how Francis's fear continued in spite of his presence. It was less intense, more bearable, he hoped, but it remained. He knew that it was his brother's fear and not his own that he experienced. The dark to him was only an absence of light; the groping hand that of a familiar child. Patiently he waited to be found.

He did not speak again, for between Francis and himself was the most intimate communion. By way of joined hands thought could flow more swiftly than lips could shape themselves round words. He could experience the whole progress of his brother's emotion, from the leap of panic at the unexpected contact to the steady pulse of fear, which now went on and on with the regularity of a heart- beat. Peter Morton thought with intensity, "I am here. You needn't be afraid. The lights will go on again soon. That rustle, that movement is nothing to fear. Only Joyce, only Mabel Warren." He bombarded the drooping form with thoughts of safety, but he was conscious that the fear continued. "They are beginning to whisper together. They are tired of looking for us. The lights will go on soon. We shall have won. Don't be afraid. That was someone on the stairs. I believe it's Mrs Henne- Falcon. Listen. They are feeling for the lights." Feet moving on a carpet, hands brushing a wall, a curtain pulled apart, a clicking handle, the opening of a cupboard door. In the case above their heads a loose book shifted under a touch. "Only Joyce, only Mabel Warren, only Mrs Henne- Falcon," a crescendo of reassuring thought before the chandelier burst, like a fruit-tree, into bloom.

The voice of the children rose shrilly into the radiance. "Where's Peter?"' "Have you looked upstairs?"' "Where's Francis?"' but they were silenced again by Mrs Henne-Falcon's scream. But she was not the first to notice Francis Morton's stillness, where he had collapsed against the wall at the touch of his brother's hand. Peter continued to hold the clenched fingers in an arid and puzzled grief. It was not merely that his brother was dead. His brain, too young to realize the full paradox, wondered with an obscure self- pity why it was that the pulse of his brother's fear went on and on, when Francis was now where he had always been told there was no more terror and no more--darkness.

I am Allergic?!

2009-05-24T22:31:00.002+08:00

Yes, I am allergic to something I haven't been aware of for the past 14 years. I'm allergic to something that is technically still unconfirmed. It can't be confirmed unless they run tests on my blood and since I don't want any of my blood to be taken, it wouldn't matter whether or not it was confirmed. My dad told me that he was allergic to something known as 'alcohol'. Well, alcohol comes in many forms, so I don't know if its a specific alcohol, or all alcohols in general, he just said 'alcohol', period.

So there it is, I might be genetically allergic to alcohol. And it might have been the doings of the punch I drank during Dr Immanuel's Session break time. The mysterious doings I would say. Come to think of it, I was already feeling weird before eating anything, but that was probably just because the air-con was super cold and I was freezing. Coming outside the room was just a massive change in temperature and made my body feel weird, which is perfectly normal.

It was a packed lunch, so I started off by eating the Bee Hoon, melted chocolate Eclair and the other funny thing I have no clue about (it sorta tasted sour). Anyway, I felt thirsty after eating dry Bee Hoon, so I went to get the punch. I took a sip, put it back on my chair, and continued eating. I started to feel abit itchy, but thought nothing of it, since it was only abit.

It was only natural that when you feel itchy or hot, you drink more right? So that's what I did, and the itch got worse and worse. I was so itchy that I gulped the whole drink down and threw it in the bin just in time for coming back to the session. I didn't finish the rest of the lunch though, I was too itchy to notice. But once I got back, I started tingling all over. Much like the Fungal Infection, but only worse. It wasn't just the armpit and the groin area, but literally everywhere.

I was shocked, and basically didn't know what to do. Well, I knew one thing I shouldn't do and that was to scratch everywhere, because that wouldn't solve the problem but just complicate things. I thought it was some kind of super serious fungal infection, because I had one of those before just two weeks ago. And so Ern Xu told me that I should zao because there were some form of spots forming on my face as well, and I could feel it.

I decided to zao, without so much as a word to everyone else, except to Naishad, "Look at my face!" I didn't know what else to say, but he simply replied, "I know, I know." And then ushered me out as if he thought it was contagious, lol. But then it meant that it must have been quite obvious, so I began covering my face with my hands, which were also starting to get all bumpy and zombie-like.

I borrowed a friend's phone at the SR Block to call my Dad. He noticed it too at first sight, so I thought it was pretty bad. At the SR Block steps later on, I asked Hua Yang who was also there and we could see it from 3 metres away. Both of my arms looked zombified, which was quite cool and horrifying at the same time. If I didn't feel so itchy and hot all over, then I probably would have thought it to be cool.

But it was itchy and hot all over, so I thought that I was going to die. Like some kind of zombie infestation were it starts eating up your skin and your meat and so on, like leprosy or something. So with these thoughts of utter doom in my head, the only thing I could do was pray, right? And so I did. I felt quite bad, because I only prayed when I thought it was like a life-and-death situation, I probably should pray more often.

But coming back to the story, my Dad picked up around 15 minutes later, and I saw that half of my left hand seemed back to normal. The other half was still zombified though, and I was still feeling itchy all over. We went straight to our family clinic and got the diagnosis of an allergic reaction. Great. That sucks, I thought i would never be allergic to anything. But I guess everyone has his weaknesses.

Dr Lee gave me an injection on my right buttcheek, which was kind of awkward because of several reasons. Number one, I've never got injected on my butt before, like seriously. It was the first time I heard that the injection was stronger and doing it on my arm would mean superb amounts of pain. Well, when it was done, there wasn't much pain. The doctor said it was because all the fat was stored up in that area. Another revelation: I have fats! OMG.

Number two reason, I don't usually undress in front of females. I really don't. They discourage you from doing it in school, otherwise why else would they ban changing in the class room? But anyway, here am I doing it in front of the doctor, who was even holding it still so that the injection would go in properly. Ok, so that was not the first time someone as touched my butt. I realize that many times including the time of my birth, there must have been an instance when my parents were changing my diapers that my bare butt was touched, so that's okay. But it was the first time that someone touched my butt WITH my permission.

Yeah, so other than it being awkward, it was also awesome. Because it actually worked. Dr Lee put some sleeping drug inside it so when I got back home, the first thing I did was...? Sleep? No, haha. You got fooled. I went to bathe before hitting the sack. Lol, I mean come on, you can't sleep in your school uniform can you? And the cool thing is that the moment I woke up, there was no more itchyness, no more heat radiating off my body, no more spots, and no more thoughts about impending doom.

Yup, I was back to normal. I still got an MC for the following friday, so I took the day off anyway and rested at home. And by rest I mean drinking lots of water and playing a selection of computer games. Oh and great tomorrow is like the Chinese Gong Han Test. Going to get like 12/20, again. I've gotten that mark for countless practice Gong Hans already.

Not only that, I discovered Physics practical is also on for the last week of school, and that Social Studies project is due next week. OMG, taking MCs may not be such a good idea after all. I also missed the RLP form deadline, missed the collection of my Raffles Bandana, and of course didn't get my latest practice Gong Han back. Oh well...

Tonsilitis Again

2009-05-14T08:20:00.002+08:00

So not very far away from my previous fungal infection, comes this annual Tonsilitis. My throat feels damn bad now as I am typing because that's what happens when you have Tonsilitis. It's primarily caused by bacteria in your throat, influenced by you eating too many potato chips, which I pretty much like what I do. Anyway, this meant that I am stuck at home, doing my ERP, trying to chiong it actually, and missing Math CCT today. So when I come back to school my throat will probably still be painful, but hopefully not as pain as right now, and I have to somehow get NC to arrange make-up Math CCT for me.

By the way, what is tested for Math CCT? I wasn't actually in the right state of health to revise it this week anyhow.

Yup, so the good thing is that I skipped uniform training, skipped English altruism presentation, skipped Literature skit presentation, and probably a lot more stuff. But no doubt homework will start pouring in on Friday. I also skipped Leadership Studies but I don't know if that's a good thing. There is a session on this Saturday but I may not be going because of my infection and I won't be able to talk well anyway.

I'm quite emo because this is the third time I'm having this dumb infection. And what pains me is that every time I drink, eat or even swallow my saliva, it hurts like crap. And there's nothing I can do except suck on lozenges until it's gone.

Quotable Quotes

"Fk will be short of two variables."
-Nigel, answering the math question

"Britain! Brighton! Bright on!"
-LL

"I know why Wei Tai said 'Cow Popper', because he was thinking of 'Cow's Junior'."
-LL

"Ok, you're in for a shock."
-LL
"Wait, wait! Sir! I'm preparing myself for the shock."
-Ern Xu

"I failed to protect you guys from the clutches of... neh neh I never say anything."
-LL

"You fail your mock test, I'm going to mock you."
-LL

"老师, 我可以跟SzeShen (Ernest)讲话吗?"
-Terence Chew, standing at the door asking for KKE's permission
"讲lor."
-KKE, leaving Terence to stone at the door, apparently expecting them to talk across the room

"不要写那些某某人跳楼自杀..."
-KKE, on what not to write for newspaper reflection
"老师, 那个是Obituary."
-Nigel

"梁文福很好色."
-KKE

"Your class happens to have strange periods."
-MDC, pun on 'periods'

"Pokeball."
-Nigel, when the projector flashed a picture of a ball-shaped Singapore flag

"Do you have a ... account?"
-Hubert, putting a book in his face

"什么是红头巾?"
-KKE
"Samsung woman."
-Nigel, trying to say 'samsui' woman

"咖啡店, 现在也有."
-KKE
"Ya Kun咖啡店."
-Nigel

"什么是那些黄色的东西?"
-Nigel, about the picture
"人啊..."
-KKE

"Not like father pass down to son, that is monarchy."
-EK, implying something in Singapore

"They are sensible mature people, unlike the..."
-EK, about the Swiss
"Britains."
-Edmund, an anti-Britarian

"是不是你给我们那个句子, 我们些那个字."
-Yan Chao, about 造句 questions in the test

"我们讲修辞."
-KKE, about Chinese literary devices
"Char Siew."
-Nigel

Guan Hao sneezes
"Swine flu."
-Nigel

"明天劳动节,咱们在家里劳动."
-KKE, giving out homework

"It's a multi-faceted defence."
-Basil, on asked why his statement was so complicated

"Are you suffering from withdrawal symptoms?"
-MDC, to Gregory

"He has nothing better to do, we are paying him to do nothing."
-MDC, about dengue breeding checkers

"So don't blame me if you can't catch up with your work. Your education is getting screwed up by your school."
-MDC

"It's not raging hormones. There's no such thing as guys have more hormones than girls. That is bullshit."
-MDC

"When we talk about green, what do we think of?"
-MDC, trying to talk about plants and nature
"Islam!"
-Teck Wei, giving a suggestion

"But we'll eat good food so we'll survive, the other's eat rubbish so they'll die."
-MDC, about spending on food

"Gundy."
-Me, when KYap talked about Gandhi

"I believe in myself."
-Edmund
"Then you are a born leader."
-KYap
"Since when did I say that?"
-Edmund

"I think he's an opinion leader. When he says something everyone starts to wonder what it's all about."
-KYap, about Nigel

"Teck Wei, do you have to say such words and undermine the discussion?"
-KYap
"What discussion?"
-Teck Wei, denying the fact that there is a discussion

"Sailing is a very interesting CCA."
-KYap
"Ya, because I'm in it."
-Ernest

"Master I."
-Ern Xu, about Naishad being Head Boy

"What is the opposite of excess?"
-JT
"Incess."
-Teck Wei
"Recess."
-Me

"What do you have to bring for all chemistry lessons?"
-JT
"Calculator."
-Anonymous
"Yes, and besides that?"
-JT
"Brain."
-Douglas

"Even though the bird is trying to fly straight..."
-DT, about directional velocity
"Ha ha ha ha."
-Nigel, catching his own pun

"典当?"
-KKE, asking for the meaning of the word
"Pawn!"
-Nigel, and everyone looks at him, wondering what he really said

"这些问题是关于爱国的."
-KKE
"那就没有关于我们的."
-Nigel

"Who is 吴作栋? What a stupid name!"
-Guan Hao
"Goh Chok Tong."
-Gregory
"Who is Goh Chok Tong?"
-Guan Hao

"It's fuming with HCl. It's a very angry molecule."
-JT

Learning Journey Day '09

2009-05-07T22:22:00.006+08:00

This year's learning journey day was in the after noon for us at 12.30pm and we were visiting two places: Bukit Chandu and Labrador Park. Almost every group goes to Labrador Park, but the first destination is varied. Firstly, we had a really lame and presentation on Singapore's brief war history by a random person. It seems that all the random persons were from this organization called the Singapore History Consultantsm, who had organized the entire Learning Journey for us. After the presentation, which included a few slides on why British troops suck and Japanese troops rock as well as a video footage from a documentary, it was time to set off.

Our tour guide would be this person known as Ms May, which is politically incorrect since you do not address people by their given name, but instead, by their family name. I decided not to care about it, and the long bus journey ensued. It wasn't at all boring though, because you know tour guides, they will often come up and speak on the bus journey about some events or share some stuff about what we are going to do, explore or just talk about general things to do with the Japanese Invasion and Occupation.

I actually brought my new Canon PowerShotA1000 camera, which my great Dad bought for me (thanks Dad!), with 10.0 Megapix (twice as much as my previous one) and 4x optical zoom (also twice as much as my previous one). The reason for buying it was that my previous camera was disfunctioning and scr3wing up alot so it was impossible to tell when it would get spoiled upon attempt to turn it on, or when it wouldn't. As such, this new camera allowed me to take superb pictures and things that were further away. The file size also got a lot bigger. I sent one image file and it was like 3.2MB big.

Coming back to the talk, I didn't learn much except for the three myths thing.

Myth Number 1) The Guns could not be turned around to attack the Japanese troops
In fact, all of the guns were turned around to fire at the Japanese troops except for two, one of them at Buona Vista, which were not turned around only because the troops manning the guns forgot to bring enough turning cable. The others all had rings to rotate it 275 degrees and were used in the battle.

Myth Number 2) The Guns were not used at all in the battle
In fact, the guns were all used, save for the two, in the battle just that they were not effective. The Guns were designed to fire and destroy ships, which meant that the bullets, were designed as armour-piercing rounds, with long time charges to allow the rounds to fully pierce into the armour before exploded. Also when the rounds were fired, they could be clearly heard. The Japanese troops simply opened their ears to hear if the guns were firing at them, and if it was, they would take cover, and when the shells landed, they would run as ar from it as possible. Because of the delayed charge time, it allowed the troops enough time to escape, thus the shell would case minimal damage. It is also highly unprobable that a shot from so far away can land a direct hit on a single soldier.

There were High-explosive fragmentation shells however, and these proved to be effective, but were in very small supply.

Myth Number 3) The Guns were placed facing the wrong way
In fact, the guns were deliberately placed facing the south. The British anticipated a Japanese attack from the south because the forested area in North would be rather difficult to pull through. However, this forested area was developed into coastal roads later on after the building of the guns, and this would later on be used by the Japanese for a swift movement down Melaka. The guns were supposed to face south and protect the southern coastal areas.

It was highly probable that the Japanese would have landed from the south if they did not have the inside intelligence to tell them that there were 29 guns waiting to gun their ships down if they did so.

Meanwhile, I'll let my pictures talk for the most part of this.

The thing they have at the entrance to this museum

This is a mural depicting the Japanese invasion. The man facing us is a malay and the man with his back facing us is the Japanese. In the distance you can see Japanese tanks and fighterplanes, as well as the opium factory burning.

List of names from malay regiment who fought and died at Bukit Chandu but their bodies were never found. You can spot Adnan Bin Saidi's name here.

Japanese wartime binoculars

Japanese bayonet, a weapon attached to the tip of the gun

Malay Parang used as a melee weapon by the Malays on Bukit Chandu

The Crest of the Malay Regiment

A statue of a fat man

A statue of a thinner man

Map of Singapore plotting out where the Japanese troops invaded from.

A glowing Singapore? No that's just a video playing in the foreground with the map of Singapore behind, lol.

The Japanese mess tin is in the perculiar shape of a bean

The mural on the stairwell, which I don't know the meaning of because I went to pee whilst the guide talked about it

A lame game, which has instruction that are not understandable

Visitor's doodle page.

Here is the write-up on Lieutenant Adnan bin Saidi

Erm, Lol. Look I see myself down there

Colonial fan which I don't know if it works

I bet you can't see the ships in the distance

Ye Olde British Mortar

Japanese Rifle and its bayonet attachment

Recess time at the museum

A weird tree that people took photo of, so I did likewise

I was being lame and taking photo of another group who had just arrived

Here is another shot with them gathering around the mural

Three men manning a mortar. Do you see something amiss on the right?

Now you see the thing amiss

Nice view of the sea from Labrador Park

Our group sitting in a pavillion

A weird tower. The top bag spins on its axis, must be some kind of telecommunications device

Entrance to the Labrador Battery. This was the slipway once which led straight to the ocean. Now it doesn't because of reclaimed land.

Yep, trees could have fallen.

Ern Xu's face coming in from the left

1892-built magazine store for the 6-inch guns

The gunsite design looks very much that of a Greek skene

Another group shot.

Sideview of the gunsite

The 6-inch gun itself

Ern Xu with a statue of a soldier carrying a shell

Zexi with a statue of another soldier carrying another shell

The reflection off a piece of glass inside the gun barrel. Notice the little grooves at the side, those are to cause the shell to spin and become more accurate as it cuts through the air. Think of it like a rugby ball.

Two people manning the 6-inch gun, lol.

And Edmund getting shot at. His arms flail as he realizes that his face is insufficient to block the attack.

Edmund is posing with the watchman statue

Me with the gun barrel in the background. Thanks to JT for helping me take this picture!

View of the gun barrel from the gun manning post

A random picture I took for fun. It resembles a stage of sorts.

The gunsite which was stupidly turned into a pavillion. But it was rather comfortable, I must say. Then again, all I need is a rock I can sit on and that'd be quite comfortable enough for me.

The jetty we wished we could go to but never did

I like the way the leaves frame the picture of the ship.

The ships without the leaves. See the difference?

Jian Hao looking into the mysterious door which leads to a room we never went to. It was apparently an ammunitions store, or something like that

Our group. I had to sneak away to take this picture

Nice view of the path back to the bus

Well that's about it folks. We took a bus back and then handed in the feedback forms and then all of us went back home. Yup! :) A day of school is gone and another is come again tomorrow.

Labour Day 09

2009-05-01T17:58:00.003+08:00

What is a day without Labour? Certainly not Labour Day. The day without Labour is the Sabbath Day. So that's the day when we should stop working. I guess I can't complain about the amount of work I have to do on Labour Day, today.

Yesterday, we had the a 2ndRE ThinkQuest meeting with KYap, and I p0nned halfway through. Well, for starters, I was hungry. And secondly, I was quite pissed. And thirdly, I was basically wasting my time.

Naishad, I and Lloyd had earlier contemplated about quitting the group last Wednesday, but they decided to 'not be so bad' and go on with it anyway. I had a different viewpoint. I was completely into the idea of quitting Edmund's group, and there were reasons, of course, not just because I'm some cruel mad person who goes around being a loser quitter. Don't be like that, only shows how weak a person is.

My reason for quitting was that number one, I was fooled. Very simply, I was fooled. Edmund approached me two weeks ago, begging me to join his ThinkQuest narrative group, and I was reluctant at first. But because he stressed on the word 'narrative' I thought like, "Oh, we can write some random nice story and submit it, no website or any of the usual ThinkQuest stuff." So I agreed. It wasn't until later on when Joseph Lee came that I was informed that, "No, it cannot be some story. It must be a proper essay." And also that there had to be a website, which he was taking care of.

Not that the website was much of a problem, but that the essay, evidence and gathering all of that, all of which I totally did not sign up for, would have to be done by tomorrow 1pm. And there's supposed to be some kind of meeting with KYap at 1pm tomorrow, of which I am so not going because I'm singing for Worship today at TM. So I'm sorry but I can't be there.

And perhaps I'm sorry but I can't do any of the work either. Or maybe I can just do some and pass it off, so even if I do minimal work my name will still be on that thing, and by some retardedly insane chances we win, I can get a Laptop. However, ThinkQuest judged are scr3wed up, as usual, and I really don't see why we actually bother participating in it, seeing as all they do it take people's hard work, add it to their library and be done with it. Also, only top 5 get a prize and a laptop, out of billions in the world. How would one know that the top 5 aren't just some dumb fake groups that they came up with themselves?

Simple answer. RI has one one spot out of that top 5 before, and they were rewarded with Laptops and etc. As such, because of the prize, I joined ThinkQuest Narrative, not knowing the consequences or outcomes, or what was expected and required of me. I decided that because I was suddenly loaded with all these responsibilities that I first made the decision to quit.

Quitting is not always a bad thing. Guan Hao has already proven this in the English Speech Assessment thing. It isn't really. People should quit smoking, people should quit taking drugs and people should quit being Ah Bengs and quit living pointless lives that lead only to the fire depths of hell. But not just that, we should also quit when we know that we're going to fail.

Wait a minute, doesn't that sound wrong? Much like coming from a person who is afraid of failure. Will you let fear make you quit? How can you be leader if you are so easily influenced by fear? If you are thinking these questions in your head, then I tell you that even LKY had fears, and so leaders do not necessarily have no fears. They at least do not give up in spite of their fears.

This is a totally different matter altogether. This is not fear of failure, this is knowledge of failure. We are going to fail and there is no doubt about it. Look, people have been working on the ThinkQuest Narrative for more than half a year, and we have to come up with everything from start to finish in 5 days. This incredibly short chionging time span makes it incredibly impossible. It's just not possible. And even if it is possible, I'm not willing to bear the costs of making this possibility come true. It's going to take up too much of my time over the weekends, and I cannot commit to this kind of schedule. I'm serious, even if its only for the weekend.

Lloyd and Naishad decided to stay on the team, and then accuse me of 'leaving the meeting halfway' and that 'I better do my work'. Then this whole comparing thing comes in. If other people can do it, then why can't I? My simple answer, I can. Of course I can chiong it in the weekend, and of course I can take on the responsibility and do the best I can despite the time constraint. But the question is, do I want to? Am I willing to do my best when failure is certain? Why should I continue when I have already failed?

When you fail, you do not keep doing the same thing in hope that you succeed. When you fail, you stop doing that, try something else and hope that it works much better than your previous attempt. Similarly, when you know you will fail and have already failed (maybe by some prophesy or oracle or vision or obvious common sense) then there is no point in continuing to fulfill your pessimistic views that you will fail. Instead, stop doing that thing altogether, and try another method to succeed. In other words, give up on ThinkQuest and see what other areas suit your abilities better, and then excel on these.

You may call me pessimistic because I keep saying that failure is not a probability but a definite outcome. But my definition of failure is not winning a prize. Why do you think I said I failed last year for RE? It's because we didn't win anything. Not winning is a failure in itself, and there are other failures within that process. I might succeed in completing my responsibility, but we will still fail to win anything in the end of it all. Would this small success be enough to drive my willpower?

Why should I chase after pointless success? I can succeed in eating ice kachang. I can succeed in failing. I can always succeed in doing my work, Andy, anytime without having to fail on a larger scale. In team form. It is my 2ndRE anyway, and I do have to right to drop it, and nobody else, not even Principal, Senior Deputy Headmaster, Deputy Principals, Teachers or fellow Rafflesians.

And I will exercise this right when I feel it necessary. My other work that I have to do for this week is the Literature thing, the History thing and study for Higher Chinese Test on Monday. And I'm like already dead after doing the Lit thing. And I'm just being damn emo. I was damn emo when I came back home on Thursday after p0nning the meeting.

I was just freaking pissed off at the fact that I have to uphold this kind of academic responsibility, integrity in a team and not let down KYap or the rest of my team members and I ask why the heck do I have this responsbility and why the heck do I have to uphold it. Why can't I just make my own decisions as to whether or not I can quit this team without getting badmouthed, seen as a quitter, or getting reprimanded by KYap, or anyone around me? Why not?!

As you can see, I have no freaking choice so I'm doing this stupid thing anyway despite having also to do History reflections and the Macbeth Lit thing. I'm not actually blaming anyone. The one I'm going to have to blame the most are those scr3wed up ThinkQuest judges who created this scr3wed up pointless competition which is incredibly unfair to us. If it weren't for their stupid rule of '15 years and below means that if you are 15 years and two days then you are older than 15 years' so you have to participate in the under 19 category, then maybe I would be less emo than I am right now.

But as of the moment, I shall just wallow in self-pity and try to do as many things as possible whilst going on a hunger strike and not eating dinner on Labour Day because I have too many freaking things to do tonight and tomorrow is too hectic (got TM412) and Sunday has church service. And I have to download files off my Yahoo! Groups... brilliant! Just great.

Have a Happy Labour Day all!

Colour Your World with Words #7

2009-05-01T17:55:00.001+08:00

The Beggar
by Anton Chekhov

"Kind sir, be so good as to notice a poor, hungry man. I have not tasted food for three days. I have not a five-kopeck piece for a night's lodging. I swear by God! For five years I was a village schoolmaster and lost my post through the intrigues of the Zemstvo. I was the victim of false witness. I have been out of a place for a year now."

Skvortsov, a Petersburg lawyer, looked at the speaker's tattered dark blue overcoat, at his muddy, drunken eyes, at the red patches on his cheeks, and it seemed to him that he had seen the man before.

"And now I am offered a post in the Kaluga province," the beggar continued, "but I have not the means for the journey there. Graciously help me! I am ashamed to ask, but... I am compelled by circumstances."

Skvortsov looked at his goloshes, of which one was shallow like a shoe, while the other came high up the leg like a boot, and suddenly remembered.

"Listen, the day before yesterday I met you in Sadovoy Street," he said, "and then you told me, not that you were a village schoolmaster, but that you were a student who had been expelled. Do you remember?"

"N-o. No, that cannot be so!" the beggar muttered in confusion. "I am a village schoolmaster, and if you wish it I can show you documents to prove it."

"That's enough lies! You called yourself a student, and even told me what you were expelled for. Do you remember?"

Skvortsov flushed, and with a look of disgust on his face turned away from the ragged figure.

"It's contemptible, sir!" he cried angrily. "It's a swindle! I'll hand you over to the police, damn you! You are poor and hungry, but that does not give you the right to lie so shamelessly!"

The ragged figure took hold of the door-handle and, like a bird in a snare, looked round the hall desperately.

"I... I am not lying," he muttered. "I can show documents."

"Who can believe you?" Skvortsov went on, still indignant. "To exploit the sympathy of the public for village schoolmasters and students -- it's so low, so mean, so dirty! It's revolting!"

Skvortsov flew into a rage and gave the beggar a merciless scolding. The ragged fellow's insolent lying aroused his disgust and aversion, was an offence against what he, Skvortsov, loved and prized in himself: kindliness, a feeling heart, sympathy for the unhappy. By his lying, by his treacherous assault upon compassion, the individual had, as it were, defiled the charity which he liked to give to the poor with no misgivings in his heart. The beggar at first defended himself, protested with oaths, then he sank into silence and hung his head, overcome with shame.

"Sir!" he said, laying his hand on his heart, "I really was... lying! I am not a student and not a village schoolmaster. All that's mere invention! I used to be in the Russian choir, and I was turned out of it for drunkenness. But what can I do? Believe me, in God's name, I can't get on without lying -- when I tell the truth no one will give me anything. With the truth one may die of hunger and freeze without a night's lodging! What you say is true, I understand that, but... what am I to do?"

"What are you to do? You ask what are you to do?" cried Skvortsov, going close up to him. "Work -- that's what you must do! You must work!"

"Work... I know that myself, but where can I get work?"

"Nonsense. You are young, strong, and healthy, and could always find work if you wanted to. But you know you are lazy, pampered, drunken! You reek of vodka like a pothouse! You have become false and corrupt to the marrow of your bones and fit for nothing but begging and lying! If you do graciously condescend to take work, you must have a job in an office, in the Russian choir, or as a billiard-marker, where you will have a salary and have nothing to do! But how would you like to undertake manual labour? I'll be bound, you wouldn't be a house porter or a factory hand! You are too genteel for that!"

"What things you say, really..." said the beggar, and he gave a bitter smile. "How can I get manual work? It's rather late for me to be a shopman, for in trade one has to begin from a boy; no one would take me as a house porter, because I am not of that class... And I could not get work in a factory; one must know a trade, and I know nothing."

"Nonsense! You always find some justification! Wouldn't you like to chop wood?"

"I would not refuse to, but the regular woodchoppers are out of work now."

"Oh, all idlers argue like that! As soon as you are offered anything you refuse it. Would you care to chop wood for me?"

"Certainly I will..."

"Very good, we shall see... Excellent. We'll see!" Skvortsov, in nervous haste; and not without malignant pleasure, rubbing his hands, summoned his cook from the kitchen.

"Here, Olga," he said to her, "take this gentleman to the shed and let him chop some wood."

The beggar shrugged his shoulders as though puzzled, and irresolutely followed the cook. It was evident from his demeanour that he had consented to go and chop wood, not because he was hungry and wanted to earn money, but simply from shame and amour propre, because he had been taken at his word. It was clear, too, that he was suffering from the effects of vodka, that he was unwell, and felt not the faintest inclination to work.

Skvortsov hurried into the dining-room. There from the window which looked out into the yard he could see the woodshed and everything that happened in the yard. Standing at the window, Skvortsov saw the cook and the beggar come by the back way into the yard and go through the muddy snow to the woodshed. Olga scrutinized her companion angrily, and jerking her elbow unlocked the woodshed and angrily banged the door open.

"Most likely we interrupted the woman drinking her coffee," thought Skvortsov. "What a cross creature she is! "

Then he saw the pseudo-schoolmaster and pseudo-student seat himself on a block of wood, and, leaning his red cheeks upon his fists, sink into thought. The cook flung an axe at his feet, spat angrily on the ground, and, judging by the expression of her lips, began abusing him. The beggar drew a log of wood towards him irresolutely, set it up between his feet, and diffidently drew the axe across it. The log toppled and fell over. The beggar drew it towards him, breathed on his frozen hands, and again drew the axe along it as cautiously as though he were afraid of its hitting his golosh or chopping off his fingers. The log fell over again.

Skvortsov's wrath had passed off by now, he felt sore and ashamed at the thought that he had forced a pampered, drunken, and perhaps sick man to do hard, rough work in the cold.

"Never mind, let him go on..." he thought, going from the dining-room into his study. "I am doing it for his good!"

An hour later Olga appeared and announced that the wood had been chopped up.

"Here, give him half a rouble," said Skvortsov. "If he likes, let him come and chop wood on the first of every month... There will always be work for him."

On the first of the month the beggar turned up and again earned half a rouble, though he could hardly stand. From that time forward he took to turning up frequently, and work was always found for him: sometimes he would sweep the snow into heaps, or clear up the shed, at another he used to beat the rugs and the mattresses. He always received thirty to forty kopecks for his work, and on one occasion an old pair of trousers was sent out to him.

When he moved, Skvortsov engaged him to assist in packing and moving the furniture. On this occasion the beggar was sober, gloomy, and silent; he scarcely touched the furniture, walked with hanging head behind the furniture vans, and did not even try to appear busy; he merely shivered with the cold, and was overcome with confusion when the men with the vans laughed at his idleness, feebleness, and ragged coat that had once been a gentleman's. After the removal Skvortsov sent for him.

"Well, I see my words have had an effect upon you," he said, giving him a rouble. "This is for your work. I see that you are sober and not disinclined to work. What is your name?"

"Lushkov."

"I can offer you better work, not so rough, Lushkov. Can you write?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then go with this note to-morrow to my colleague and he will give you some copying to do. Work, don't drink, and don't forget what I said to you. Good-bye."

Skvortsov, pleased that he had put a man in the path of rectitude, patted Lushkov genially on the shoulder, and even shook hands with him at parting.

Lushkov took the letter, departed, and from that time forward did not come to the back-yard for work.

Two years passed. One day as Skvortsov was standing at the ticket-office of a theatre, paying for his ticket, he saw beside him a little man with a lambskin collar and a shabby cat's-skin cap. The man timidly asked the clerk for a gallery ticket and paid for it with kopecks.

"Lushkov, is it you?" asked Skvortsov, recognizing in the little man his former woodchopper. "Well, what are you doing? Are you getting on all right?"

"Pretty well... I am in a notary's office now. I earn thirty-five roubles."

"Well, thank God, that's capital. I rejoice for you. I am very, very glad, Lushkov. You know, in a way, you are my godson. It was I who shoved you into the right way. Do you remember what a scolding I gave you, eh? You almost sank through the floor that time. Well, thank you, my dear fellow, for remembering my words."

"Thank you too," said Lushkov. "If I had not come to you that day, maybe I should be calling myself a schoolmaster or a student still. Yes, in your house I was saved, and climbed out of the pit."

"I am very, very glad."

"Thank you for your kind words and deeds. What you said that day was excellent. I am grateful to you and to your cook, God bless that kind, noble-hearted woman. What you said that day was excellent; I am indebted to you as long as I live, of course, but it was your cook, Olga, who really saved me."

"How was that?"

"Why, it was like this. I used to come to you to chop wood and she would begin: 'Ah, you drunkard! You God-forsaken man! And yet death does not take you!' and then she would sit opposite me, lamenting, looking into my face and wailing: 'You unlucky fellow! You have no gladness in this world, and in the next you will burn in hell, poor drunkard! You poor sorrowful creature!' and she always went on in that style, you know. How often she upset herself, and how many tears she shed over me I can't tell you. But what affected me most -- she chopped the wood for me! Do you know, sir, I never chopped a single log for you -- she did it all! How it was she saved me, how it was I changed, looking at her, and gave up drinking, I can't explain. I only know that what she said and the noble way she behaved brought about a change in my soul, and I shall never forget it. It's time to go up, though, they are just going to ring the bell."

Lushkov bowed and went off to the gallery.

OBS Finale

2009-04-24T22:21:00.004+08:00

Lols, the long-awaited Finale has finally arrived. I think it was like around 3 months late or so.

The Yao Yuan band from RS last year came to play again.

OBS Finale - BandAge Performance

There was a Duet by Yao Yuan and Nishanth, followed by a special appearance of Theophilus for the Batch Song.

OBS Finale - Batch Performance

Quotable Quotes

"Great camaty..."
-Nigel
"Great calamity, you mean."
-JLim

"Let's talk about the witches, since we're more interested in them."
-JLim
"Yeah."
-Jian Hao, with connotation

"Would you consider Oedipus as less 'human'?"
-JLim
"Yes, he did it with his mom."
-Izzat

"Wei Tai, why are you sitting next to him? What if you get infected? You are one of the last hopes for this class!"
-LL, about Wei Tai sitting next Ryan

"Normal mentorship is free-of-charge. But this one is Gold Class."
-LL, about his mentorship

"Mr Lim will say, 'Don't worry, very easy,' and then give you something that kills you."
-LL

"What is an example of a falsifiable statement? Jian Hao."
-LL
"Ninjas are immortal."
-Jian Hao
"If you can find them, that is."
-LL, replying
"Can! Go to Japan, lah!"
-Nigel

"Sir! Can you draw the argument map?"
-Nigel
"Nehhh!"
-LL, pointing at the argument map on the board

"Modus Ponens, Modus Pollens, Modus Nipples or Modens Onens?"
-LL
"Modulus Equations."
-Nigel

"Gay men are not men ah? Then what? Kueh ah?"
-LL

"She's a very nice lady."
-JLim, about RS

"What is the culture for guests over here?"
-JLim
"Put a chair at the back and put chewing gum on it."
-Nigel

"So when do you want to watch it? Huh? June Hols?"
-JLim, trying to decide what date to watch Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet

Hao Tian coughts like crap in class damn loudly
"Hao Tian... you should change your cigarette brand."
-Herr Spindler

"放手!"
-Cheng Cheng, in SS video, heard as the F word

"Can you tell me one motion that is undergoing constant acceleration?"
-DT
"Passing motion."
-Douglas

"So, on the second second..."
-DT, after which everyone lame laughs.

"It's not so simple, but neither is it complex."
-DT

"And this was done by..."
-NC
"Nigel!"
-Nigel
"Ok, Hubert."
-NC, suanning Nigel

"我写这么多错字呀!"
-KKE, when he wrote a lot of wrong words on the board
"老师,你要不要词典?"
-Nigel

"因为是'一名'中学校长."
-KKE, pun on Yi Ming
Everyone lame laughs

"Making the bed is a chore?"
-KYap
"Leaning is a chore."
-Me, pun on 'When I lean it is a chore'

"Where should he go?"
-KYap, on Charlie and Tiffany case study
"Geylang."
-Jian Hao

"In the end I will have to go and answer for it."
-KYap
"Sir, it's a great sacrifice."
-Edmund

"Few years down the road, when I write my resume, I want to write there RI and not RK."
-KYap, making a random comment
"Huh?"
-3M, not getting it
"Raffles Kindergarten."
-KYap, after which everyone lame laughs

"Just a few years ago, Singapore's population was only 2.4 x 10⁶."
-JT
"People are getting more lusty."
-Nigel, explaining
"You mean, people are getting more productive."
-JT

"I'm gay what."
-Samuel, confessing

"Zi Jie got experience. He got 63 break-ups."
-Yi Ming

ORA Walk-a-Jogathon 2009

2009-04-18T23:41:00.003+08:00

Being the first time I actually bothered to go for the Jogathon, I was rewarded with a free shirt, and a nice pencil case which actually cost me $3.50. Unfortunately, the camera crisis of mine has yet to be solved (and will probably never be solved) so there are no pictures available for show and tell.

It started off with everyone assembling at the RIJC Parade Square. I didn't actually know where that was until I saw like random flag poles with flags on them and quickly interpreted it was a Parade Square podium. The Parade Square itself was pretty small, and I'm just confused at how the JC people manage to squeeze within that area, provided that they have twice our number and that we use up one entire parade square larger than theirs. They must have had some secret floating invisible platform somewhere I guess.

I don't know why we had to sing the National Anthem, but it was quite funny after that because the dude saying the pledge scr3wed it up. He said, "...so as to achieve happiness, peace, prosperity... uhh... prosperity, peace....uhh, so as to achieve happiness, prosperity and progress for our nation." Which made all of us who were at the parade square laugh. The dude was from RIJC as well. So that's saying something but I'm not implying anything, you can go make up your own conclusion based on the fact that an RIJC dude scr3wed up the pledge. I take no responsibility for any stereotyping, harm, defamation, death or depression caused by the reading of this post in one way or another.

For some reason, we had briefing of 'in the case when it rains' which was highly unlikely, seeing as it was sunny and there were barely any clouds in sight. Might as well have said 'in the case when the sun explodes' according to Yao Yuan. Or even more probable, Matthias rolling into everyone along the way. Matthias came late and joined us just before the walk began. RI started 5 mins after RGS, for some stupid reason.

It was really a walk, and was quite boring as well. Then at the Tennis Court Gates they made everyone squeeze into one small gateway. Me, Nick and Jason tried using the other small gateway and then there was like a teacher over there looking angry and pointing at the other gateway saying incomprehensible loud mutterings which jolly well could have been inaudible vulgarities.

Anyway, we walked for I think about 15 or more minutes, and then came back to the Parade Square to collect a $1 coupon each. I should have went back over and over again to collect $4 so I could get the Pencil Case for free. Oh well. The actual fair wasn't actually very fun. I spent most of my time trying to sell epic fail RINCC cookies to customers who were ignorant to the fact that some of them tasted like crap.

At least that's 3 hours of CIP clocked in for me. Other than that, I bought the pencil case from the RIPB booth. Next year, RINCC should also start making its own merchandise. Get some ownage design and stick it on somewhere. Notebook, badges, pencil case...etc. Should try to brainstorm more. The pencil cases were so popular that they actually ran out of the 'RAFFLES' design at around 10.30am or so.

There was also this street dancing performance and several other musical performances which I didn't actually catch because I was at the booth getting CIP hours. I was walking with Lien Chew until 10.30am, then he had to go off, so I went back home too. Ypu, so that's all about it for ORA.

Thanks to MDC for the T-Shirt!

Quotable Quotes

"You tell me the joke ah, if it's not funny..."
-NC

"What is falsifiable?"
-Ern Xu, on definition
"Can be falsified!"
-LL, explaining

"Basil, if you fall down, I'll walk there and step on you. Then continuously stamp my foot and say, '死了没有?!死了没有?!'"
-LL, on Basil sittig on two legs of his chair

"他练习拿水."
-Ern Xu, on Yan Chao being a waterboy

"I really hate it when people don't label..."
-NC
"Their... histograms."
-Nigel, finishing his sentence

"[a name], [a name], [a name] and..."
-JT, listing a set a of names
"Basil!"
-Basil, wanting to be in that list
"Zi Jie!"
-JT, concluding

"I seem to be always laughing at my own jokes."
-JT, about his lame jokes

"You're going to get a table, ok?"
-JT, talking about chemistry and banging the table
Everyone laughs in lameness at his pun

"Did you know that everyone of us has a mickey mouse in our body?"
-JT, trying to tell us a joke I heard before
"Down there."
-Jian Hao, suggesting indecent things
"This knee, okay? Disney!"
-JT

"What is TCS?"
-Anonymous, asking JLim
"Tradition Chinese Medicine!"
-Ryan
"That's TCM lah!"
-Nigel
"Are you serious? You don't know what's TCS?"
-JLim
"Sir, what's TCS?"
-Anonymous
"TCS is... err..."
-JLim
"Sir, you don't even know!"
-Nigel

"Aiyah, 这种人啊, 很什么什么."
-Nigel, about people who leave lesson halfway when teacher not in class

"毛泽, 毛泽, 毛泽, 毛泽..."
-Me, swinging back and forth on chair and saying MaoZeDong's first two characters in rhythem
"Who is that ah?"
-NC, hearing me
"Yi Zu."
-Everyone
"I notice it in the other class also, is it a symptom?"
-NC
"It's a symptom of AIDS."
-Nigel, trying to be funny
"Then Nigel why aren't you showing it?"
-Ernest, jacking him

"O₂ is water."
-Nigel, confusing oxygen with the water chemical formula.

Colour Your World with Words #6

2009-04-16T06:31:00.002+08:00

Them Notorious Pigs
by Lucy Maud Montgomery

John Harrington was a woman-hater, or thought that he was, which amounts to the same thing. He was forty-five and, having been handsome in his youth, was a fine-looking man still. He had a remarkably good farm and was a remarkably good farmer. He also had a garden which was the pride and delight of his heart or, at least, it was before Mrs. Hayden's pigs got into it.

Sarah King, Harrington's aunt and housekeeper, was deaf and crabbed, and very few visitors ever came to the house. This suited Harrington. He was a good citizen and did his duty by the community, but his bump of sociability was undeveloped. He was also a contented man, looking after his farm, improving his stock, and experimenting with new bulbs in undisturbed serenity. This, however, was all too good to last. A man is bound to have some troubles in this life, and Harrington's were near their beginning when Perry Hayden bought the adjoining farm from the heirs of Shakespeare Ely, deceased, and moved in.

To be sure, Perry Hayden, poor fellow, did not bother Harrington much, for he died of pneumonia a month after he came there, but his widow carried on the farm with the assistance of a lank hired boy. Her own children, Charles and Theodore, commonly known as Bobbles and Ted, were as yet little more than babies.

The real trouble began when Mary Hayden's pigs, fourteen in number and of half-grown voracity, got into Harrington's garden. A railing, a fir grove, and an apple orchard separated the two establishments, but these failed to keep the pigs within bounds.

Harrington had just got his garden planted for the season, and to go out one morning and find a horde of enterprising porkers rooting about in it was, to put it mildly, trying. He was angry, but as it was a first offence he drove the pigs out with tolerable calmness, mended the fence, and spent the rest of the day repairing damages.

Three days later the pigs got in again. Harrington relieved his mind by some scathing reflections on women who tried to run farms. Then he sent Mordecai, his hired man, over to the Hayden place to ask Mrs. Hayden if she would be kind enough to keep her pigs out of his garden. Mrs. Hayden sent back word that she was very sorry and would not let it occur again. Nobody, not even John Harrington, could doubt that she meant what she said. But she had reckoned without the pigs. They had not forgotten the flavour of Egyptian fleshpots as represented by the succulent young shoots in the Harrington domains. A week later Mordecai came in and told Harrington that "them notorious pigs" were in his garden again.

There is a limit to everyone's patience. Harrington left Mordecai to drive them out, while he put on his hat and stalked over to the Haydens' place. Ted and Bobbles were playing at marbles in the lane and ran when they saw him coming. He got close up to the little low house among the apple trees before Mordecai appeared in the yard, driving the pigs around the barn. Mrs. Hayden was sitting on her doorstep, paring her dinner potatoes, and stood up hastily when she saw her visitor.

Harrington had never seen his neighbour at close quarters before. Now he could not help seeing that she was a very pretty little woman, with wistful, dark blue eyes and an appealing expression. Mary Hayden had been next to a beauty in her girlhood, and she had a good deal of her bloom left yet, although hard work and worry were doing their best to rob her of it. But John Harrington was an angry man and did not care whether the woman in question was pretty or not. Her pigs had rooted up his garden--that fact filled his mind.

"Mrs. Hayden, those pigs of yours have been in my garden again. I simply can't put up with this any longer. Why in the name of reason don't you look after your animals better? If I find them in again I'll set my dog on them, I give you fair warning."

A faint colour had crept into Mary Hayden's soft, milky-white cheeks during this tirade, and her voice trembled as she said, "I'm very sorry, Mr. Harrington. I suppose Bobbles forgot to shut the gate of their pen again this morning. He is so forgetful."

"I'd lengthen his memory, then, if I were you," returned Harrington grimly, supposing that Bobbles was the hired man. "I'm not going to have my garden ruined just because he happens to be forgetful. I am speaking my mind plainly, madam. If you can't keep your stock from being a nuisance to other people you ought not to try to run a farm at all."

Then did Mrs. Hayden sit down upon the doorstep and burst into tears. Harrington felt, as Sarah King would have expressed it, "every which way at once." Here was a nice mess! What a nuisance women were--worse than the pigs!

"Oh, don't cry, Mrs. Hayden," he said awkwardly. "I didn't mean--well, I suppose I spoke too strongly. Of course I know you didn't mean to let the pigs in. There, do stop crying! I beg your pardon if I've hurt your feelings."

"Oh, it isn't that," sobbed Mrs. Hayden, wiping away her tears. "It's only--I've tried so hard--and everything seems to go wrong. I make such mistakes. As for your garden, sir. I'll pay for the damage my pigs have done if you'll let me know what it comes to."

She sobbed again and caught her breath like a grieved child. Harrington felt like a brute. He had a queer notion that if he put his arm around her and told her not to worry over things women were not created to attend to he would be expressing his feelings better than in any other way. But of course he couldn't do that. Instead, he muttered that the damage didn't amount to much after all, and he hoped she wouldn't mind what he said, and then he got himself away and strode through the orchard like a man in a desperate hurry.

Mordecai had gone home and the pigs were not to be seen, but a chubby little face peeped at him from between two scrub, bloom-white cherry trees.

"G'way, you bad man!" said Bobbles vindictively. "G'way! You made my mommer cry--I saw you. I'm only Bobbles now, but when I grow up I'll be Charles Henry Hayden and you won't dare to make my mommer cry then."

Harrington smiled grimly. "So you're the lad who forgets to shut the pigpen gate, are you? Come out here and let me see you. Who is in there with you?"

"Ted is. He's littler than me. But I won't come out. I don't like you. G'way home."

Harrington obeyed. He went home and to work in his garden. But work as hard as he would, he could not forget Mary Hayden's grieved face.

"I was a brute!" he thought. "Why couldn't I have mentioned the matter gently? I daresay she has enough to trouble her. Confound those pigs!"

* * * * *
After that there was a time of calm. Evidently something had been done to Bobbles' memory or perhaps Mrs. Hayden attended to the gate herself. At all events the pigs were not seen and Harrington's garden blossomed like the rose. But Harrington himself was in a bad state.

For one thing, wherever he looked he saw the mental picture of his neighbour's tired, sweet face and the tears in her blue eyes. The original he never saw, which only made matters worse. He wondered what opinion she had of him and decided that she must think him a cross old bear. This worried him. He wished the pigs would break in again so that he might have a chance to show how forbearing he could be.

One day he gathered a nice mess of tender young greens and sent them over to Mrs. Hayden by Mordecai. At first he had thought of sending her some flowers, but that seemed silly, and besides, Mordecai and flowers were incongruous. Mrs. Hayden sent back a very pretty message of thanks, whereat Harrington looked radiant and Mordecai, who could see through a stone wall as well as most people, went out to the barn and chuckled.

"Ef the little widder hain't caught him! Who'd a-thought it?"

The next day one adventurous pig found its way alone into the Harrington garden. Harrington saw it get in and at the same moment he saw Mrs. Hayden running through her orchard. She was in his yard by the time he got out.

Her sunbonnet had fallen back and some loose tendrils of her auburn hair were curling around her forehead. Her cheeks were so pink and her eyes so bright from running that she looked almost girlish.

"Oh, Mr. Harrington," she said breathlessly, "that pet pig of Bobbles' is in your garden again. He only got in this minute. I saw him coming and I ran right after him."

"He's there, all right," said Harrington cheerfully, "but I'll get him out in a jiffy. Don't tire yourself. Won't you go into the house and rest while I drive him around?"

Mrs. Hayden, however, was determined to help and they both went around to the garden, set the gate open, and tried to drive the pig out. But Harrington was not thinking about pigs, and Mrs. Hayden did not know quite so much about driving them as Mordecai did; as a consequence they did not make much headway. In her excitement Mrs. Hayden ran over beds and whatever came in her way, and Harrington, in order to keep near her, ran after her. Between them they spoiled things about as much as a whole drove of pigs would have done.

But at last the pig grew tired of the fun, bolted out of the gate, and ran across the yard to his own place. Mrs. Hayden followed slowly and Harrington walked beside her.

"Those pigs are all to be shut up tomorrow," she said. "Hiram has been fixing up a place for them in his spare moments and it is ready at last."

"Oh, I wouldn't," said Harrington hastily. "It isn't good for pigs to be shut up so young. You'd better let them run a while yet."

"No," said Mrs. Hayden decidedly. "They have almost worried me to death already. In they go tomorrow."

They were at the lane gate now, and Harrington had to open it and let her pass through. He felt quite desperate as he watched her trip up through the rows of apple trees, her blue gingham skirt brushing the lush grasses where a lacy tangle of sunbeams and shadows lay. Bobbles and Ted came running to meet her and the three, hand in hand, disappeared from sight.

Harrington went back to the house, feeling that life was flat, stale, and unprofitable. That evening at the tea table he caught himself wondering what it would be like to see Mary Hayden sitting at his table in place of Sarah King, with Bobbles and Ted on either hand. Then he found out what was the matter with him. He was in love, fathoms deep, with the blue-eyed widow!

Presumably the pigs were shut up the next day, for Harrington's garden was invaded no more. He stood it for a week and then surrendered at discretion. He filled a basket with early strawberries and went across to the Hayden place, boldly enough to all appearance, but with his heart thumping like any schoolboy's.

The front door stood hospitably open, flanked by rows of defiant red and yellow hollyhocks. Harrington paused on the step, with his hand outstretched to knock. Somewhere inside he heard a low sobbing. Forgetting all about knocking, he stepped softly in and walked to the door of the little sitting-room. Bobbles was standing behind him in the middle of the kitchen but Harrington did not see him. He was looking at Mary Hayden, who was sitting by the table in the room with her arms flung out over it and her head bowed on them. She was crying softly in a hopeless fashion.

Harrington put down his strawberries. "Mary!" he exclaimed.

Mrs. Hayden straightened herself up with a start and looked at him, her lips quivering and her eyes full of tears.

"What is the matter?" said Harrington anxiously. "Is anything wrong?"

"Oh, nothing much," Said Mrs. Hayden, trying to recover herself. "Yes, there is too. But it is very foolish of me to be going on like this. I didn't know anyone was near. And I was feeling so discouraged. The colt broke his leg in the swamp pasture today and Hiram had to shoot him. It was Ted's colt. But there, there is no use in crying over it."

And by way of proving this, the poor, tired, overburdened little woman began to cry again. She was past caring whether Harrington saw her or not.

The woman-hater was so distressed that he forgot to be nervous. He sat down and put his arm around her and spoke out what was in his mind without further parley.

"Don't cry, Mary. Listen to me. You were never meant to run a farm and be killed with worry. You ought to be looked after and petted. I want you to marry me and then everything will be all right. I've loved you ever since that day I came over here and made you cry. Do you think you can like me a little, Mary?"

It may be that Mrs. Hayden was not very much surprised, because Harrington's face had been like an open book the day they chased the pig out of the garden together. As for what she said, perhaps Bobbles, who was surreptitiously gorging himself on Harrington's strawberries, may tell you, but I certainly shall not.

The little brown house among the apple trees is shut up now and the boundary fence belongs to ancient history. Sarah King has gone also and Mrs. John Harrington reigns royally in her place. Bobbles and Ted have a small, blue-eyed, much-spoiled sister, and there is a pig on the estate who may die of old age, but will never meet his doom otherwise. It is Bobbles' pig and one of the famous fourteen.

Mordecai still shambles around and worships Mrs. Harrington. The garden is the same as of yore, but the house is a different place and Harrington is a different man. And Mordecai will tell you with a chuckle, "It was them notorious pigs as did it all."

My Superhero is Better than Your Superhero

2009-04-12T23:02:00.005+08:00

That is because my Superhero is Jesus!

So we had our Easter Outreach yesterday at KCP School Auditorium. I invited some people, then they all cannot come, or give a random excuse like 'personal matter' or even more appealing pathos 'personal family matter', which is usually 80-90% fake and made-up out of the inability to come up with a better excuse, or the inability to tell the truth such as 'I am lazy' and so on.

Moving on to more pressing issues, our CG Outing consisted of 3 people. Timo, myself and Shao Hong. The others were either doing Outreach preparation, coming later, or not coming at all. What happened was that we basically walked around Plaza Sing aimlessly and ate at Long John Silvers, all the while talking crap and all and sundry. Timo mentioned that our CG was dead, and there is much room to agree. I suppose we should come up with a CG Logo and with that, a shirt to boost our CG morale and 'togetherness'.

Here is something cool I took photo of when we were taking the MRT to Bishan. The ground is apparently cracking beneath our feet. What it actually is, is this sticker that they pasted on the ground.

Come to think of it, Jun Hao reminded me about following up with MIAs, and so far, our only two are Eleanor and Eastella, both of whom probably have some school commitment on Saturdays so can't come for TM. Still must pray for them, yup.

After praying for two weeks plus, as a CG, we managed to bring down 4 friends in total. Matt Chan brought down 2 and Anne brought down 2 as well. I guess it wasn't that small in the end, but there were quite a few people who didn't come like Titus, Dexter, Zhi Ting and the 2 MIAs. Probably because of work, or too emo that friends never come.

The entire thing only started at 4.30pm because there was some delay in people arriving since it was raining heavily and all. The registration also took quite sometime and everyone was given this sticker with their name written on it with a marker to paste on their shirts so that new people would feel more comfortable, knowing people's names. And the usual name switching always happens, so I won't dwell much into that.

It started off with a music video of a song which went something like 'Jesus, you're my superhero'. The cartoon animation was quite nice and I think it did set a nice mood to the entire event. Following that was a short worship session of 3 songs. And it was quite good. =] Ya, then we learned that our two MCs where Ian Chew and Amy Tan, who were random and funny at the same time. I was quite taken aback that I did not discover the letter hidden under the seat beforehand, because I suspected that many others already did, and being not-in-the-know is just unsettling. The game had a severe lack of prizes: Amy had to give prizes in the form of applauding at random actions.

The game was called 'Human Scrabble' and it works simply. Everyone has one letter, and then the name of a superhero will be flashed on the screen. The first group to come down and form the word wins. The words were: Superman, Savior and Jesus. In that exact order. I pretty much went up for all three, maybe too enthusiastic, didn't get anything anyway. My hopes were dashed and I went back to my seat, and decided to let others have a go.

The next game was the usual 'Send the _____est person in your CG down to do something' game. The first word was fittest, and then bravest. Matthew Chan went up for the first one and all he had to do was attempt to stretch the word 'Ittedakimasu' as long as possible with one breath, and this attempt won him a camp notebook and a cup. And I'm like wow. Matthew Calaunan had to drink some disgusting concoction for the second round just to get that exact same thing. The winners of both rounds got, in addition, a camp T-Shirt as well.

Then, Guest Star Andrew Yeo came up to give his gospel message. He talked first about how guys are able to use toothpaste which have dropped on the floor, and how girls have to squeeze another exact 3cm out to brush instead of using the one on the floor. But his actual message was really about hurt, pain and sorrow.

He listed many examples of people in hurt and pain, especially those from his ministry where he works with delinquents and youths. Andrew was an AB. Ah Beng. He found his way to God, and gave his life to Christ, and since then, became an ABC. Ah Beng Christian. In his spiritual walk, he grew more and more and started serving God and evangelical ministry reaching out to Youth in Singapore Schools all over the island. Thus, he is now an ABCDEFG. Ah Beng Christian Doing Evangelism For God. Everyone applauded after he said that. Quite cool.

Most of it was about emo kids and how they would get so much stress and pain that they would cut themselves, fight or commit suicide. But at the last part, right before the altar call, he gave a very weird testimony. He was in the toilet doing his business when suddenly, there was a shout for help in Chinese in the cubicle next to him. The shout continued, so he looked over the cubicle wall and saw an old Ah Pek stuck in the toilet bowl. He was about to go ask for help, but the old Ah Pek told him to stay at help him. So Andrew climbed over, unlocked the door, and pulled the old man out. The Ah Pek thanked him and then later asked him why he had helped him. The reason was because he asked for help, so he helped him. It's that simple.

And it's the same with Jesus. Just ask him for help, for forgiveness and to take away all the pain and hurt of your past self, and he will surely help you. There was an altar call and quite a sizeable number of people went forward to be prayed for and to receive Jesus as their personal Lord and Saviour.

Then, it was dinner, and I got to know my CG's new friends, aka Jaime, Jeremy, Rain and Vanessa abit. I helped Jun Hao distribute forks, spoons and plates to the people in the queue before sitting back at my place, only to discover that Matt Chan had simply taken everything possible from the buffet and dumped it on my plate. Obviously, I didn't finish it, so it went to the starving African children overseas. No, I'm kidding, it went to the trash, but if it was possible, it would have gone to those starving children.

We took a CG Photo before going home. It wasn't much of a CG photo, though, since most of our CG was missing anyway... oh well.

Back to school, and I'm still unsure whether or not there actually is homework to do or not. And German Test is on Tuesday!

And now for some random pics...

The first tornado ever formed in Singapore!

Someone caught eating popcorn in class during lessons using a smart under the table tactic.

I see someone in our class has started a company...

Colour Your World with Words #5

2009-04-12T22:43:00.001+08:00

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn't get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away and sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor's voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

"He's an angel," she told them. "He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down."

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo's house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a spiritual conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff's club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if weren't a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o'clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive's future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. The he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn't sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a her taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd's frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out in the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn't just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest's tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents' house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in tow and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn't recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn't get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel's reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo's courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn't get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn't get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and have up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn't receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he'd gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn't resist the temptation to listen to the angel's heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn't understand why other men didn't have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he'd be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn't get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

Cold War Conclusion

2009-04-10T14:38:00.003+08:00

This is a video that Ms Tang showed us. Everyone is familiar with Hossan Leong's 'We live in Singapura' song. But does everyone know that he did not invent it himself and that this is the original song? The actual song here talks about the events during the cold war over 40 years of American History.

We didn't start the Fire - Billy Joel

Lyrics (also shown in video):

Harry Truman, Doris Day, Red China, Johnny Ray
South Pacific, Walter Winchell, Joe DiMaggio

Joe McCarthy, Richard Nixon, Studebaker, Television
North Korea, South Korea, Marilyn Monroe

Rosenbergs, H Bomb, Sugar Ray, Panmunjom
Brando, The King And I, and The Catcher In The Rye

Eisenhower, Vaccine, England's got a new queen
Maciano, Liberace, Santayana goodbye

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev
Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc

Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dancron
Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock

Einstein, James Dean, Brooklyn's got a winning team
Davy Crockett, Peter Pan, Elvis Presley, Disneyland

Bardot, Budapest, Alabama, Khrushchev
Princess Grace, Peyton Place, Trouble in the Suez

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Little Rock, Pasternak, Mickey Mantle, Kerouac
Sputnik, Chou En-Lai, Bridge On The River Kwai

Lebanon, Charles de Gaulle, California baseball
Starkwether, Homicide, Children of Thalidomide
Buddy Holly, Ben Hur, Space Monkey, Mafia
Hula Hoops, Castro, Edsel is a no-go

U2, Syngman Rhee, payola and Kennedy
Chubby Checker, Psycho, Belgians in the Congo

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Hemingway, Eichman, Stranger in a Strange Land
Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs invasion

Lawrence of Arabia, British Beatlemania
Ole Miss, John Glenn, Liston beats Patterson

Pope Paul, Malcolm X, British Politician sex
J.F.K. blown away, what else do I have to say

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon back again
Moonshot, Woodstock, Watergate, punk rock
Begin, Reagan, Palestine, Terror on the airline
Ayatollah's in Iran, Russians in Afghanistan

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal, suicide
Foreign debts, homeless Vets, AIDS, Crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shores, China's under martial law
Rock and Roller cola wars, I can't take it anymore

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning on us
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it

Quotable Quotes

"Yes, Teck Wei, you have an answer?"
-Noel Chong, about the math question on the screen
"Uhh, no. I was just fingering my pen."
-Teck Wei

"You might catch something from him. It's called the kiasu syndrome."
-MDC, about Wei Tai wearing a mask over his mouth to prevent him from getting sick.

"If I was Ah Beng ah, I see them outside, punch then strip them down to their panties."
-LL about how angry he was with the previous class

"Clear?"
-LL
"Crystal clear."
-Nigel
"I'm most worried about you."
-LL

"Sir, Benedict's against the law!"
-Nigel
"Look who's talking!"
-Ernest

"I thought I could spend very little time on deduction. I was wrong. Very wrong. Very very very wrong!"
-LL, suffering from increasing disappointment syndrome

"Just don't read number 4. It will burn your eyes."
-LL, about ignoring question number 4.

"But then it says 'only' person."
-Anonymous, saying that the premise shows there's only one person at the crime scene
"Then they haven't found the other person, lah!"
-LL

"My husband has weak intermolecular forces. He easily reaches his boiling point."
-Random person in the Chemistry video

"Shut up, Nigel."
-JLim, much to the entire class' applause

"Sir, I have another example of falling."
-Nigel, when discussing about a prose extract about 'falling'
"Yeah, what?"
-Jeremy Lim
"Falling asleep."
-Nigel, pointing to Edmund who was sleeping on his chair.

"Sir! I can't do this!"
-Nigel, when NC asked him to punch holes in all the worksheets
"Why?"
-NC
"Because there is this much to hole punc, and I can only punch this much at a time!"
-Nigel, showing the enormous stack of worksheets and a puny amount he could punch at a time
"Then do it slowly."
-NC, shrugging it off
"I got no patience!"
-Nigel, insisting

"Paiseh."
-Nigel, to KKE, who then looks at him
"I mean 不好意思."
-Nigel, correcting himself

"Homecoming parties."
-KYap, about where people get drunk
"They're coming home."
-Yi Ming

"It's only half-incest."
-Nigel

"If you are 14 years old, and you have another older girl who is about..."
-KYap, talking about double standards in the law
"65 years old."
-Yi Ming, completing the sentence

"Sir, after O-levels lah, relieve stress."
-Izzat

"...and think like S word."
-KYap
"Sucker!"
-Dehn

"It's a 3-letter word starting with the letter S."
-JT, about metallic bonding
"Sex."
-Euan
"'Sea', right? Metallic structures are bonded by a sea of electrons."
-JT

"Sir, can it be four?"
-Izzat
"Uhh, no. Because there's 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 atoms here."
-JT

"Ernest, do you what is a furnace?"
-JT, rhyming

Shocking Story

2009-04-06T21:45:00.004+08:00

This is a story of a young college girl who passed away last month in Pasir Ris.

Her name was Priscilla. She was hit by a truck. She was working in a call center. She had a boyfriend named Shawn. Both of them were true lovers. They always talked on the phone.

You would never find her without handphone. In fact she also changed her cell connection from M-One to Starhub, so that both of them could be on the same network, and save on the cost. She used to spend half of the day talking with Shawn.

Priscilla's family knew about their relationship. Shawn was very close to Priscilla's family as well.

Before she passed away she always told her friends, "If I pass away please burn me with my handphone" she also said the same thing to her parents.

After her death, people could'nt carry her body. A lot of them tried to do so, but still couldn't. Everybody who tried to carry the body, got the same results.

Eventually, they called a soul speaker known to one of their neighbours, who could speak with the soul of dead person and who was a friend of her father.

He took a stick and started speaking to himself slowly.

After a few minutes, he said, "This girl misses something here." Then, her friends told that person about her intentions to burn her with her phone.

He then opened the grave box and placed her phone and sim card inside the casket. After that they tried to carry the body, and it was moved easily into the van.

All of them were shocked. Priscilla's parents did not inform Shawn that Priscilla had passed away.

Two weeks later, Shawn called Priscilla's mom.

Shawn said, "Aunty, I'm coming home today. Cook something nice for me. Don't tell Priscilla that I'm coming home today, I wanna surprise her.'

Her mother replied, "You come home first, I want to tell you something very important."

After he came, they told him the truth about Priscilla.

Shawn thought that they were playing a prank. He was laughing and even said, "Don't try to fool me - tell Priscilla to come out, I have a gift for her. Please stop this nonsense."

Then, they showed him the original death certificate. They gave him the proof to make him believe. Shawn broke out in sweat and said, "Its not true. We spoke yesterday. She still calls me."

Shawn was shaking. Suddenly, Shawn's phone rang. "See this is from Priscilla, see this." He showed the phone to Priscilla's family. The caller ID was 'Priscilla'. All of them told him to answer. He decided to talk using the loudspeaker mode.

All of them heard his conversation. Loud and clear, no cross lines, no humming.
It is the actual voice of Priscilla and there was no way others could use her sim card since it was nailed inside the grave box buried 5 feet underground.

They were so shocked and asked for the soul speaker's help again. He brought his ShiFu to solve this matter. He and his ShiFu worked for 5 hours.

Then they discovered one thing which really shocked them...

(find out the end of the story at the end of this post)

Quotable Quotes

"Who didn't know that you were supposed to read it?"
-LL
*people in class raise hand*
"Don't read then do what? Burn? 7th Month Coming."
-LL

"Who stays at Bishan? Ok, you were meet me somewhere else. Not J8."
-LL
"Huh?"
-Anonymous dude who lives at Bishan
"It's too near for you."
-LL

"Not always Philo Rep, not always CEC, not always Prefects. Oh wait, not Prefects, forget that."
-LL, about who is reponsible for making sure everyone in class does their homework

"Who studies Mantis Shrimps?"
-Anonymous
"A mantis-shrimptologist, lah."
-LL

"Can someone whose intelligence level is higher than Nigel's please answer? By the way, that means all of you."
-LL

"Wei Tai caught peeking at panties/underwear."
-LL, being random

"Sir, we cannot always trust our sense of sight!"
-Edmund
"That's why you have to trust mine!"
-LL

"开头写什么?"
-KKE, about Chinese formal letter writing
"Hello!"
-Nigel, being random
"开头些'Hello'就扣分啊."
-KKE

"There was this little girl lying on the road. And then a boy came along and... okay forget that story. Because I see Euan smiling over there."
-JT, trying to come up with a suitable story to relate to the topic of co-ordinate bonding

"Who has the potential to donate electrons?"
-JT
"Me!"
-Douglas
"And who might you be?"
-JT

"Uh, yes! No! No, no!"
-JT, answering someone's question

"Beach, not bitch."
-Herr Spindler, about the meaning of the German word 'Strand'

"What's the difference? The intent right? This is for the greater good."
-EK, about National Education, as compared to conflict in Northern Ireland

"You said it already."
-Jian Hao, halfway through Nigel's Physics Presentation

"He reached his final height."
-Euan, about Samuel

"Teens are getting sex-linked diseases. Even in Singapore."
-KYap, halfway through a video during CLE lesson
"This doesn't look like Singapore to me."
-Me, gesturing at the Ang Mohs on screen

"Oh really? Stop tickling me."
-JT, imitating James Bond

"When he spoke, he spat, so I remember him."
-MDC, on how she remembers people

"What are you doing there?"
-MDC's teacher, on why MDC had opened an umbrella in class
"It's raining."
-MDC, about the teacher spitting at her like rain

"Were you ill?"
-MDC, to John, whom she thought looked ill as he walked past the classroom to the toilet
"No, I just really felt like peeing."
-John

"Basil!"
-Matthias, trying to sabo Basil into presenting
"Let's go Matthias!"
-MDC, jacking Matthias

"Pass up his work, all look like assorted vegetables."
-MDC, about a boy she had taught who was a hawker's son

Joke of the Month
Q: Why is Mathematics contradictory?
A: Cos0 is 1 and 1 is 0!
Explanation: Cosine(0)= 1, 1=0! (factorial)

Starhub has the best coverage!
'Where ever you go, our network follows!'

Cold War Historiography

2009-04-02T20:11:00.005+08:00

Here's a video from YouTube that Ms Tang showed us in HistRA class.

This is a very interesting and entertaining US war veteran's song about his experiences in the Vietnam War.

Goodnight Saigon - Billy Joel

Lyrics:

We met as soul mates
On parris island
We left as inmates
From an asylum
And we were sharp
As sharp as knives
And we were so gung ho
To lay down our lives

We came in spastic
Like tameless horses
We left in plastic
As numbered corpses
And we learned fast
To travel light
Our arms were heavy
But our bellies were tight

We had no home front
We had no soft soap
They sent us playboy
They gave us bob hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to Jesus Christ
With all our might

We had no cameras
To shoot the landscape
We passed the hash pipe
And played our doors tapes
And it was dark
So dark at night
And we held on to each other
Like brother to brother
We promised our mothers wed write

And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Remember charlie
Remember baker
They left their childhood
On every acre
And who was wrong?
And who was right?
It didnt matter in the thick of the fight

We held the day
In the palm
Of our hand
They ruled the night
And the night
Seemed to last

As long as six weeks
On parris island
We held the coastline
They held the highlands
And they were sharp
As sharp as knives
They heard the hum of our motors
They counted the rotors
And waited for us to arrive

And we would all go down together
We said we'd all go down together
Yes we would all go down together

Colour Your World with Words #4

2009-04-02T20:03:00.004+08:00

Lamb to the Slaughter
by Roald Dahl

The room was warm and clean, the curtains drawn, the two table lamps alight-hers and the one by the empty chair opposite. On the sideboard behind her, two tall glasses, soda water, whiskey. Fresh ice cubes in the Thermos bucket.

Mary Maloney was waiting for her husband to come him from work.

Now and again she would glance up at the clock, but without anxiety, merely to please herself with the thought that each minute gone by made it nearer the time when he would come. There was a slow smiling air about her, and about everything she did. The drop of a head as she bent over her sewing was curiously tranquil. Her skin -for this was her sixth month with child-had acquired a wonderful translucent quality, the mouth was soft, and the eyes, with their new placid look, seemed larger darker than before. When the clock said ten minutes to five, she began to listen, and a few moments later, punctually as always, she heard the tires on the gravel outside, and the car door slamming, the footsteps passing the window, the key turning in the lock. She laid aside her sewing, stood up, and went forward to kiss him as he came in.

“Hullo darling,” she said.

“Hullo darling,” he answered.

She took his coat and hung it in the closer. Then she walked over and made the drinks, a strongish one for him, a weak one for herself; and soon she was back again in her chair with the sewing, and he in the other, opposite, holding the tall glass with both hands, rocking it so the ice cubes tinkled against the side.

For her, this was always a blissful time of day. She knew he didn’t want to speak much until the first drink was finished, and she, on her side, was content to sit quietly, enjoying his company after the long hours alone in the house. She loved to luxuriate in the presence of this man, and to feel-almost as a sunbather feels the sun-that warm male glow that came out of him to her when they were alone together. She loved him for the way he sat loosely in a chair, for the way he came in a door, or moved slowly across the room with long strides. She loved intent, far look in his eyes when they rested in her, the funny shape of the mouth, and especially the way he remained silent about his tiredness, sitting still with himself until the whiskey had taken some of it away.

“Tired darling?”

“Yes,” he said. “I’m tired,” And as he spoke, he did an unusual thing. He lifted his glass and drained it in one swallow although there was still half of it, at least half of it left.. She wasn’t really watching him, but she knew what he had done because she heard the ice cubes falling back against the bottom of the empty glass when he lowered his arm. He paused a moment, leaning forward in the chair, then he got up and went slowly over to fetch himself another.

“I’ll get it!” she cried, jumping up.

“Sit down,” he said.

When he came back, she noticed that the new drink was dark amber with the quantity of whiskey in it.

“Darling, shall I get your slippers?”

“No.”

She watched him as he began to sip the dark yellow drink, and she could see little oily swirls in the liquid because it was so strong.

“I think it’s a shame,” she said, “that when a policeman gets to be as senior as you, they keep him walking about on his feet all day long.”

He didn’t answer, so she bent her head again and went on with her sewing; bet each time he lifted the drink to his lips, she heard the ice cubes clinking against the side of the glass.

“Darling,” she said. “Would you like me to get you some cheese? I haven’t made any supper because it’s Thursday.”

“No,” he said.

“If you’re too tired to eat out,” she went on, “it’s still not too late. There’s plenty of meat and stuff in the freezer, and you can have it right here and not even move out of the chair.”

Her eyes waited on him for an answer, a smile, a little nod, but he made no sign.

“Anyway,” she went on, “I’ll get you some cheese and crackers first.”

“I don’t want it,” he said.

She moved uneasily in her chair, the large eyes still watching his face. “But you must eat! I’ll fix it anyway, and then you can have it or not, as you like.”

She stood up and placed her sewing on the table by the lamp.

“Sit down,” he said. “Just for a minute, sit down.”

It wasn’t till then that she began to get frightened.

“Go on,” he said. “Sit down.”

She lowered herself back slowly into the chair, watching him all the time with those large, bewildered eyes. He had finished the second drink and was staring down into the glass, frowning.
“Listen,” he said. “I’ve got something to tell you.”

“What is it, darling? What’s the matter?”

He had now become absolutely motionless, and he kept his head down so that the light from the lamp beside him fell across the upper part of his face, leaving the chin and mouth in shadow. She noticed there was a little muscle moving near the corner of his left eye.

“This is going to be a bit of a shock to you, I’m afraid,” he said. “But I’ve thought about it a good deal and I’ve decided the only thing to do is tell you right away. I hope you won’t blame me too much.”

And he told her. It didn’t take long, four or five minutes at most, and she say very still through it all, watching him with a kind of dazed horror as he went further and further away from her with each word.

“So there it is,” he added. “And I know it’s kind of a bad time to be telling you, bet there simply wasn’t any other way. Of course I’ll give you money and see you’re looked after. But there needn’t really be any fuss. I hope not anyway. It wouldn’t be very good for my job.”

Her first instinct was not to believe any of it, to reject it all. It occurred to her that perhaps he hadn’t even spoken, that she herself had imagined the whole thing. Maybe, if she went about her business and acted as though she hadn’t been listening, then later, when she sort of woke up again, she might find none of it had ever happened.

“I’ll get the supper,” she managed to whisper, and this time he didn’t stop her.

When she walked across the room she couldn’t feel her feet touching the floor. She couldn’t feel anything at all- except a slight nausea and a desire to vomit. Everything was automatic now-down the steps to the cellar, the light switch, the deep freeze, the hand inside the cabinet taking hold of the first object it met. She lifted it out, and looked at it. It was wrapped in paper, so she took off the paper and looked at it again.

A leg of lamb.

All right then, they would have lamb for supper. She carried it upstairs, holding the thin bone-end of it with both her hands, and as she went through the living-room, she saw him standing over by the window with his back to her, and she stopped.

“For God’s sake,” he said, hearing her, but not turning round. “Don’t make supper for me. I’m going out.”

At that point, Mary Maloney simply walked up behind him and without any pause she swung the big frozen leg of lamb high in the air and brought it down as hard as she could on the back of his head.

She might just as well have hit him with a steel club.

She stepped back a pace, waiting, and the funny thing was that he remained standing there for at least four or five seconds, gently swaying. Then he crashed to the carpet.

The violence of the crash, the noise, the small table overturning, helped bring her out of he shock. She came out slowly, feeling cold and surprised, and she stood for a while blinking at the body, still holding the ridiculous piece of meat tight with both hands.

All right, she told herself. So I’ve killed him.

It was extraordinary, now, how clear her mind became all of a sudden. She began thinking very fast. As the wife of a detective, she knew quite well what the penalty would be. That was fine. It made no difference to her. In fact, it would be a relief. On the other hand, what about the child? What were the laws about murderers with unborn children? Did they kill then both-mother and child? Or did they wait until the tenth month? What did they do?

Mary Maloney didn’t know. And she certainly wasn’t prepared to take a chance.

She carried the meat into the kitchen, placed it in a pan, turned the oven on high, and shoved t inside. Then she washed her hands and ran upstairs to the bedroom. She sat down before the mirror, tidied her hair, touched up her lops and face. She tried a smile. It came out rather peculiar. She tried again.

“Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, aloud.

The voice sounded peculiar too.

“I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.”

That was better. Both the smile and the voice were coming out better now. She rehearsed it several times more. Then she ran downstairs, took her coat, went out the back door, down the garden, into the street.

It wasn’t six o’clock yet and the lights were still on in the grocery shop.

“Hullo Sam,” she said brightly, smiling at the man behind the counter.

“Why, good evening, Mrs. Maloney. How’re you?”

“I want some potatoes please, Sam. Yes, and I think a can of peas.”

The man turned and reached up behind him on the shelf for the peas.

“Patrick’s decided he’s tired and doesn’t want to eat out tonight,” she told him. “We usually go out Thursdays, you know, and now he’s caught me without any vegetables in the house.”

“Then how about meat, Mrs. Maloney?”

“No, I’ve got meat, thanks. I got a nice leg of lamb from the freezer.”

“Oh.”

“I don’t know much like cooking it frozen, Sam, but I’m taking a chance on it this time. You think it’ll be all right?”

“Personally,” the grocer said, “I don’t believe it makes any difference. You want these Idaho potatoes?”

“Oh yes, that’ll be fine. Two of those.”

“Anything else?” The grocer cocked his head on one side, looking at her pleasantly. “How about afterwards? What you going to give him for afterwards?”

“Well-what would you suggest, Sam?”

The man glanced around his shop. “How about a nice big slice of cheesecake? I know he likes that.”

“Perfect,” she said. “He loves it.”

And when it was all wrapped and she had paid, she put on her brightest smile and said, “Thank you, Sam. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Mrs. Maloney. And thank you.”

And now, she told herself as she hurried back, all she was doing now, she was returning home to her husband and he was waiting for his supper; and she must cook it good, and make it as tasty as possible because the poor man was tired; and if, when she entered the house, she happened to find anything unusual, or tragic, or terrible, then naturally it would be a shock and she’d become frantic with grief and horror. Mind you, she wasn’t expecting to find anything. She was just going home with the vegetables. Mrs. Patrick Maloney going home with the vegetables on Thursday evening to cook supper for her husband.

That’s the way, she told herself. Do everything right and natural. Keep things absolutely natural and there’ll be no need for any acting at all.

Therefore, when she entered the kitchen by the back door, she was humming a little tune to herself and smiling.

“Patrick!” she called. “How are you, darling?”

She put the parcel down on the table and went through into the living room; and when she saw him lying there on the floor with his legs doubled up and one arm twisted back underneath his body, it really was rather a shock. All the old love and longing for him welled up inside her, and she ran over to him, knelt down beside him, and began to cry her heart out. It was easy. No acting was necessary.

A few minutes later she got up and went to the phone. She know the number of the police station, and when the man at the other end answered, she cried to him, “Quick! Come quick! Patrick’s dead!”

“Who’s speaking?”

“Mrs. Maloney. Mrs. Patrick Maloney.”

“You mean Patrick Maloney’s dead?”

“I think so,” she sobbed. “He’s lying on the floor and I think he’s dead.”

“Be right over,” the man said.

The car came very quickly, and when she opened the front door, two policeman walked in. She know them both-she know nearly all the man at that precinct-and she fell right into a chair, then went over to join the other one, who was called O’Malley, kneeling by the body.

“Is he dead?” she cried.

“I’m afraid he is. What happened?”

Briefly, she told her story about going out to the grocer and coming back to find him on the floor. While she was talking, crying and talking, Noonan discovered a small patch of congealed blood on the dead man’s head. He showed it to O’Malley who got up at once and hurried to the phone.

Soon, other men began to come into the house. First a doctor, then two detectives, one of whom she know by name. Later, a police photographer arrived and took pictures, and a man who know about fingerprints. There was a great deal of whispering and muttering beside the corpse, and the detectives kept asking her a lot of questions. But they always treated her kindly. She told her story again, this time right from the beginning, when Patrick had come in, and she was sewing, and he was tired, so tired he hadn’t wanted to go out for supper. She told how she’d put the meat in the oven-”it’s there now, cooking”- and how she’d slopped out to the grocer for vegetables, and come back to find him lying on the floor.

Which grocer?” one of the detectives asked.

She told him, and he turned and whispered something to the other detective who immediately went outside into the street.

In fifteen minutes he was back with a page of notes, and there was more whispering, and through her sobbing she heard a few of the whispered phrases-”...acted quite normal...very cheerful...wanted to give him a good supper…peas...cheesecake...impossible that she...”

After a while, the photographer and the doctor departed and two other men came in and took the corpse away on a stretcher. Then the fingerprint man went away. The two detectives remained, and so did the two policeman. They were exceptionally nice to her, and Jack Noonan asked if she wouldn’t rather go somewhere else, to her sister’s house perhaps, or to his own wife who would take care of her and put her up for the night.

No, she said. She didn’t feel she could move even a yard at the moment. Would they mind awfully of she stayed just where she was until she felt better. She didn’t feel too good at the moment, she really didn’t.

Then hadn’t she better lie down on the bed? Jack Noonan asked.

No, she said. She’d like to stay right where she was, in this chair. A little later, perhaps, when she felt better, she would move.

So they left her there while they went about their business, searching the house. Occasionally on of the detectives asked her another question. Sometimes Jack Noonan spoke at her gently as he passed by. Her husband, he told her, had been killed by a blow on the back of the head administered with a heavy blunt instrument, almost certainly a large piece of metal. They were looking for the weapon. The murderer may have taken it with him, but on the other hand he may have thrown it away or hidden it somewhere on the premises.

“It’s the old story,” he said. “Get the weapon, and you’ve got the man.”

Later, one of the detectives came up and sat beside her. Did she know, he asked, of anything in the house that could’ve been used as the weapon? Would she mind having a look around to see if anything was missing-a very big spanner, for example, or a heavy metal vase.

They didn’t have any heavy metal vases, she said.

“Or a big spanner?”

She didn’t think they had a big spanner. But there might be some things like that in the garage.

The search went on. She knew that there were other policemen in the garden all around the house. She could hear their footsteps on the gravel outside, and sometimes she saw a flash of a torch through a chink in the curtains. It began to get late, nearly nine she noticed by the clock on the mantle. The four men searching the rooms seemed to be growing weary, a trifle exasperated.

“Jack,” she said, the next tome Sergeant Noonan went by. “Would you mind giving me a drink?”

“Sure I’ll give you a drink. You mean this whiskey?”

“Yes please. But just a small one. It might make me feel better.”

He handed her the glass.

“Why don’t you have one yourself,” she said. “You must be awfully tired. Please do. You’ve been very good to me.”

“Well,” he answered. “It’s not strictly allowed, but I might take just a drop to keep me going.”

One by one the others came in and were persuaded to take a little nip of whiskey. They stood around rather awkwardly with the drinks in their hands, uncomfortable in her presence, trying to say consoling things to her. Sergeant Noonan wandered into the kitchen, come out quickly and said, “Look, Mrs. Maloney. You know that oven of yours is still on, and the meat still inside.”

“Oh dear me!” she cried. “So it is!”

“I better turn it off for you, hadn’t I?”

“Will you do that, Jack. Thank you so much.”

When the sergeant returned the second time, she looked at him with her large, dark tearful eyes. “Jack Noonan,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Would you do me a small favor-you and these others?”

“We can try, Mrs. Maloney.”

“Well,” she said. “Here you all are, and good friends of dear Patrick’s too, and helping to catch the man who killed him. You must be terrible hungry by now because it’s long past your suppertime, and I know Patrick would never forgive me, God bless his soul, if I allowed you to remain in his house without offering you decent hospitality. Why don’t you eat up that lamb that’s in the oven. It’ll be cooked just right by now.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Sergeant Noonan said.

“Please,” she begged. “Please eat it. Personally I couldn’t tough a thing, certainly not what’s been in the house when he was here. But it’s all right for you. It’d be a favor to me if you’d eat it up. Then you can go on with your work again afterwards.”

There was a good deal of hesitating among the four policemen, but they were clearly hungry, and in the end they were persuaded to go into the kitchen and help themselves. The woman stayed where she was, listening to them speaking among themselves, their voices thick and sloppy because their mouths were full of meat.

“Have some more, Charlie?”

“No. Better not finish it.”

“She wants us to finish it. She said so. Be doing her a favor.”

“Okay then. Give me some more.”

“That’s the hell of a big club the gut must’ve used to hit poor Patrick,” one of them was saying. “The doc says his skull was smashed all to pieces just like from a sledgehammer.”

“That’s why it ought to be easy to find.”

“Exactly what I say.”

“Whoever done it, they’re not going to be carrying a thing like that around with them longer than they need.”

One of them belched.

“Personally, I think it’s right here on the premises.”

“Probably right under our very noses. What you think, Jack?”

And in the other room, Mary Maloney began to giggle.

Deceiving Senses

2009-03-28T13:44:00.004+08:00

During Philo lesson, LL mentioned the story of the Ghost in the show '3 men and a baby', and apparently said it was really scary. Here's a YouTube video of famous debunker Captain Disillusion, who explains this paranormal phenomenon.

3 Men and a Baby Ghost Debunk - Captain Disillusion

On a side note, today is Earth Hour day so from 8.30pm to 9.30pm everyone in Singapore is like supposed to switch off all the electrical appliances in the house today!

Quotable Quotes

"Waves, EM SPectrum, Sound and Cinematics. Any questions?"
-DT, listing the topics tested for Physics
"Oh my God."
-Nigel

"You have to make yourself different from the rest, so you have to look dumb."
-Naishad, about Prefect Elections
"That's sad."
-MDC

"Brainwash the China scholar."
-Yi Ming
"Hold that thought."
-MDC
A while later
"But why use the China scholar?"
-MDC
"To spread communism."
-Jian Hao

"I can't take boys being dumb."
-MDC
"There's only one Eiffel Tower..."
-Anonymous, imitating Koh Zhi You

"Why do we want an Indian barber to earn money?"
-Anonymous
"You bloody racist!"
-MDC
"It's a Malay barber."
-Naishad

"But our class is quite nice, we have some darkies."
-MDC

"The Indians came and were moneylenders."
-MDC
"Naishad!"
-Anonymous

"Malays have this attitude of relac."
-MDC, explaining why Malays were seen to be lazy

"You look like a Chinese."
-KKE, to Haziq

"什么是'灵秀'?"
-KKE
"查字典."
-Nigel

"4Ls. Lecture, Loo, Library and Lunch."
-KYap, summarizing the life of a university student

"In the Arts canteen you can have lunch and a free fashion show."
-KYap, about Arts students being very eye-catching

"There is a legal loophole which I discovered when I bought something pirated."
-KYap.
"Ohh!"
-3M

"What's there to invest Ryan?"
-KYap, suanning Ryan

"I saw Yi Ming before, when he goes out he keeps his hands to himself."
-KYap, with another accidental connotation

"They have to cover themselves from head to toe and show only their eyes."
-KYap, about how some women have to clothe themselves
"Wah, Ninja!"
-Nigel

"If you go to a bar and start getting touchy feely, then you'll soon touch and feel the bars."
-KYap, trying to be funny

"Then, in the fountain, you can see couples doing whatever to one another."
-KYap, about romance at the fountain
"In the fountain?!"
-Izzat
"Around the fountain, ok?"
-KYap, clarifying

"Diamond melts at 3005 degrees Celsius."
-JT, he then goes to write 3500 deg C on the board
"Sir, you said 3005."
-Hubert
"I did? Yahoo!"
-JT, being random
"Yahoo!"
-Jian Hao, copying him

"I'm sure half the class will know."
-Douglas, trying to avoid telling the class
"So the other half doesn't know lah, so tell us."
-MDC, insisting he tells the class

"Emo 是 Elmo 的爸爸."
-Ryan, explaining the word 'Emo' to KKE

"RI marry RGS equals..."
-MDC, thinking
"Incest!"
-Edmund

Colour Your World with Words #3

2009-03-26T22:30:00.002+08:00

The Fall of the House of Usher
by Edgar Allen Poe

Son coeur est un luth suspendu;
Sitot qu'on le touche il resonne.
--De Beranger

During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country ; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was - but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable ; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me - upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain - upon the bleak walls - upon the vacant eye-like windows - upon a few rank sedges - and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees - with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium - the bitter lapse into everyday life - the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart - an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it - I paused to think - what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher ? It was a mystery all insoluble ; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion, that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression ; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down - but with a shudder even more thrilling than before - upon the remodelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

Nevertheless, in this mansion of gloom I now proposed to myself a sojourn of some weeks. Its proprietor, Roderick Usher, had been one of my boon companions in boyhood ; but many years had elapsed since our last meeting. A letter, however, had lately reached me in a distant part of the country - a letter from him - which, in its wildly importunate nature, had admitted of no other than a personal reply. The MS. gave evidence of nervous agitation. The writer spoke of acute bodily illness - of a mental disorder which oppressed him - and of an earnest desire to see me, as his best, and indeed his only personal friend, with a view of attempting, by the cheerfulness of my society, some alleviation of his malady. It was the manner in which all this, and much more, was said - it was the apparent heart that went with his request - which allowed me no room for hesitation; and I accordingly obeyed forthwith what I still considered a very singular summons.

Although, as boys, we had been even intimate associates, yet I really knew little of my friend. His reserve had been always excessive and habitual. I was aware, however, that his very ancient family had been noted, time out of mind, for a peculiar sensibility of temperament, displaying itself, through long ages, in many works of exalted art, and manifested, of late, in repeated deeds of munificent yet unobtrusive charity, as well as in a passionate devotion to the intricacies, perhaps even more than to the orthodox and easily recognisable beauties, of musical science. I had learned, too, the very remarkable fact, that the stem of the Usher race, all time-honored as it was, had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch ; in other words, that the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain. It was this deficiency, I considered, while running over in thought the perfect keeping of the character of the premises with the accredited character of the people, and while speculating upon the possible influence which the one, in the long lapse of centuries, might have exercised upon the other - it was this deficiency, perhaps, of collateral issue, and the consequent undeviating transmission, from sire to son, of the patrimony with the name, which had, at length, so identified the two as to merge the original title of the estate in the quaint and equivocal appellation of the "House of Usher" - an appellation which seemed to include, in the minds of the peasantry who used it, both the family and the family mansion.

I have said that the sole effect of my somewhat childish experiment - that of looking down within the tarn - had been to deepen the first singular impression. There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition - for why should I not so term it ? - served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis. And it might have been for this reason only, that, when I again uplifted my eyes to the house itself, from its image in the pool, there grew in my mind a strange fancy - a fancy so ridiculous, indeed, that I but mention it to show the vivid force of the sensations which oppressed me. I had so worked upon my imagination as really to believe that about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves and their immediate vicinity - an atmosphere which had no affinity with the air of heaven, but which had reeked up from the decayed trees, and the gray wall, and the silent tarn - a pestilent and mystic vapor, dull, sluggish, faintly discernible, and leaden-hued.

Shaking off from my spirit what must have been a dream, I scanned more narrowly the real aspect of the building. Its principal feature seemed to be that of an excessive antiquity. The discoloration of ages had been great. Minute fungi overspread the whole exterior, hanging in a fine tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen ; and there appeared to be a wild inconsistency between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling condition of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of old wood-work which has rotted for long years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance from the breath of the external air. Beyond this indication of extensive decay, however, the fabric gave little token of instability. Perhaps the eye of a scrutinizing observer might have discovered a barely perceptible fissure, which, extending from the roof of the building in front, made its way down the wall in a zigzag direction, until it became lost in the sullen waters of the tarn.

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall. A valet, of stealthy step, thence conducted me, in silence, through many dark and intricate passages in my progress to the studio of his master. Much that I encountered on the way contributed, I know not how, to heighten the vague sentiments of which I have already spoken. While the objects around me - while the carvings of the ceilings, the sombre tapestries of the walls, the ebon blackness of the floors, and the phantasmagoric armorial trophies which rattled as I strode, were but matters to which, or to such as which, I had been accustomed from my infancy - while I hesitated not to acknowledge how familiar was all this - I still wondered to find how unfamiliar were the fancies which ordinary images were stirring up. On one of the staircases, I met the physician of the family. His countenance, I thought, wore a mingled expression of low cunning and perplexity. He accosted me with trepidation and passed on. The valet now threw open a door and ushered me into the presence of his master.

The room in which I found myself was very large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow, and pointed, and at so vast a distance from the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made their way through the trellissed panes, and served to render sufficiently distinct the more prominent objects around ; the eye, however, struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon the walls. The general furniture was profuse, comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books and musical instruments lay scattered about, but failed to give any vitality to the scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded all.

Upon my entrance, Usher arose from a sofa on which he had been lying at full length, and greeted me with a vivacious warmth which had much in it, I at first thought, of an overdone cordiality - of the constrained effort of the ennuyé ; man of the world. A glance, however, at his countenance, convinced me of his perfect sincerity. We sat down ; and for some moments, while he spoke not, I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity, half of awe. Surely, man had never before so terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had Roderick Usher ! It was with difficulty that I could bring myself to admit the identity of the wan being before me with the companion of my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness of complexion ; an eye large, liquid, and luminous beyond comparison ; lips somewhat thin and very pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve ; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations ; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair of a more than web-like softness and tenuity ; these features, with an inordinate expansion above the regions of the temple, made up altogether a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing character of these features, and of the expression they were wont to convey, lay so much of change that I doubted to whom I spoke. The now ghastly pallor of the skin, and the now miraculous lustre of the eye, above all things startled and even awed me. The silken hair, too, had been suffered to grow all unheeded, and as, in its wild gossamer texture, it floated rather than fell about the face, I could not, even with effort, connect its Arabesque expression with any idea of simple humanity.

In the manner of my friend I was at once struck with an incoherence - an inconsistency ; and I soon found this to arise from a series of feeble and futile struggles to overcome an habitual trepidancy - an excessive nervous agitation. For something of this nature I had indeed been prepared, no less by his letter, than by reminiscences of certain boyish traits, and by conclusions deduced from his peculiar physical conformation and temperament. His action was alternately vivacious and sullen. His voice varied rapidly from a tremulous indecision (when the animal spirits seemed utterly in abeyance) to that species of energetic concision - that abrupt, weighty, unhurried, and hollow-sounding enunciation - that leaden, self-balanced and perfectly modulated guttural utterance, which may be observed in the lost drunkard, or the irreclaimable eater of opium, during the periods of his most intense excitement.

It was thus that he spoke of the object of my visit, of his earnest desire to see me, and of the solace he expected me to afford him. He entered, at some length, into what he conceived to be the nature of his malady. It was, he said, a constitutional and a family evil, and one for which he despaired to find a remedy - a mere nervous affection, he immediately added, which would undoubtedly soon pass off. It displayed itself in a host of unnatural sensations. Some of these, as he detailed them, interested and bewildered me ; although, perhaps, the terms, and the general manner of the narration had their weight. He suffered much from a morbid acuteness of the senses ; the most insipid food was alone endurable; he could wear only garments of certain texture ; the odors of all flowers were oppressive ; his eyes were tortured by even a faint light ; and there were but peculiar sounds, and these from stringed instruments, which did not inspire him with horror.

To an anomalous species of terror I found him a bounden slave. "I shall perish," said he, "I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise, shall I be lost. I dread the events of the future, not in themselves, but in their results. I shudder at the thought of any, even the most trivial, incident, which may operate upon this intolerable agitation of soul. I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect - in terror. In this unnerved - in this pitiable condition - I feel that the period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, FEAR."

I learned, moreover, at intervals, and through broken and equivocal hints, another singular feature of his mental condition. He was enchained by certain superstitious impressions in regard to the dwelling which he tenanted, and whence, for many years, he had never ventured forth - in regard to an influence whose supposititious force was conveyed in terms too shadowy here to be re-stated - an influence which some peculiarities in the mere form and substance of his family mansion, had, by dint of long sufferance, he said, obtained over his spirit - an effect which the physique of the gray walls and turrets, and of the dim tarn into which they all looked down, had, at length, brought about upon the morale of his existence.

He admitted, however, although with hesitation, that much of the peculiar gloom which thus afflicted him could be traced to a more natural and far more palpable origin - to the severe and long-continued illness - indeed to the evidently approaching dissolution - of a tenderly beloved sister - his sole companion for long years - his last and only relative on earth. "Her decease," he said, with a bitterness which I can never forget, "would leave him (him the hopeless and the frail) the last of the ancient race of the Ushers." While he spoke, the lady Madeline (for so was she called) passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment, and, without having noticed my presence, disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread - and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings. A sensation of stupor oppressed me, as my eyes followed her retreating steps. When a door, at length, closed upon her, my glance sought instinctively and eagerly the countenance of the brother - but he had buried his face in his hands, and I could only perceive that a far more than ordinary wanness had overspread the emaciated fingers through which trickled many passionate tears.

The disease of the lady Madeline had long baffled the skill of her physicians. A settled apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character, were the unusual diagnosis. Hitherto she had steadily borne up against the pressure of her malady, and had not betaken herself finally to bed ; but, on the closing in of the evening of my arrival at the house, she succumbed (as her brother told me at night with inexpressible agitation) to the prostrating power of the destroyer ; and I learned that the glimpse I had obtained of her person would thus probably be the last I should obtain - that the lady, at least while living, would be seen by me no more.

For several days ensuing, her name was unmentioned by either Usher or myself: and during this period I was busied in earnest endeavors to alleviate the melancholy of my friend. We painted and read together ; or I listened, as if in a dream, to the wild improvisations of his speaking guitar. And thus, as a closer and still closer intimacy admitted me more unreservedly into the recesses of his spirit, the more bitterly did I perceive the futility of all attempt at cheering a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects of the moral and physical universe, in one unceasing radiation of gloom.

I shall ever bear about me a memory of the many solemn hours I thus spent alone with the master of the House of Usher. Yet I should fail in any attempt to convey an idea of the exact character of the studies, or of the occupations, in which he involved me, or led me the way. An excited and highly distempered ideality threw a sulphureous lustre over all. His long improvised dirges will ring forever in my ears. Among other things, I hold painfully in mind a certain singular perversion and amplification of the wild air of the last waltz of Von Weber. From the paintings over which his elaborate fancy brooded, and which grew, touch by touch, into vaguenesses at which I shuddered the more thrillingly, because I shuddered knowing not why ; - from these paintings (vivid as their images now are before me) I would in vain endeavor to educe more than a small portion which should lie within the compass of merely written words. By the utter simplicity, by the nakedness of his designs, he arrested and overawed attention. If ever mortal painted an idea, that mortal was Roderick Usher. For me at least - in the circumstances then surrounding me - there arose out of the pure abstractions which the hypochondriac contrived to throw upon his canvass, an intensity of intolerable awe, no shadow of which felt I ever yet in the contemplation of the certainly glowing yet too concrete reveries of Fuseli.

One of the phantasmagoric conceptions of my friend, partaking not so rigidly of the spirit of abstraction, may be shadowed forth, although feebly, in words. A small picture presented the interior of an immensely long and rectangular vault or tunnel, with low walls, smooth, white, and without interruption or device. Certain accessory points of the design served well to convey the idea that this excavation lay at an exceeding depth below the surface of the earth. No outlet was observed in any portion of its vast extent, and no torch, or other artificial source of light was discernible ; yet a flood of intense rays rolled throughout, and bathed the whole in a ghastly and inappropriate splendor.

I have just spoken of that morbid condition of the auditory nerve which rendered all music intolerable to the sufferer, with the exception of certain effects of stringed instruments. It was, perhaps, the narrow limits to which he thus confined himself upon the guitar, which gave birth, in great measure, to the fantastic character of his performances. But the fervid facility of his impromptus could not be so accounted for. They must have been, and were, in the notes, as well as in the words of his wild fantasias (for he not unfrequently accompanied himself with rhymed verbal improvisations), the result of that intense mental collectedness and concentration to which I have previously alluded as observable only in particular moments of the highest artificial excitement. The words of one of these rhapsodies I have easily remembered. I was, perhaps, the more forcibly impressed with it, as he gave it, because, in the under or mystic current of its meaning, I fancied that I perceived, and for the first time, a full consciousness on the part of Usher, of the tottering of his lofty reason upon her throne. The verses, which were entitled "The Haunted Palace," ran very nearly, if not accurately, thus:

I.
In the greenest of our valleys,
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace -
Radiant palace - reared its head.
In the monarch Thought's dominion -
It stood there !
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair.
II.
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow;
(This - all this - was in the olden
Time long ago)
And every gentle air that dallied,
In that sweet day,
Along the ramparts plumed and pallid,
A winged odor went away.
III.
Wanderers in that happy valley
Through two luminous windows saw
Spirits moving musically
To a lute's well-tunéd law,
Round about a throne, where sitting
(Porphyrogene !)
In state his glory well befitting,
The ruler of the realm was seen.
IV.
And all with pearl and ruby glowing
Was the fair palace door,
Through which came flowing, flowing, flowing,
And sparkling evermore,
A troop of Echoes whose sweet duty
Was but to sing,
In voices of surpassing beauty,
The wit and wisdom of their king.
V.
But evil things, in robes of sorrow,
Assailed the monarch's high estate ;
(Ah, let us mourn, for never morrow
Shall dawn upon him, desolate !)
And, round about his home, the glory
That blushed and bloomed
Is but a dim-remembered story
Of the old time entombed.
VI.
And travellers now within that valley,
Through the red-litten windows, see
Vast forms that move fantastically
To a discordant melody ;
While, like a rapid ghastly river,
Through the pale door,
A hideous throng rush out forever,
And laugh - but smile no more.

I well remember that suggestions arising from this ballad, led us into a train of thought wherein there became manifest an opinion of Usher's which I mention not so much on account of its novelty, (for other men have thought thus,) as on account of the pertinacity with which he maintained it. This opinion, in its general form, was that of the sentience of all vegetable things. But, in his disordered fancy, the idea had assumed a more daring character, and trespassed, under certain conditions, upon the kingdom of inorganization. I lack words to express the full extent, or the earnest abandon of his persuasion. The belief, however, was connected (as I have previously hinted) with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers. The conditions of the sentience had been here, he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of these stones - in the order of their arrangement, as well as in that of the many fungi which overspread them, and of the decayed trees which stood around - above all, in the long undisturbed endurance of this arrangement, and in its reduplication in the still waters of the tarn. Its evidence - the evidence of the sentience - was to be seen, he said, (and I here started as he spoke,) in the gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls. The result was discoverable, he added, in that silent, yet importunate and terrible influence which for centuries had moulded the destinies of his family, and which made him what I now saw him - what he was. Such opinions need no comment, and I will make none.

Our books - the books which, for years, had formed no small portion of the mental existence of the invalid - were, as might be supposed, in strict keeping with this character of phantasm. We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset ; the Belphegor of Machiavelli ; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg ; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg ; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D'Indaginé, and of De la Chambre ; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck ; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favorite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorium , by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Oegipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic - the manual of a forgotten church - the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae .

I could not help thinking of the wild ritual of this work, and of its probable influence upon the hypochondriac, when, one evening, having informed me abruptly that the lady Madeline was no more, he stated his intention of preserving her corpse for a fortnight, (previously to its final interment,) in one of the numerous vaults within the main walls of the building. The worldly reason, however, assigned for this singular proceeding, was one which I did not feel at liberty to dispute. The brother had been led to his resolution (so he told me) by consideration of the unusual character of the malady of the deceased, of certain obtrusive and eager inquiries on the part of her medical men, and of the remote and exposed situation of the burial-ground of the family. I will not deny that when I called to mind the sinister countenance of the person whom I met upon the staircase, on the day of my arrival at the house, I had no desire to oppose what I regarded as at best but a harmless, and by no means an unnatural, precaution.

At the request of Usher, I personally aided him in the arrangements for the temporary entombment. The body having been encoffined, we two alone bore it to its rest. The vault in which we placed it (and which had been so long unopened that our torches, half smothered in its oppressive atmosphere, gave us little opportunity for investigation) was small, damp, and entirely without means of admission for light ; lying, at great depth, immediately beneath that portion of the building in which was my own sleeping apartment. It had been used, apparently, in remote feudal times, for the worst purposes of a donjon-keep, and, in later days, as a place of deposit for powder, or some other highly combustible substance, as a portion of its floor, and the whole interior of a long archway through which we reached it, were carefully sheathed with copper. The door, of massive iron, had been, also, similarly protected. Its immense weight caused an unusually sharp grating sound, as it moved upon its hinges.

Having deposited our mournful burden upon tressels within this region of horror, we partially turned aside the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude between the brother and sister now first arrested my attention ; and Usher, divining, perhaps, my thoughts, murmured out some few words from which I learned that the deceased and himself had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely intelligible nature had always existed between them. Our glances, however, rested not long upon the dead - for we could not regard her unawed. The disease which had thus entombed the lady in the maturity of youth, had left, as usual in all maladies of a strictly cataleptical character, the mockery of a faint blush upon the bosom and the face, and that suspiciously lingering smile upon the lip which is so terrible in death. We replaced and screwed down the lid, and, having secured the door of iron, made our way, with toil, into the scarcely less gloomy apartments of the upper portion of the house.

And now, some days of bitter grief having elapsed, an observable change came over the features of the mental disorder of my friend. His ordinary manner had vanished. His ordinary occupations were neglected or forgotten. He roamed from chamber to chamber with hurried, unequal, and objectless step. The pallor of his countenance had assumed, if possible, a more ghastly hue - but the luminousness of his eye had utterly gone out. The once occasional huskiness of his tone was heard no more; and a tremulous quaver, as if of extreme terror, habitually characterized his utterance. There were times, indeed, when I thought his unceasingly agitated mind was laboring with some oppressive secret, to divulge which he struggled for the necessary courage. At times, again, I was obliged to resolve all into the mere inexplicable vagaries of madness, for I beheld him gazing upon vacancy for long hours, in an attitude of the profoundest attention, as if listening to some imaginary sound. It was no wonder that his condition terrified - that it infected me. I felt creeping upon me, by slow yet certain degrees, the wild influences of his own fantastic yet impressive superstitions.

It was, especially, upon retiring to bed late in the night of the seventh or eighth day after the placing of the lady Madeline within the donjon, that I experienced the full power of such feelings. Sleep came not near my couch - while the hours waned and waned away. I struggled to reason off the nervousness which had dominion over me. I endeavored to believe that much, if not all of what I felt, was due to the bewildering influence of the gloomy furniture of the room - of the dark and tattered draperies, which, tortured into motion by the breath of a rising tempest, swayed fitfully to and fro upon the walls, and rustled uneasily about the decorations of the bed. But my efforts were fruitless. An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame ; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm. Shaking this off with a gasp and a struggle, I uplifted myself upon the pillows, and, peering earnestly within the intense darkness of the chamber, harkened - I know not why, except that an instinctive spirit prompted me - to certain low and indefinite sounds which came, through the pauses of the storm, at long intervals, I knew not whence. Overpowered by an intense sentiment of horror, unaccountable yet unendurable, I threw on my clothes with haste (for I felt that I should sleep no more during the night), and endeavored to arouse myself from the pitiable condition into which I had fallen, by pacing rapidly to and fro through the apartment.

I had taken but few turns in this manner, when a light step on an adjoining staircase arrested my attention. I presently recognised it as that of Usher. In an instant afterward he rapped, with a gentle touch, at my door, and entered, bearing a lamp. His countenance was, as usual, cadaverously wan - but, moreover, there was a species of mad hilarity in his eyes - an evidently restrained hysteria in his whole demeanor. His air appalled me - but anything was preferable to the solitude which I had so long endured, and I even welcomed his presence as a relief.

"And you have not seen it ?" he said abruptly, after having stared about him for some moments in silence - "you have not then seen it ? - but, stay ! you shall." Thus speaking, and having carefully shaded his lamp, he hurried to one of the casements, and threw it freely open to the storm.

The impetuous fury of the entering gust nearly lifted us from our feet. It was, indeed, a tempestuous yet sternly beautiful night, and one wildly singular in its terror and its beauty. A whirlwind had apparently collected its force in our vicinity ; for there were frequent and violent alterations in the direction of the wind ; and the exceeding density of the clouds (which hung so low as to press upon the turrets of the house) did not prevent our perceiving the life-like velocity with which they flew careering from all points against each other, without passing away into the distance. I say that even their exceeding density did not prevent our perceiving this - yet we had no glimpse of the moon or stars - nor was there any flashing forth of the lightning. But the under surfaces of the huge masses of agitated vapor, as well as all terrestrial objects immediately around us, were glowing in the unnatural light of a faintly luminous and distinctly visible gaseous exhalation which hung about and enshrouded the mansion.

"You must not - you shall not behold this !" said I, shudderingly, to Usher, as I led him, with a gentle violence, from the window to a seat. "These appearances, which bewilder you, are merely electrical phenomena not uncommon - or it may be that they have their ghastly origin in the rank miasma of the tarn. Let us close this casement ; - the air is chilling and dangerous to your frame. Here is one of your favorite romances. I will read, and you shall listen ; - and so we will pass away this terrible night together."

The antique volume which I had taken up was the "Mad Trist" of Sir Launcelot Canning ; but I had called it a favorite of Usher's more in sad jest than in earnest ; for, in truth, there is little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity which could have had interest for the lofty and spiritual ideality of my friend. It was, however, the only book immediately at hand ; and I indulged a vague hope that the excitement which now agitated the hypochondriac, might find relief (for the history of mental disorder is full of similar anomalies) even in the extremeness of the folly which I should read. Could I have judged, indeed, by the wild overstrained air of vivacity with which he harkened, or apparently harkened, to the words of the tale, I might well have congratulated myself upon the success of my design.

I had arrived at that well-known portion of the story where Ethelred, the hero of the Trist, having sought in vain for peaceable admission into the dwelling of the hermit, proceeds to make good an entrance by force. Here, it will be remembered, the words of the narrative run thus:

"And Ethelred, who was by nature of a doughty heart, and who was now mighty withal, on account of the powerfulness of the wine which he had drunken, waited no longer to hold parley with the hermit, who, in sooth, was of an obstinate and maliceful turn, but, feeling the rain upon his shoulders, and fearing the rising of the tempest, uplifted his mace outright, and, with blows, made quickly room in the plankings of the door for his gauntleted hand ; and now pulling therewith sturdily, he so cracked, and ripped, and tore all asunder, that the noise of the dry and hollow-sounding wood alarummed and reverberated throughout the forest."

At the termination of this sentence I started, and for a moment, paused ; for it appeared to me (although I at once concluded that my excited fancy had deceived me) - it appeared to me that, from some very remote portion of the mansion, there came, indistinctly, to my ears, what might have been, in its exact similarity of character, the echo (but a stifled and dull one certainly) of the very cracking and ripping sound which Sir Launcelot had so particularly described. It was, beyond doubt, the coincidence alone which had arrested my attention ; for, amid the rattling of the sashes of the casements, and the ordinary commingled noises of the still increasing storm, the sound, in itself, had nothing, surely, which should have interested or disturbed me. I continued the story:

"But the good champion Ethelred, now entering within the door, was sore enraged and amazed to perceive no signal of the maliceful hermit ; but, in the stead thereof, a dragon of a scaly and prodigious demeanor, and of a fiery tongue, which sate in guard before a palace of gold, with a floor of silver ; and upon the wall there hung a shield of shining brass with this legend enwritten -

Who entereth herein, a conqueror hath bin ;
Who slayeth the dragon, the shield he shall win;And Ethelred uplifted his mace, and struck upon the head of the dragon, which fell before him, and gave up his pesty breath, with a shriek so horrid and harsh, and withal so piercing, that Ethelred had fain to close his ears with his hands against the dreadful noise of it, the like whereof was never before heard."

Here again I paused abruptly, and now with a feeling of wild amazement - for there could be no doubt whatever that, in this instance, I did actually hear (although from what direction it proceeded I found it impossible to say) a low and apparently distant, but harsh, protracted, and most unusual screaming or grating sound - the exact counterpart of what my fancy had already conjured up for the dragon's unnatural shriek as described by the romancer.

Oppressed, as I certainly was, upon the occurrence of this second and most extraordinary coincidence, by a thousand conflicting sensations, in which wonder and extreme terror were predominant, I still retained sufficient presence of mind to avoid exciting, by any observation, the sensitive nervousness of my companion. I was by no means certain that he had noticed the sounds in question ; although, assuredly, a strange alteration had, during the last few minutes, taken place in his demeanor. From a position fronting my own, he had gradually brought round his chair, so as to sit with his face to the door of the chamber ; and thus I could but partially perceive his features, although I saw that his lips trembled as if he were murmuring inaudibly. His head had dropped upon his breast - yet I knew that he was not asleep, from the wide and rigid opening of the eye as I caught a glance of it in profile. The motion of his body, too, was at variance with this idea - for he rocked from side to side with a gentle yet constant and uniform sway. Having rapidly taken notice of all this, I resumed the narrative of Sir Launcelot, which thus proceeded:

"And now, the champion, having escaped from the terrible fury of the dragon, bethinking himself of the brazen shield, and of the breaking up of the enchantment which was upon it, removed the carcass from out of the way before him, and approached valorously over the silver pavement of the castle to where the shield was upon the wall ; which in sooth tarried not for his full coming, but fell down at his feet upon the silver floor, with a mighty great and terrible ringing sound."

No sooner had these syllables passed my lips, than - as if a shield of brass had indeed, at the moment, fallen heavily upon a floor of silver - I became aware of a distinct, hollow, metallic, and clangorous, yet apparently muffled reverberation. Completely unnerved, I leaped to my feet ; but the measured rocking movement of Usher was undisturbed. I rushed to the chair in which he sat. His eyes were bent fixedly before him, and throughout his whole countenance there reigned a stony rigidity. But, as I placed my hand upon his shoulder, there came a strong shudder over his whole person ; a sickly smile quivered about his lips ; and I saw that he spoke in a low, hurried, and gibbering murmur, as if unconscious of my presence. Bending closely over him, I at length drank in the hideous import of his words.

"Not hear it ? - yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long - long - long - many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it - yet I dared not - oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am ! - I dared not - I dared not speak ! We have put her living in the tomb ! Said I not that my senses were acute ? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them - many, many days ago - yet I dared not - I dared not speak ! And now - to-night - Ethelred - ha ! ha ! - the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield ! - say, rather, the rending of her coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges of her prison, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault ! Oh whither shall I fly ? Will she not be here anon ? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste ? Have I not heard her footstep on the stair ? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart ? Madman !" - here he sprang furiously to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul - " Madman ! I tell you that she now stands without the door ! "

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell - the huge antique pannels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust - but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold - then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her violent and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.

From that chamber, and from that mansion, I fled aghast. The storm was still abroad in all its wrath as I found myself crossing the old causeway. Suddenly there shot along the path a wild light, and I turned to see whence a gleam so unusual could have issued ; for the vast house and its shadows were alone behind me. The radiance was that of the full, setting, and blood-red moon, which now shone vividly through that once barely-discernible fissure, of which I have before spoken as extending from the roof of the building, in a zigzag direction, to the base. While I gazed, this fissure rapidly widened - there came a fierce breath of the whirlwind - the entire orb of the satellite burst at once upon my sight - my brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder - there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters - and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the "House of Usher."

Trash - Twisted Valleys 8 v 8

2009-03-24T21:19:00.002+08:00

I've decided that to increase my YouTube popularity (or notoriety), I should start posting all my latest vids on my blog! xD

Take a look at my latest YouTube video!

Trash - Twisted Valleys 8 v 8

Just a short intro on the game. Trash is an RTS (real-time strategy) game, which is also known as a build base and troops and destroy enemy with troops game, created by inhumangames.com. You can go to their site if you want, but apparently, that's the only game they have although they are currently constructing a Trash II game. Anyway, there really are very few Trash videos on YouTube because the game is not very popular, and has too little servers. Luckily, the connection to somewhere in Texas is not that bad from here in Singapore.

It's quite hard to follow the gameplay, but the best way is to simply take note of everytime I bring the player list up, then you can follow who got destroyed already and who is still playing. What happens is that 4 of our teammates got killed, whilst we only managed to destroy one of the opponents. The game became a lopsided 3 vs 7 and we still won in the end thanks to TwOv2's pwnage mutant army and my gunship/stinger army. Weirdo combination, but somehow worked.

Both our bases were on the bottom left corner on the map, as you can see from the video, I didn't show it much except for maybe a few split seconds or so when there was a battle raging on there. I was playing by the username of SabreFang. Yup, and even if the video is so messy, just enjoy the music, lols xD

Quotable Quotes

"I mean I'm going to p0n English lah. You think I really want to p0n my own CEC Investiture ah? Do I look like a Naishad?"
-Nigel

"Mama mia!"
-Jian Hao, making a random comment

"What the hell? Li Bai?!"
-Basil, gobsmacked about a chinese poet

"Science Teachers are Very Cruel Men. Fei Zhou Ni Gu Jin."
-JT, about the elements: -Sc Ti V Cr Mn Fe Ch Ni Gu Zn- in order

"I've noticed that you have a very perverse streak in you."
-MDC, to Jian Hao
"Oh no."
-Jian Hao

"It was a daily routine that the customer enjoyed."
-Edmund, hoping his answer was correct for comprehension
"Uh ha ha ha ha ha haha haha ha haha haha... no."
-MDC, laughing uncontrollably and then rejecting his answer
The entire class laughs after that

"Did you notice I called him Basil the leaf, and not Basil the person? Because we're talking about a vegetarian."
-MDC, referring to our comprehension about a vegetarian in New York

"Basil, if you don't shut up, I'll wrap you in Basil leaves."
-MDC, with a weird threat

"It's all for the old folk's home, not for RI. We're only taking 50%."
-MDC, about the ORA Walk-a-Jogathon Card

"With a shirt like this, who needs pants?"
-Edmund, about Jian Hao getting an extra large shirt size

"So when I'm at the Cafe, I see old people and young girls slipping on the black snow. It's fun to watch!"
-JLim, about black snow being hard to see and slippery when he was in the US.

"Do you know that I have actually driven someone out of my class just now?"
-NC
"Oh."
-Nigel

"Who is throbbing here?"
-JLim, about the poet using the word 'throbbing', with a connotation.

"This is called the lower class..."
-NC
"Boundary!"
-Nigel, finishing NC's sentence
"Yes."
-NC
"Very Good!"
-Nigel, in NC's voice

"You'll be surprised, I'm not related to RI at all."
-NC
"Sir, we're not surprised."
-The whole 3M

"I'm just curious, did anyone try this?"
-NC, about the additional questions
"Curiosity killed--"
-Nigel, stopping halfway after NC looked at him sternly

"She wasn't sexy, she was... hairy."
-LL, about his past science teacher

"She came back with a scar here as if she got her head chopped off."
-LL, about the science teacher's condition after her operation on her neck

"Sir, you're a better teacher."
-Ern Xu, saying that LL teaches better than Iluyo
"Yes, I know that."
-LL

"Success is 50% luck, 50% courage."
-LL, and his words of wisdom

"Ern Xu, you're being pervert."
-LL

NCC Specialist Course Phase 1 '09

2009-03-20T16:03:00.003+08:00

So I was the only one from RI who went, and so maybe I didn't act enthu enough to get OOC (or perhaps it was just because other school act damn enthu then get), but at least I got 2nd Sergeant, and that is like super good.

Ok, Max Huang says it is 'expected' of me, but think of it this way. I didn't know what the heck to study for Trainfire, IFC or GSK Test, which counts in the Army-NCC Badge Test and your score decides on your rank. Simply put, I didn't actually mug anything because I didn't know what to mug. I went straight to Pasir Laba Camp without a clue as to how to even pass any of these tests.

Surprisingly, I did. On the first day, I went around asking all of my platoon mates what was there to remember and this and that. And then right before the test (like one hour before) I would just mug with the others (who have been mugging for the past one month, whilst me only the past one hour). Then verbally go through what is essential and what to look out for and avoid. So I did just that.

I pretty much barely managed to pass most of it, so I was pretty worried later cannot get 2SG rank, because you need like 80% (up 5% from last year) to get you a rank higher than a 3SG. For someone who has never taken a GSK Test before (the others at least took something similar in their school), and for someone who hasn't taught Trainfire Mutuals before, it was really quite a feat to attain $80 overall. Granted, I had PT and Peer Appraisal sections to pull me up (because I'm a nice guy and made alot of friends), but still it was very challenging.

All the other school people randomly chiong up to be IC and they were too fast because they were in front and had a headstart anyway. The Nan Chiao people were the most kope-ish and just chionged for everything. In Spec Course the IC no longer decides who to pick for volunteers but just says the first ones to come up to him gets selected. So dumb right? So in the end always first row people get the job. Of course once I managed to push my way through from the back but that's another story of how I became Company IC a day too late and my efforts were not recognized. Oh well.

Haven't bathed for 4 days but still feeling as fresh as ever. I wonder what's out there for me as a Specialist. Can pump all my platoon mates lol. I learnt several things over these four days. One is a new way of how to insult people's lameness.

As demonstrated by our PC, CLT Ardhur, when someone says something super lame, he will go around shaking people's hands. The act either means 'no link, no link', or 'give up, give up' aka 'good game'. Ya, and then after that OC Khalis also learned from him, lols, and then whole of Platoon 1 (my platoon) was like laughing during the award presentation.

Even CPT (NCC) Central District was not taking it so seriously. He is like a half-serious half-not serious kind of guy. Then halfway through went back into the shelter because he felt the sun was too hot, lols. At least OC Sivah saw my potential, but even he couldn't randomly slot me inside one of the award winners. I guess I just have to leave it up to people like Dylan, Zhao Song Yuan, Aliff and others to go and kope some awards in June. Good luck guys!

And a word of advice: To win an award is quite simple. Just SUPER MUG either Trainfire or GSK or IFC. As long as you super mug and get full marks, confirm will get one, no kidding. Because I didn't even know what to mug, of course I never get lah.

Being without my schoolmates has taught me a great deal about how to make friends, and about which friends to make. During the course I have made alot of friends from other schools, some of which I will see tomorrow in the NDP Selection Test at Amoy Quee. I will try to list all of my new friends in order of remembrance:
1. Saiful
2. Sufi
3. Alvin Koh
4. Marvin
5. Royston Shieh
6. Gee Choon
7. Wei Hao
8. Benjamin Lim
9. Benjamin Gay
10. James Lim
11. Carlo Pisigan
12. Kok Sze Jian
13. Kee Hong
14. Mao Feng
15. Jason Tan
16. Parvithiran
17. The rest whose names have escaped me

CPL Tan Yi Zu has been promoted to 2SG Tan Yi Zu for having passed the ARMY-NCC BADGE TEST held on 18 MARCH 2009.

Night before Spec Course

2009-03-15T23:22:00.004+08:00

Yup, so I'm going off to the Spec Course for the next 4 days and I just pray that God will keep me safe, and bless me in the course.

I went on a search for some GSK Notes and found out that, much like SANA Course, there are prizes for Top stuff. I inferred this when I saw this picture:

I then aspired to become the best Cadet in the GSK Test. The blogger with this plaque said that there were only 20 questions, so by just spam mugging, this will be quite possibly attainable. I believe there are also plaques for like best cadet in TrainFire, IFC, Footdrills and that kind of thing, but since GSK is the easiest, might as well get that and see if the rest can follow.

In case you guys still don't know, I'll be solo-ing this course without any schoolmantes because the rest are going in June. I can't go in June because of my German Immersion Program. The Spec Course is going to last from Monday to Thursday evening so don't expect a blogpost from me until, say around Friday?

Luckily, I did finish my Physics project research and historiography essay, which I hope was well-done, and so all that's left to do on the remaining days after the course is the HCL Gong Han and the reading of Macbeth... which we are doing for Lit. Speaking of HCL, because of randomly failing HCL CCT, I'm probably going to have to go for remedial lessons with KKE. So sad.

Its like 11.30pm, I have to wake up at 6am tomorrow and I still have to go upstairs to fold my sleeves and pin badges and that kind of thing, just settle appulets, gutters so that nothing gets messed up tomorrow. Scr3w those loose strings. Feeling slightly pissed because of the rush even during the school holidays. I hope the course will go slow, so at least got some slack and relax time. And I hope no one noticed my bad eating habits...

And as the only dude from RINCC going there, I'm pretty much going to get suanned by both the cadets and the cadet officers... haiz. Ok so my aim is to come back from spec course as a 2SG, or if possible, a 1SG. And striving towards getting GSK Best! I bet when Dylan goes in June, he'll get IFC Best, lolx!

Wish me good luck!

Colour Your World with Words #2

2009-03-11T21:55:00.001+08:00

The Rocking Horse Winner
by DH Lawrence

There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. She had bonny children, yet she felt they had been thrust upon her, and she could not love them. They looked at her coldly, as if they were finding fault with her. And hurriedly she felt she must cover up some fault in herself. Yet what it was that she must cover up she never knew. Nevertheless, when her children were present, she always felt the centre of her heart go hard. This troubled her, and in her manner she was all the more gentle and anxious for her children, as if she loved them very much. Only she herself knew that at the centre of her heart was a hard little place that could not feel love, no, not for anybody. Everybody else said of her: "She is such a good mother. She adores her children." Only she herself, and her children themselves, knew it was not so. They read it in each other's eyes.

There were a boy and two little girls. They lived in a pleasant house, with a garden, and they had discreet servants, and felt themselves superior to anyone in the neighbourhood.

Although they lived in style, they felt always an anxiety in the house. There was never enough money. The mother had a small income, and the father had a small income, but not nearly enough for the social position which they had to keep up. The father went into town to some office. But though he had good prospects, these prospects never materialised. There was always the grinding sense of the shortage of money, though the style was always kept up.

At last the mother said: "I will see if I can't make something." But she did not know where to begin. She racked her brains, and tried this thing and the other, but could not find anything successful. The failure made deep lines come into her face. Her children were growing up, they would have to go to school. There must be more money, there must be more money. The father, who was always very handsome and expensive in his tastes, seemed as if he never would be able to do anything worth doing. And the mother, who had a great belief in herself, did not succeed any better, and her tastes were just as expensive.

And so the house came to be haunted by the unspoken phrase: There must be more money! There must be more money! The children could hear it all the time though nobody said it aloud. They heard it at Christmas, when the expensive and splendid toys filled the nursery. Behind the shining modern rocking-horse, behind the smart doll's house, a voice would start whispering: "There must be more money! There must be more money!" And the children would stop playing, to listen for a moment. They would look into each other's eyes, to see if they had all heard. And each one saw in the eyes of the other two that they too had heard. "There must be more money! There must be more money!"

It came whispering from the springs of the still-swaying rocking-horse, and even the horse, bending his wooden, champing head, heard it. The big doll, sitting so pink and smirking in her new pram, could hear it quite plainly, and seemed to be smirking all the more self-consciously because of it. The foolish puppy, too, that took the place of the teddy-bear, he was looking so extraordinarily foolish for no other reason but that he heard the secret whisper all over the house: "There must be more money!"

Yet nobody ever said it aloud. The whisper was everywhere, and therefore no one spoke it. Just as no one ever says: "We are breathing!" in spite of the fact that breath is coming and going all the time.

"Mother," said the boy Paul one day, "why don't we keep a car of our own? Why do we always use uncle's, or else a taxi?"

"Because we're the poor members of the family," said the mother.

"But why are we, mother?"

"Well - I suppose," she said slowly and bitterly, "it's because your father has no luck."

The boy was silent for some time.

"Is luck money, mother?" he asked, rather timidly.

"No, Paul. Not quite. It's what causes you to have money."

"Oh!" said Paul vaguely. "I thought when Uncle Oscar said filthy lucker, it meant money."

"Filthy lucre does mean money," said the mother. "But it's lucre, not luck."

"Oh!" said the boy. "Then what is luck, mother?"

"It's what causes you to have money. If you're lucky you have money. That's why it's better to be born lucky than rich. If you're rich, you may lose your money. But if you're lucky, you will always get more money."

"Oh! Will you? And is father not lucky?"

"Very unlucky, I should say," she said bitterly.

The boy watched her with unsure eyes.

"Why?" he asked.

"I don't know. Nobody ever knows why one person is lucky and another unlucky."

"Don't they? Nobody at all? Does nobody know?"

"Perhaps God. But He never tells."

"He ought to, then. And aren't you lucky either, mother?"

"I can't be, it I married an unlucky husband."

"But by yourself, aren't you?"

"I used to think I was, before I married. Now I think I am very unlucky indeed."

"Why?"

"Well - never mind! Perhaps I'm not really," she said.

The child looked at her to see if she meant it. But he saw, by the lines of her mouth, that she was only trying to hide something from him.

"Well, anyhow," he said stoutly, "I'm a lucky person."

"Why?" said his mother, with a sudden laugh.

He stared at her. He didn't even know why he had said it.

"God told me," he asserted, brazening it out.

"I hope He did, dear!", she said, again with a laugh, but rather bitter.

"He did, mother!"

"Excellent!" said the mother, using one of her husband's exclamations.

The boy saw she did not believe him; or rather, that she paid no attention to his assertion. This angered him somewhere, and made him want to compel her attention.

He went off by himself, vaguely, in a childish way, seeking for the clue to 'luck'. Absorbed, taking no heed of other people, he went about with a sort of stealth, seeking inwardly for luck. He wanted luck, he wanted it, he wanted it. When the two girls were playing dolls in the nursery, he would sit on his big rocking-horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily. Wildly the horse careered, the waving dark hair of the boy tossed, his eyes had a strange glare in them. The little girls dared not speak to him.

When he had ridden to the end of his mad little journey, he climbed down and stood in front of his rocking-horse, staring fixedly into its lowered face. Its red mouth was slightly open, its big eye was wide and glassy-bright.

"Now!" he would silently command the snorting steed. "Now take me to where there is luck! Now take me!"

And he would slash the horse on the neck with the little whip he had asked Uncle Oscar for. He knew the horse could take him to where there was luck, if only he forced it. So he would mount again and start on his furious ride, hoping at last to get there.

"You'll break your horse, Paul!" said the nurse.

"He's always riding like that! I wish he'd leave off!" said his elder sister Joan.

But he only glared down on them in silence. Nurse gave him up. She could make nothing of him. Anyhow, he was growing beyond her.

One day his mother and his Uncle Oscar came in when he was on one of his furious rides. He did not speak to them.

"Hallo, you young jockey! Riding a winner?" said his uncle.

"Aren't you growing too big for a rocking-horse? You're not a very little boy any longer, you know," said his mother.

But Paul only gave a blue glare from his big, rather close-set eyes. He would speak to nobody when he was in full tilt. His mother watched him with an anxious expression on her face.

At last he suddenly stopped forcing his horse into the mechanical gallop and slid down.

"Well, I got there!" he announced fiercely, his blue eyes still flaring, and his sturdy long legs straddling apart.

"Where did you get to?" asked his mother.

"Where I wanted to go," he flared back at her.

"That's right, son!" said Uncle Oscar. "Don't you stop till you get there. What's the horse's name?"

"He doesn't have a name," said the boy.

"Gets on without all right?" asked the uncle.

"Well, he has different names. He was called Sansovino last week."

"Sansovino, eh? Won the Ascot. How did you know this name?"

"He always talks about horse-races with Bassett," said Joan.

The uncle was delighted to find that his small nephew was posted with all the racing news. Bassett, the young gardener, who had been wounded in the left foot in the war and had got his present job through Oscar Cresswell, whose batman he had been, was a perfect blade of the 'turf'. He lived in the racing events, and the small boy lived with him.

Oscar Cresswell got it all from Bassett.

"Master Paul comes and asks me, so I can't do more than tell him, sir," said Bassett, his face terribly serious, as if he were speaking of religious matters.

"And does he ever put anything on a horse he fancies?"

"Well - I don't want to give him away - he's a young sport, a fine sport, sir. Would you mind asking him himself? He sort of takes a pleasure in it, and perhaps he'd feel I was giving him away, sir, if you don't mind.

Bassett was serious as a church.

The uncle went back to his nephew and took him off for a ride in the car.

"Say, Paul, old man, do you ever put anything on a horse?" the uncle asked.

The boy watched the handsome man closely.

"Why, do you think I oughtn't to?" he parried.

"Not a bit of it! I thought perhaps you might give me a tip for the Lincoln."

The car sped on into the country, going down to Uncle Oscar's place in Hampshire.

"Honour bright?" said the nephew.

"Honour bright, son!" said the uncle.

"Well, then, Daffodil."

"Daffodil! I doubt it, sonny. What about Mirza?"

"I only know the winner," said the boy. "That's Daffodil."

"Daffodil, eh?"

There was a pause. Daffodil was an obscure horse comparatively.

"Uncle!"

"Yes, son?"

"You won't let it go any further, will you? I promised Bassett."

"Bassett be damned, old man! What's he got to do with it?"

"We're partners. We've been partners from the first. Uncle, he lent me my first five shillings, which I lost. I promised him, honour bright, it was only between me and him; only you gave me that ten-shilling note I started winning with, so I thought you were lucky. You won't let it go any further, will you?"

The boy gazed at his uncle from those big, hot, blue eyes, set rather close together. The uncle stirred and laughed uneasily.

"Right you are, son! I'll keep your tip private. How much are you putting on him?"

"All except twenty pounds," said the boy. "I keep that in reserve."

The uncle thought it a good joke.

"You keep twenty pounds in reserve, do you, you young romancer? What are you betting, then?"

"I'm betting three hundred," said the boy gravely. "But it's between you and me, Uncle Oscar! Honour bright?"

"It's between you and me all right, you young Nat Gould," he said, laughing. "But where's your three hundred?"

"Bassett keeps it for me. We're partners."

"You are, are you! And what is Bassett putting on Daffodil?"

"He won't go quite as high as I do, I expect. Perhaps he'll go a hundred and fifty."

"What, pennies?" laughed the uncle.

"Pounds," said the child, with a surprised look at his uncle. "Bassett keeps a bigger reserve than I do."

Between wonder and amusement Uncle Oscar was silent. He pursued the matter no further, but he determined to take his nephew with him to the Lincoln races.

"Now, son," he said, "I'm putting twenty on Mirza, and I'll put five on for you on any horse you fancy. What's your pick?"

"Daffodil, uncle."

"No, not the fiver on Daffodil!"

"I should if it was my own fiver," said the child.

"Good! Good! Right you are! A fiver for me and a fiver for you on Daffodil."

The child had never been to a race-meeting before, and his eyes were blue fire. He pursed his mouth tight and watched. A Frenchman just in front had put his money on Lancelot. Wild with excitement, he flayed his arms up and down, yelling "Lancelot!, Lancelot!" in his French accent.

Daffodil came in first, Lancelot second, Mirza third. The child, flushed and with eyes blazing, was curiously serene. His uncle brought him four five-pound notes, four to one.

"What am I to do with these?" he cried, waving them before the boys eyes.

"I suppose we'll talk to Bassett," said the boy. "I expect I have fifteen hundred now; and twenty in reserve; and this twenty."

His uncle studied him for some moments.

"Look here, son!" he said. "You're not serious about Bassett and that fifteen hundred, are you?"

"Yes, I am. But it's between you and me, uncle. Honour bright?"

"Honour bright all right, son! But I must talk to Bassett."

"If you'd like to be a partner, uncle, with Bassett and me, we could all be partners. Only, you'd have to promise, honour bright, uncle, not to let it go beyond us three. Bassett and I are lucky, and you must be lucky, because it was your ten shillings I started winning with ..."

Uncle Oscar took both Bassett and Paul into Richmond Park for an afternoon, and there they talked.

"It's like this, you see, sir," Bassett said. "Master Paul would get me talking about racing events, spinning yarns, you know, sir. And he was always keen on knowing if I'd made or if I'd lost. It's about a year since, now, that I put five shillings on Blush of Dawn for him: and we lost. Then the luck turned, with that ten shillings he had from you: that we put on Singhalese. And since that time, it's been pretty steady, all things considering. What do you say, Master Paul?"

"We're all right when we're sure," said Paul. "It's when we're not quite sure that we go down."

"Oh, but we're careful then," said Bassett.

"But when are you sure?" smiled Uncle Oscar.

"It's Master Paul, sir," said Bassett in a secret, religious voice. "It's as if he had it from heaven. Like Daffodil, now, for the Lincoln. That was as sure as eggs."

"Did you put anything on Daffodil?" asked Oscar Cresswell.

"Yes, sir, I made my bit."

"And my nephew?"

Bassett was obstinately silent, looking at Paul.

"I made twelve hundred, didn't I, Bassett? I told uncle I was putting three hundred on Daffodil."

"That's right," said Bassett, nodding.

"But where's the money?" asked the uncle.

"I keep it safe locked up, sir. Master Paul he can have it any minute he likes to ask for it."

"What, fifteen hundred pounds?"

"And twenty! And forty, that is, with the twenty he made on the course."

"It's amazing!" said the uncle.

"If Master Paul offers you to be partners, sir, I would, if I were you: if you'll excuse me," said Bassett.

Oscar Cresswell thought about it.

"I'll see the money," he said.

They drove home again, and, sure enough, Bassett came round to the garden-house with fifteen hundred pounds in notes. The twenty pounds reserve was left with Joe Glee, in the Turf Commission deposit.

"You see, it's all right, uncle, when I'm sure! Then we go strong, for all we're worth, don't we, Bassett?"

"We do that, Master Paul."

"And when are you sure?" said the uncle, laughing.

"Oh, well, sometimes I'm absolutely sure, like about Daffodil," said the boy; "and sometimes I have an idea; and sometimes I haven't even an idea, have I, Bassett? Then we're careful, because we mostly go down."

"You do, do you! And when you're sure, like about Daffodil, what makes you sure, sonny?"

"Oh, well, I don't know," said the boy uneasily. "I'm sure, you know, uncle; that's all."

"It's as if he had it from heaven, sir," Bassett reiterated.

"I should say so!" said the uncle.

But he became a partner. And when the Leger was coming on Paul was 'sure' about Lively Spark, which was a quite inconsiderable horse. The boy insisted on putting a thousand on the horse, Bassett went for five hundred, and Oscar Cresswell two hundred. Lively Spark came in first, and the betting had been ten to one against him. Paul had made ten thousand.

"You see," he said. "I was absolutely sure of him."

Even Oscar Cresswell had cleared two thousand.

"Look here, son," he said, "this sort of thing makes me nervous."

"It needn't, uncle! Perhaps I shan't be sure again for a long time."

"But what are you going to do with your money?" asked the uncle.

"Of course," said the boy, "I started it for mother. She said she had no luck, because father is unlucky, so I thought if I was lucky, it might stop whispering."

"What might stop whispering?"

"Our house. I hate our house for whispering."

"What does it whisper?"

"Why - why" - the boy fidgeted - "why, I don't know. But it's always short of money, you know, uncle."

"I know it, son, I know it."

"You know people send mother writs, don't you, uncle?"

"I'm afraid I do," said the uncle.

"And then the house whispers, like people laughing at you behind your back. It's awful, that is! I thought if I was lucky -"

"You might stop it," added the uncle.

The boy watched him with big blue eyes, that had an uncanny cold fire in them, and he said never a word.

"Well, then!" said the uncle. "What are we doing?"

"I shouldn't like mother to know I was lucky," said the boy.

"Why not, son?"

"She'd stop me."

"I don't think she would."

"Oh!" - and the boy writhed in an odd way - "I don't want her to know, uncle."

"All right, son! We'll manage it without her knowing."

They managed it very easily. Paul, at the other's suggestion, handed over five thousand pounds to his uncle, who deposited it with the family lawyer, who was then to inform Paul's mother that a relative had put five thousand pounds into his hands, which sum was to be paid out a thousand pounds at a time, on the mother's birthday, for the next five years.

"So she'll have a birthday present of a thousand pounds for five successive years," said Uncle Oscar. "I hope it won't make it all the harder for her later."

Paul's mother had her birthday in November. The house had been 'whispering' worse than ever lately, and, even in spite of his luck, Paul could not bear up against it. He was very anxious to see the effect of the birthday letter, telling his mother about the thousand pounds.

When there were no visitors, Paul now took his meals with his parents, as he was beyond the nursery control. His mother went into town nearly every day. She had discovered that she had an odd knack of sketching furs and dress materials, so she worked secretly in the studio of a friend who was the chief 'artist' for the leading drapers. She drew the figures of ladies in furs and ladies in silk and sequins for the newspaper advertisements. This young woman artist earned several thousand pounds a year, but Paul's mother only made several hundreds, and she was again dissatisfied. She so wanted to be first in something, and she did not succeed, even in making sketches for drapery advertisements.

She was down to breakfast on the morning of her birthday. Paul watched her face as she read her letters. He knew the lawyer's letter. As his mother read it, her face hardened and became more expressionless. Then a cold, determined look came on her mouth. She hid the letter under the pile of others, and said not a word about it.

"Didn't you have anything nice in the post for your birthday, mother?" said Paul.

"Quite moderately nice," she said, her voice cold and hard and absent.

She went away to town without saying more.

But in the afternoon Uncle Oscar appeared. He said Paul's mother had had a long interview with the lawyer, asking if the whole five thousand could not be advanced at once, as she was in debt.

"What do you think, uncle?" said the boy.

"I leave it to you, son."

"Oh, let her have it, then! We can get some more with the other," said the boy.

"A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, laddie!" said Uncle Oscar.

"But I'm sure to know for the Grand National; or the Lincolnshire; or else the Derby. I'm sure to know for one of them," said Paul.

So Uncle Oscar signed the agreement, and Paul's mother touched the whole five thousand. Then something very curious happened. The voices in the house suddenly went mad, like a chorus of frogs on a spring evening. There were certain new furnishings, and Paul had a tutor. He was really going to Eton, his father's school, in the following autumn. There were flowers in the winter, and a blossoming of the luxury Paul's mother had been used to. And yet the voices in the house, behind the sprays of mimosa and almond-blossom, and from under the piles of iridescent cushions, simply trilled and screamed in a sort of ecstasy: "There must be more money! Oh-h-h; there must be more money. Oh, now, now-w! Now-w-w - there must be more money! - more than ever! More than ever!"

It frightened Paul terribly. He studied away at his Latin and Greek with his tutor. But his intense hours were spent with Bassett. The Grand National had gone by: he had not 'known', and had lost a hundred pounds. Summer was at hand. He was in agony for the Lincoln. But even for the Lincoln he didn't 'know', and he lost fifty pounds. He became wild-eyed and strange, as if something were going to explode in him.

"Let it alone, son! Don't you bother about it!" urged Uncle Oscar. But it was as if the boy couldn't really hear what his uncle was saying.

"I've got to know for the Derby! I've got to know for the Derby!" the child reiterated, his big blue eyes blazing with a sort of madness.

His mother noticed how overwrought he was.

"You'd better go to the seaside. Wouldn't you like to go now to the seaside, instead of waiting? I think you'd better," she said, looking down at him anxiously, her heart curiously heavy because of him.

But the child lifted his uncanny blue eyes.

"I couldn't possibly go before the Derby, mother!" he said. "I couldn't possibly!"

"Why not?" she said, her voice becoming heavy when she was opposed. "Why not? You can still go from the seaside to see the Derby with your Uncle Oscar, if that that's what you wish. No need for you to wait here. Besides, I think you care too much about these races. It's a bad sign. My family has been a gambling family, and you won't know till you grow up how much damage it has done. But it has done damage. I shall have to send Bassett away, and ask Uncle Oscar not to talk racing to you, unless you promise to be reasonable about it: go away to the seaside and forget it. You're all nerves!"

"I'll do what you like, mother, so long as you don't send me away till after the Derby," the boy said.

"Send you away from where? Just from this house?"

"Yes," he said, gazing at her.

"Why, you curious child, what makes you care about this house so much, suddenly? I never knew you loved it."

He gazed at her without speaking. He had a secret within a secret, something he had not divulged, even to Bassett or to his Uncle Oscar.

But his mother, after standing undecided and a little bit sullen for some moments, said: "Very well, then! Don't go to the seaside till after the Derby, if you don't wish it. But promise me you won't think so much about horse-racing and events as you call them!"

"Oh no," said the boy casually. "I won't think much about them, mother. You needn't worry. I wouldn't worry, mother, if I were you."

"If you were me and I were you," said his mother, "I wonder what we should do!"

"But you know you needn't worry, mother, don't you?" the boy repeated.

"I should be awfully glad to know it," she said wearily.

"Oh, well, you can, you know. I mean, you ought to know you needn't worry," he insisted.

"Ought I? Then I'll see about it," she said.

Paul's secret of secrets was his wooden horse, that which had no name. Since he was emancipated from a nurse and a nursery-governess, he had had his rocking-horse removed to his own bedroom at the top of the house.

"Surely you're too big for a rocking-horse!" his mother had remonstrated.

"Well, you see, mother, till I can have a real horse, I like to have some sort of animal about," had been his quaint answer.

"Do you feel he keeps you company?" she laughed.

"Oh yes! He's very good, he always keeps me company, when I'm there," said Paul.

So the horse, rather shabby, stood in an arrested prance in the boy's bedroom.

The Derby was drawing near, and the boy grew more and more tense. He hardly heard what was spoken to him, he was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny. His mother had sudden strange seizures of uneasiness about him. Sometimes, for half an hour, she would feel a sudden anxiety about him that was almost anguish. She wanted to rush to him at once, and know he was safe.

Two nights before the Derby, she was at a big party in town, when one of her rushes of anxiety about her boy, her first-born, gripped her heart till she could hardly speak. She fought with the feeling, might and main, for she believed in common sense. But it was too strong. She had to leave the dance and go downstairs to telephone to the country. The children's nursery-governess was terribly surprised and startled at being rung up in the night.

"Are the children all right, Miss Wilmot?"

"Oh yes, they are quite all right."

"Master Paul? Is he all right?"

"He went to bed as right as a trivet. Shall I run up and look at him?"

"No," said Paul's mother reluctantly. "No! Don't trouble. It's all right. Don't sit up. We shall be home fairly soon." She did not want her son's privacy intruded upon.

"Very good," said the governess.

It was about one o'clock when Paul's mother and father drove up to their house. All was still. Paul's mother went to her room and slipped off her white fur cloak. She had told her maid not to wait up for her. She heard her husband downstairs, mixing a whisky and soda.

And then, because of the strange anxiety at her heart, she stole upstairs to her son's room. Noiselessly she went along the upper corridor. Was there a faint noise? What was it?

She stood, with arrested muscles, outside his door, listening. There was a strange, heavy, and yet not loud noise. Her heart stood still. It was a soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. What was it? What in God's name was it? She ought to know. She felt that she knew the noise. She knew what it was.

Yet she could not place it. She couldn't say what it was. And on and on it went, like a madness.

Softly, frozen with anxiety and fear, she turned the door-handle.

The room was dark. Yet in the space near the window, she heard and saw something plunging to and fro. She gazed in fear and amazement.

Then suddenly she switched on the light, and saw her son, in his green pyjamas, madly surging on the rocking-horse. The blaze of light suddenly lit him up, as he urged the wooden horse, and lit her up, as she stood, blonde, in her dress of pale green and crystal, in the doorway.

"Paul!" she cried. "Whatever are you doing?"

"It's Malabar!" he screamed in a powerful, strange voice. "It's Malabar!"

His eyes blazed at her for one strange and senseless second, as he ceased urging his wooden horse. Then he fell with a crash to the ground, and she, all her tormented motherhood flooding upon her, rushed to gather him up.

But he was unconscious, and unconscious he remained, with some brain-fever. He talked and tossed, and his mother sat stonily by his side.

"Malabar! It's Malabar! Bassett, Bassett, I know! It's Malabar!"

So the child cried, trying to get up and urge the rocking-horse that gave him his inspiration.

"What does he mean by Malabar?" asked the heart-frozen mother.

"I don't know," said the father stonily.

"What does he mean by Malabar?" she asked her brother Oscar.

"It's one of the horses running for the Derby," was the answer.

And, in spite of himself, Oscar Cresswell spoke to Bassett, and himself put a thousand on Malabar: at fourteen to one.

The third day of the illness was critical: they were waiting for a change. The boy, with his rather long, curly hair, was tossing ceaselessly on the pillow. He neither slept nor regained consciousness, and his eyes were like blue stones. His mother sat, feeling her heart had gone, turned actually into a stone.

In the evening Oscar Cresswell did not come, but Bassett sent a message, saying could he come up for one moment, just one moment? Paul's mother was very angry at the intrusion, but on second thoughts she agreed. The boy was the same. Perhaps Bassett might bring him to consciousness.

The gardener, a shortish fellow with a little brown moustache and sharp little brown eyes, tiptoed into the room, touched his imaginary cap to Paul's mother, and stole to the bedside, staring with glittering, smallish eyes at the tossing, dying child.

"Master Paul!" he whispered. "Master Paul! Malabar came in first all right, a clean win. I did as you told me. You've made over seventy thousand pounds, you have; you've got over eighty thousand. Malabar came in all right, Master Paul."

"Malabar! Malabar! Did I say Malabar, mother? Did I say Malabar? Do you think I'm lucky, mother? I knew Malabar, didn't I? Over eighty thousand pounds! I call that lucky, don't you, mother? Over eighty thousand pounds! I knew, didn't I know I knew? Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I'm sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?"

"I went a thousand on it, Master Paul."

"I never told you, mother, that if I can ride my horse, and get there, then I'm absolutely sure - oh, absolutely! Mother, did I ever tell you? I am lucky!"

"No, you never did," said his mother.

But the boy died in the night.

And even as he lay dead, his mother heard her brother's voice saying to her, "My God, Hester, you're eighty-odd thousand to the good, and a poor devil of a son to the bad. But, poor devil, poor devil, he's best gone out of a life where he rides his rocking-horse to find a winner."

[1885-1930; Lawrence was born in 1885 in Eastwood, Nottinghamshire, C England, UK]

HCL CCT Fail

2009-03-09T16:45:00.003+08:00

Ya. Today's CCT was epic fail. Mugged so much yesterday but epic fail today. Its like the first section already lose 6 marks. 2nd section confirm lose 7 marks. And 3rd section confirm lose 10 marks. So that amounts to a total loss of an epic fail 23 marks. Amazing. But due to human error, I will increase the range so that it becomes 24-22 points lost. So pretty much, I will pass by a narrow margin of around 1-3 marks. Meaning I get like 26-29/50. Or, if my calculations are epic fail, I will fail by that same narrow margin.

Anyway, because I'm already screwed for the test, there's no time to bother about it or worry about what the marks are since its already so clear what its going to be. Instead, I shall just be less emo and be happy and satisfied with what I have now. Oh right, I have SS and Physics test on Wednesday, and I have to hand in the NCC Heritage Essay by Wednesday and the Historiography Essay by Thursday because Friday no school and during the holidays I will be away as a solo-ist at Spec Course in Amoy Quee. I'm like going to die. x.x

Quotable Quotes

"Benign, is being very... benign."
-MDC, defining the word 'benign'

"And then suddenly, I turn and I'm like... woah!"
-MDC, about seeing a deformed man

"Kirk can't dance for nuts. When he tries to be cool, its just so funny."
-MDC, about Kirk's 1337 dancing skills

"Edmund speaks."
-MDC, trying to get the class to pay attention to Edmund
"Who is that?"
-Anonymous member of our class

"Article 153 [of the Merger with Malaysia] -> Bumiputra -> 'sons of the soil'"
-TSN writes on the board
"No wonder become called 'Mud'."
-Wei Han

"Confucious say: Sex is like Bridge. You must either have good partner or good hand."
-Teck Wei

"Confucious say: Woman is like Furniture. They must be screwed on the bed."
-Wei Tai

"Your mother so fat, when she put on a yellow raincoat, people go 'Taxi! Taxi!'"
-Teck Wei

"Sir, that one love bite."
-Izzat, when KYap was talking about an ACS rugby dude biting off a St Andrew's rugby dude's ear
"You've been watching too much Twilight."
-KYap

"He was very bad-tempered, you know, threw his racket, broke his racket and so on. Who was he?"
-KYap, asking about an unsporting tennis player.
"Euan."
-Douglas

"He's not a poker face."
-MDC, on Guan Hao's gambling habits

"I bet you 10 bucks that I won't talk about gambling."
-Guan Hao
"You just did."
-Me
"Oh, shit."
-Guan Hao

"Time seems to pass by very fuck, I mean fast."
-NC, with a slip of the tongue

"If you catch it by the tail, you will get bitten."
-Yi Ming, during the show where there was a guy catching a snake, referring to the HCL CCT passage about how happiness and satisfaction is related to catching snakes by the tails and getting bitten.

"Yah, Nigel."
-Izzat, when an eagle screeched

"I thought I saw a ghost."
-Izzat, giving an example of how our eyes can deceive us
"And what was it?"
-IR, asking him what it really was
"My grandmother."
-Izzat

"我昨天没有睡."
-KKE, about why he's so tired today
"老师，现在你就可以睡."
-Nigel, offering a solution

"大家好，我今天要演讲的题目是..."
-Nigel
The bell suddenly rings
"哦，老师下课了."
-Nigel

CG Outing 7/3/09

2009-03-08T21:46:00.002+08:00

There was some discrepancy between the arriving times of people. Our initial meeting time was 3pm, and because Timo was adamant, it got shifted earlier to 1pm, but Sharon couldn't make it because she had training (and so did other people), and came later at around 3pm. I arrived there at around 12.50pm and was bored to death. I ended up playing around 15 Sudoku games on my handphone, each game lasting on the average 3min 10sec. I was quite happy after beating my own high score of 2:35 seconds with a time of 2:28 seconds. The others after that were above 3 minutes because I got pretty much tired of the game.

Davidson and Timo and Titus only came at around 1.45pm and they hadn't eaten lunch. All we did was go to some National Geographic Museum shop which sold loads of historical books and National Geog Merchandise like overpriced toys, t-shirts, pillows. The pillows were around $60 each, the T-shirts were $60 and the toys could go up to $60 as well. They sold school bags for $60. The books too. Basically, everything was really expensive (like six times more than they should be).

There was this cold room with a sign outside saying that it was supposed to imitate winter conditions for those who would like to try. There was even a TV screen inside, which showed heat loss of the body. We were hesitant to try it out, because apparently we were supposed to get the help of a staff member. Since there were none around, I just opened the door and Timo stuck his hand inside. At first he went, "Not that cold what." And then he said, "Oh shit." He quickly snatched his hand back. Lol.

It was really cold inside, so we were trying to close back the door, but failed countless times. In the end, I leaned on the door and Timo latched it shut. xD

Then we went back down to the basement, bought some random scam candy from candy empire and then to the MRT to meet Eastella there. Then, Davidson and Timo remembered to eat lunch and we went to Kopitiam to eat. Davidson went toilet so he gave some money to Timo and asked him to buy something for him. Timo decided to be kind and instead of buying Pig's Intestine Soup, he ordered Pork Rib soup, much to Davidson's disgust.

I learned, or rather remembered, that Eastella was aunty Hoong Yen's niece, and also that she had been to Chiang Mai lots of times already. Sounds like another me. But I've only been the Chiang Rai lots of times, its more cooling and nicer there, I feel. Chiang Mai is like some uber hot city area with mild pollution. She apparently also knew of aunty Nellie and aunty Lily. Omigosh.

So anyway, Zhi Ting and Sherwyn came along, and after that so did 4 of her (and Da Wei's) friends: James, Silas, Yu Hern, and Joey (Yes I remember their names!). After eating, we went up to get tickets and met Sharon there too, so we set off for Sentosa at around 3pm+. Unfortunately, it was raining when we got there, and instead of trying not to get wet, we got wet at the little fountain under the shelter, instead of the rain itself.

The fountain spurted out water in patterns so it was a challenge splashing others when the opportunity came. All of us got wet, although everyone said I was the least wet. It wasn't my fault. Halfway through I used my umbrella to try and block getting splashed by water, and then Zhi Ting swung it and broke on of its mechanical arms. I pretty much stayed out of the area trying to fix the arm in vain. Once you break and umbrella, there's no fixing it, is there?

I actually suggested riding on the luge, but forgot that for the family package, it needed to have one person below 12 years old. So lame, in the end we didn't go for it because it was too expensive ($10 instead of family package $6.15). We headed for the beach, stoned around for abit and then asked to play with some girls because we were watching them for quite a while.

We suspected that they were like classmates who were all volleyball (or to that extent) players because they were playing like super well amongst themselves. They were playing this special game with a volleyball which I called (since it didn't have a name) "Post Ball". Yay. Basically about the same gameplay as Captain's Ball just that to score, you are supposed to throw the ball and it has to hit the opponent's lamp post on the other side of the sand playing area. There were no boundaries except that you cannot go behind the two posts.

From the moment we started playing, we suddenly realized that we were facing opponents which were way better than us. In less than 5 minutes we were down 5-0. We did manage to score 1 point though, and the game ended with a 10-1 score. Wow, great ownage. We played a second game, and this time, Sharon, Sherwyn, Zhi Ting and Eastella came to play too.

Sherwyn was a real big blocker because he jumped damn high and kept saving the balls and then throwing it damn far to where James was camping, and subsequently a score. The thing is, the lamp post is pretty tall, so as long as you aim for the top, nobody's going to be able to reach it and block the shot. I realized that trying to intercept balls from mid-distance is not very good. Instead, I just ran up to the opponent trying to pass or shoot, make sure I know she's going to throw it upwards, and then jump just in time to whack the ball away just as she releases the ball.

This process pretty much lasted for about 1 second, so it worked well especially when our opponents changed their tactics from short to long shots. There was a point in time when one of the opponents snatched the ball from Eastella, so I retaliated and snatched the ball from her, and tossed the ball back to Eastella, who rightfully deserved the ball. Okay, so it was tie, there should've been a jump ball. And so Sherwyn did later inform me that, "You shouldn't snatch the ball from girls." My argument was that "She snatched the ball from a girl anyway."

And for some reason girl-to-girl snatching is prohibited but boy-to-girl snatching is dishonourable. I don't know why. o.0 So anyway, because of that random act of self-defamation, I decided to play a less impacting role in the game, so as to cut them some slack and let them have an advantage in winning. They did win, in the end, with a narrow scoreline of 10-9. At least they didn't lose so they probably won't say things like, "Wah lao they play so rough."

I don't know whether or not I actually play rough. During the first half of that game, I was actually quite slack, walking around and stoning and pretending I was just some loser on the field who couldn't even run or catch the ball. Then, I picked up pace, and went flying (literally) for balls and then seem very rough. It's more of getting into the game. If I don't get into the game, and don't get competitive, then I'll just be like some useless bugger on the field. Somehow, I have to learn how not to be useless bugger and at the same time not too competitive. After all, it was a firnedly, and I totally agree that I probably shouldn't have snatched the ball from that girl. She was a nice girl anyway.

Interestingly, instead of roughly snatching it away (which she did to Eastella), I actually just curled my hand around the ball, and it was more like she letting go of it rather than me actually using force. I didn't use much force at all, I realized, so it was either she realized that she shouldn't have snatched, or that she was so shocked at my actions that she was stunned and released her grip.

Anyway, moving on to after the game. We were trying to keep a beach ball in the air for 50 hits and then it all broke out into some sand-throwing war game, which pretty much gave us some reason to go and bathe in the toilets. None of us got thrown into the pool, surprisingly.

After that, we ate dinner at level two open area of Harbourfront. I ate You Mian, whilst most of the others ate from Carl's Jr, pretty much because of infinite refills (then again, how much can you actually drink?). Then, we went to the arcade, got amazed by James, Silas and Yu-Hern's superb street basketball scores, and then went home.

Yup. I thought I had broken my camera, but it suddenly became okay back at home for some reason. I think it was because of the super humidity that made my camera go bonkers (when I reached home it was like water vapour was condensing onto it). But my umbrella didn't refix itself, sadly.

And more sadly, HCL CCT is tomorrow. And although I mugged, it would be only 10 marks out of 50. And the other 40 came from compre and summarizing. Dang. Good thing is, History RA debates are postponed because Lloyd was hospitalized due to a leg fracture, Zi Qi was uncontactable, Ern Xu has bad sore throat and Wei Han is sick.

Tomorrow also has PE swimming/polo... liddat how to do CCT?

Colour Your World with Words #1

2009-03-04T20:59:00.003+08:00

Tomorrow
by Albert E. Cowdrey

One hot, later-summer day, young Gaius Manilius turned his back on his native town and the serne sea and set out to climb the omuntain that towered bluely in the distance, hoping to find the Sybil who lived among its upper crags.

Gaius's many friends thought him a decent sort, though a bit simple-minded, and they had always advised him to avoid the Sybil Althea. She speaks the truth but tells a lie, his friends had warned him. She sees the future, yet she doesn't dare interfere with the decrees of the Fates. So she plays with words. The things se predicts come true, but until they happen you won't know what she she really meant.

Well, circumstances were forcing Gaius to ignore his friends' advice. His life had always been hard, for he was almost uneducated and his father, a retired centurion of the XII Legion, had gambled away the land he'd been given in lieu of a pension. Now truly terrible possibilities faced Gaius, and at the age of twenty-two he simply didn't know how to handle them.

For a time his way twisted along back roads, through farmlands full of morning sunlight. THe mountain's lowe rslopes were also pleasant, green and thatched with wheatfields and the groves of gray-leafed olive trees. Slaves paused at their work to watch him pass, and poor as he was, Gaius felt a comfortable sense of superiority, for he was a free man. And yet...

The sun was bright but his feelings darkened as he hastened on. Clouds hung over the mountaintop, and just so, he thought, a cloud hing over him. Poverty and debt, and if his debts couldn't be paid - well, he could be seized and a jdugement rendered and he could be sold into slavery to satisfy his creditors. The ragged saves in the fields, their bodies bent and twisted by hard labor and scant food and frequent thrashings, suddenly filled him with anxiety and fear.

The mountain was changing, too, becoming rocky and steep. THe last fields ended where the slope turned suddenly upward. Brown pitted rocks projected through the waving wild grasses and the stunted pines. A flight of crows swept past, screaming in their own language. A warning perhaps? But Gaius had never learned to read the language of birds, not well anyway, he was a soldier's son, not a priest's or an augur's. He knew that seeing an eagle was lucky, and from time to time he paused to search the sky, but no eagle appeared to comfort him. The way was hard now and he had to pause from time to time to catch his breath. Gaius had heard in the marketplace that a series of landmarks indicated the way to the Sybil's cave, and he noted the sights as he passed them: an abandoned olive grove, a great boulder, an oak in the shape of a humpbacked man, a hawk's nest hanging raggedy visible on a crag.

In a place truly wild and desolate he found the last marker, a shrine dedicated to Dis, lord of the underworld. The frightened him: there were people who worshipped Death. Gauis hesitated, momentarily afraid to go on. He looked around him and shivered. The trees and plants had taken on strange, otherworldly forms. They were stunted by the vapors emitted from the underworld, which had opening hereabout, cracks and windows into the land of great Dis and wan Proserpina and furious Ate. Gaius could smell the sulfur in the air. Most of the trees had died, but wild grasses seemed to thrive in the rank mists that crept down the slopes at evening.

Only the thought of his father, a soldier afraid of nothing, nerved him to go on. Taking a deep breath,Gaius, beganto climb again, fighting as much against his own fears as against the steep, twisted way.

All at once he emerged onto a sort of natural shelf, at whose back yawned a dark cave mouth overhung by vines. He halted, breathing hard, scracely able to believe that he had found the place at last. Then a tall, thin woman wearing a dirty red travelling cloak emerged from the cave.Her gray hair fell to her waist and she combed it with her long crooked fingers.

The Sybil Althea's first words were anything but prophetic.

"Get the mule!" she screeched like a crow, her voice harsh with long breathing of this tainted air. Then she saw Gaius. "Yes, yes?" she demanded.

Trembling, he came forward and sank onto his knees.

"Great Sybil," he said. "I've come to seek wisdom."

"Nobody wants wisdom," she snapped. "All they want is comfortable lies." She added, "Do you have any money?"

Trembling, he detached a leather puch from his belt and held it out to her. She swept toward him, trailing dusty garments and bringing odours of incense and smoke. She took the purse.

"Huh," she said, fingering the few sestertil. "You don't rate wisdom very high, my friend."

"Forgive me, great Sybil. I'm poor and desperate."

"Nothing new about that," she grunted. "Nine-tenths of the world could say the same."

At the moemnt, a young slave woman emerged from the cave carrying a battered leather box, which she set down on the ground.

"I'll fetch the mule," she said, and hastened away, vanishing into a thicket of vines and thistles.

Meanwhile, the Sybil seated herself on a boulder. "Normally I wouldn't take such a miserable fee," she told Gaius. "But I'm leaving on a trip and I suppose even a few bits of silver might come in handy."

Besides, she thought, I believe I can get a small additional fee form you.

The slave returned, leading a small mule already saddled. When she lifted the leather box to tie it behind the saddle, Gaius noted that she had a clean face, and might have been pretty in some other life where she was prosperous and free.

"Now," said the Sybil. "Tell me your troubles, briefly."

Clumsily, Gaius explained. His father was dying of an illness no doctor could cure. Their money was gone. The old man owed doctors, the landlord, the apothecary, and the wind shop. All these debts Gaius would inherit, and he had no way to pay. It was time of peace, the legions weren't recruiting, and in any case his father had always told him he was too kind-hearted for the army life. He longed to marry, but who'd marry a peuper? At best he faced a future of hard labour, poor as a beggar's dog, competing with slaves who worked for nothing.

And there were wirse possibilities. At any time, Gaius might be seized by his father's creditors and sold. If that was to be his fate, he wished to know it honestly so he could kill himself. Suicide was honourable if done bravely for a good reason, and his father had always taught him to prefer death to humiliation.

The Sybil listened to his story and then said, in her abrupt way, "Drusilla, give this young man some water. Leave me," she added to Gaius. "I need silence and solitude in order to see what will come to pass."

So Gaius went into the cave with Drusilla, and the slave showed him where a cold spring broke out of the earth and gave him a wooden cup to drink the water. The water tasted faintly of sulfur but it was cold and refreshing anyway.

"I didn't know there were psrings here," he said when he had drunk.

"Oh yes. There are springs of hot water and springs of cold water. THere's a place not a hundred paces from here where hot water bubbles up and makes a natural calidarium. If you'd like a soak, there's plenty of time. She takes forever with her visions. She's getting old, you see."

After his long trek that counded enticing, Gaius followed Drusilla out of the cave and down a narrow, stony path. The hot spring was in as wild and strange a place as he had ever seen, set all around with gray and brown rocks of contorted shapes swathed in brown vines. The pool lay in a natural bowl in the rock, surrounded with smooth, multicoloured crusts of stone deposited by the steam that rose in wisps from its surface.

Drusilla helped him undress, as a slave should, and then took off her own shapeless garment and joined him to scrub his back with pumice.

"I should have brought some oil," she fretted. "But the last jug's been packed up. Madam Althea's determined to get moving today, though she never says why. Where are you from?"

"Herculaneum."

"Ah, I knew you were a townsman. Your skin's beautiful. We country folks are all burnt by the sun and we have bodies like old gnarly trees."

She said this to force Gaius to look at her and see that she was lying. In fact, her face and hands were red and coarse but her body was white. Gaius, a true Roman, thought that bathing was second only to love among the joys of life. Amare, lavare, cantore, the saying went - to love to bathe to sing... His body relaxed, and for a little while his troubles dispersed with the handfuls of gray pumice tat clouded the roiling spring and vanished. The water heated his blood, and instead of a harried deptor, he was a young man alone with a tolerably pretty woman.

Almost an hour had passed when Gaius and Drusilla returned to the Sybil, both of them glowing with cleanliness and healthy exercise. Althea had gone to sleep on her boulder and she was snoring, slowly and rhythmically. The mule was browsing.

"Ah, yes," she said. "And were you hospital to the young man?"

"Oh yes, madam."

"I thought you would be. Now, Gaius Manilius, sit down at my feet and ask me three questions, fo rI will answer no more for the pittance you paid me. And be quick about it; I'd mean to be on the road by this hour."

In an instant all his anxieties returned. Gaius bit his lower lip. What exactly should he ask? Taking a deep breath, he began:

"Will my father die leaving me in debt?"

"Your father will die tomorrow and the death will be a cruel one. But at least it will bequick. No lingering. And his debts will be uncollectable, so you need not worry about them."

He almost wasted a question asking why the debts would be uncollectable. But he stopped himself in time, and asked instead:

"Will I ever be enslaved?"

"You will be a free man all your life."

He heaved a great sigh of relief and joy. It had been a long, hard trek up Mount Vesuvius, but the journey had brought him bodily pleasure and infinite relief of spirit. His thoughts instantly went to the future and he asked:

"Will my life be a long one?"

"VEry few people in Herculaneum - or in your great neighbour Pompeii, either - will live longer than you."

Joyfully, he leapt to his feet. Then, overcome, he fell to his knees and prostrated himself before the Sybil.

"May all the gods and goddeses bless you and your mighty wisdom," cried Gaius.

With a grim smile, Althea rose stiffly to her feet.

"Drusilla, bring the mule," she said. "He's eating thistles and you knowthat it fills his belly with gas." To Gaius she said, "You may helpm me mount."

When she was settled comfortable in her sidesaddle,w ith the reins in her hands, she looked down at him for the last time. Knowing the future had turned her heart to gristle years ago, yet at times when she was troubles by the harshness of the Fates. Gaius's face was rosy and her dark eyes were shining and he seemed to radiate youth.

She muttered, "Twenty-two years old."

"Pardon?"

"I'm leaving this place forever," she said, "and so I'll give you aprting gift: two prophecies you haven't paid for. You will have at least one child, whether son or daughter I don't know yet. And hwhen you go to Dis's Kingdom if you leave behind the mold from which a remarkable statue of one will later be painted. Thousands of years from now, people will come from far countries to marvel at it."

She adjusted her saddle and the leather box, and turned the mule's head and set off sat off at a slow pace. Drusilla smiled at Gaius, waves, and trotted after hre, wiping a few tears from her eyes. He had time to draw no more than a dozen breaths before they vanished into the dying thickets and outcroppings of old lava.

Gaius raid his fists and stood pressing them to his temples, trying to remember every detail of this, the most miraculous of his life.

A statue!

Only the rich could affort statues. And people only came to gawk at the statues of the famous, or of the gods. Not only would he escape debt, not only would he remain free, not only would he merry and beget at least one child. He would also become rich and famous and be remembered for thousands of years.

"How? He couldn't imagine. But with the Fates all things were possible. Slaves became emperors and emperors became slaves. The rich fell into poverty, the poor rose to opulence. Unbelievable things happened every day.

Slowly his sense of duty returned. Althea had predicted not only his own happiness but also his father's death. He must hasted home to see to his father's needs an, when tomorrow came, to ease his end. The old man must not die a cruel death, as Althea - to that extent Gaius hoped to change the decrees of the Fates. If necessary, he would help his father open his veins, as a loving son should.

He started down the mountain, lepaing like a goat. In the remote distance the aftersoon was descending toward the blueGulf ofNaples and the Tyrrhenian Sea. Everything Gaius saw and heard - oliv egroves rustling in the evening breeze, cattling lowing, the sound sound of someones playing panpipes in the distance - promised a peaceful tomorrow.

Those fools who call temselves my friends! he thought. Telling lies about the Sybil. Could anybody have spoken up more plainly, more honsestly than she.

Descending the other side of the mountain, Althea chatted with her slave.

"What did you think of him, madam?" panted Drusilla, trotting behind the mule.

"Who?"

"The young man, Gaius."

Athena thinking: I hope the child's healthy. I'm getting on and I can use another servant. And if money gets short, I can always take it to a slave broker and sell it.

"Do try to keep up girl," she said aloud. "I want to be far away from here by tomorrow."

Tomorrow, tomorrow, thought Drusilla. What's so important about tomorrow?

Disconcertingly, Althea answered her thought.

You'll know when it gets here, said the Sybil.

EL Diagnostic Essay

2009-03-03T19:59:00.003+08:00

This essay scored a 9/10, by MDC's standards. It was written by me in 50 minutes.

A Long Way Home

"Hold on!" someone called out. A huge, towering wave smashed into the raft of kayaks. In an instant, our lines were broken. The two kayaks I was holding on to tore free from my grasp. My partner's desperate attempt to cling on to an outstretched paddle failed and we found ourselves drifting away from the safety of the motorboat. "Paddle right!" I shouted, scrambling to retrieve the paddle that I had lodged in between my feet. We paddled frantically and steered back towards the motorboat.

Suddenly, the engines started and the boat began to pull away from us, towards the dangerous waters of Chek Jawa. "Follow the boat!" an instructor called out from amidst the frenzy. The rest of the kayaks around us began to paddle again, and so did we. The clouds gathered in a large mass overlooking the sea in front of us. The wind howled at our faces, pushing the waves against us. Nature was not going to let us get away so easily.

In stubborn determination, I pressed on and continued the strenuous paddling. The waves rocked against the side of the kayak, and threatened to topple us over. "Face the wave!" my partner yelled from behind me. I steered the kayak to face the incoming waters. I winced as the kayak took on the wave head-on. It tilted upwards at the initial force, and then slammed back onto the surface of the water, successfully cutting through the wave.

We hat beat the wave! I nearly forgot to carry on paddling. However, one look around me told me that it was too soon to celebrate. We were not even halfway across Chek Jawa, yet we were already exhausted. Six or more kayaks had capsized around us, and the kayakers, my friends, were shouting for help. "Look out!" my partner snapped me back to my senses. A wave smashed hard against the side of our kayak and the water rushed in. A heavier kayak meant a harder journey, and it was a long way home.

We would not give up hope, and our paddles refused to halt in the storm. Wave after wave came upon us, each hit causing more water to flood the kayak. I felt the kayak sinking slowly with every stroke and every breath I took. The kayak's speed dropped tremendously, and I found it increasingly tiring as I paddled on. A peculiar sound behind me made me look back, only to see my partner vomiting over the side of the kayak!

I had promised myself that as long as I could paddle, I would never stop until we got home. Now was not the time to break that promise. "You bail, I paddle!" I shouted behind me. Two taps on the kayak: He heard me. With the assurance that I still had my partner's support, I paddled to tackle the waves once more. There was just one final stretch to go, and we would make it to the end. We will make it home!

The battle raged on between kayak and sea. An endless amount of waves charged at us. The wind, with the strength of a lion, roared at us. The clouds, looming over us like predator over prey, laughed at us. Yet, against all odds, we crossed the waters of Chek Jawa. The most difficult section of our sea expedition was finally behind us. We had overcome the greatest challenge!

The motorboat pulled up beside the kayaks whilst we were celebrating our victory. An instructor stood up and said, "Congratulations in crossing the hardest part of your journey. The worst is over, but the sun is setting and there is still a long way to go before we reach our desginated campsite."

Immediately, our spirits sank like anchors in water, far beneath the raging seas. As I looked ahead at the sea in front, and the sun setting in the horizon, I could not help but wonder how long the road forward would be. I guess, it would be a long way home.

(672 words)

Comments by MDC:
Good Job. (Marks: 9/10)

Quotable Quotes

"I know you're desperate, after watching 'Desperate Housewives.'"
-NC
Whole class goes into fake laughter mode

"When I went to Europe, I thought I kept seeing the same people over and over again. No, I'm not kidding, okay!"
-NC
"Sir, racist!"
-Yi Ming

"Ma'am what about Japanese Chowder?"
-Anonymous, when asked if who has eaten chowder before
"No, not Japanese Chowder. The Japanese make absolutely excellent sushi, excellent sashimi, excellent teppanyaki and all that crap, but definitely not chowder."
-MDC, with super juxtaposition

"So, Matthias, what is El Niño?"
-MDC, since Matthias is GeogRA
"El Niño is a tough little weather phenomenon."
-Matthias, quoting directly from the comprehension text we were studying

"Who is 李显龙 (Lee Hsien Loong)?"
-Guan Hao, after he read a Chinese passage with the words inside
After being daoed, he added...
"Who is he?! Is he Lee Kuan Yew?"

Edmund's Joke
Q: How did the author of 'To Kill a Mockingbird' die?
A: She didn't. She lived Harper Lee ever after.
(geddit? happily ever after? *stitch stitch*)

I Heart Revolution

2009-03-02T21:26:00.003+08:00

Do you have the heart for a Revolution?

I ask myself this question, why is it so difficult to have a prayer group in RI?

Is it because of the incredibly busy schedules we have everyday, such that there is absolutely no free time slot for Christians to gather together, meet, get to know one another and have fellowship and bible study and prayer sessions? Why do I see so many people from other schools starting prayer groups which the Lord is adding to their number daily? How do prayer groups in other schools, even neighbourhood schools, flourish with such spiritual revival when the ones here, if there are any, are stagnant?

Is it because of the don't-care-less attitude employed by many of the Christians here? In 3M alone, there are nearly 10 Christians, including the Catholics. Both our form teachers are Christian, and so are a great deal of our teachers. The thing is, what is preventing us from coming together as a prayer group to make Jesus Alive in our school? What is that obstacle that us as Rafflesian Christians have to overcome in order to start a prayer group?

I am hearing countless testimonies of prayer groups all over Singapore multiplying and growing in faith. Yet, I hear no testimonies of growing prayer groups here in RI. In fact, I hear not one mention of the word 'prayer group' from my peers, not a single word. Not even close to the topic. There is, I believe, and existing prayer chain headed by Joseph Lee. But how much can a prayer chain do if nothing is done to do something. I keep seeing the same prayer items on the email, the most common ones are:
- Pray for salvation and revival in our classes.
- Pray for a spiritual atmosphere change in our school.

The question I want pose to all of you Christians in RI is this: What are YOU doing to start a spiritual revival in your class?

Frankly, I am quite disappointed at the fact that I don't know of any existing prayer groups in school. Joshua Phang told me that some dude by the name of 'Samuel' has one and that they are 'meeting every Wednesday'. So how can I not hear anything about a prayer group which was meeting every week on Wednesday?

Isn't this prayer group spreading the gospel to their friends in their respective classes? Isn't this prayer group longing to grow in faith and also in numbers? Isn't this prayer group driven by the Spirit, instead of a person named 'Samuel'? Isn't this prayer group planning outreach events to generate interest in Christianity? Isn't this prayer grouop working to clarify all the misconceptions that Rafflesians have of Christians or Christian Life?

For example, I have a friend who believes that "If you don't eat Jesus' flesh, the bread, and drink Jesus' blood, the cup, then you will go to hell". I know people who are convinced that "Christians are all hypocrites because of the Crusades". I don't even have to mention the popular belief, because of the novel by Dan Brown 'The Da Vinci Code', that "The Church is a manipulative organization working for its own purposes".

I personally have read the Da Vinci Code and don't really get how people can somehow apply to real life. It is, after all, under the 'fiction' section of the library, and although there is a lie on one of the front pages saying that everything is true or something like that, it must most definitely not be taken into account as true. Here we have one book that can totally brainwash the minds of thousands of people, whilst there are evidently major historical inaccuracies, if one actually bothers google-ing.

The point is this. Many people out there have a warped and disfigured view of Christianity, mostly by their own experiences and influences, which is basically holding them back, and what we need to do is to correct that view and bring them the truth. Or else, no one will.

If you are a Rafflesian Christian, and you are reading this post, then you'd better email me at kaizersaber@hotmail.com, I really want to start a prayer group with you people. So far, I've only actually got support from Joshua Phang. Ya, so I really need the encouragement.

I will feel guilty if I leave RI without doing my best for God.

YOUth Got Heart 2009

2009-02-28T14:47:00.002+08:00

What is YOUth Got Heart all about?

Youth Got Heart 2009 is an initiative by Raffles Institution (Junior College) InteractClub with the support of Anglo-Chinese School (Independent) Interact Club which aims to expose youths across the nation to the various types of community service and service learning. The event provides a platform and opportunity for the establishment of sustained partnerships between the Voluntary Welfare Organizations (VWOs) of Singapore and youths who are interested in providing their service to the community. Through the interactive road show which showcases a myriad of VWOs, coupled with interesting performances and talks, it is hoped that the meaningful purpose of volunteerism can be brought across to students as well as the members of the public.

The road show showcases 23 VWOs, and details like their beneficiaries and projects which require volunteers will be available. Performances onstage will occur concurrently with the road show exhibition. Chairpersons of the various VWOs and other key note speakers are also invited to give talks to the public to enable them to understand more about the need of the VWOs and ways in which they can play a part in serving the organizations. In addition, we have invited Mr Teo Ser LUck as our Guest-of-Honour, together ith other VIPs such as Ms Eunice Olsen (Nominated Member of Parliament), Mr Yeo Oon Chye (Director, Corporate Development and Manpower Division, National Council of Social Service), Mr Paliath "Mohan" Mohandas (President of Rotary Club of Singapore), and Mrs Lim Lai Cheng (Principal of RI(JC)).

So I went there and was rather disappointed because of mainly one thing

1) It was too hot
Although it can be argued that it will probably get cooler at night, I feel there must have been more thought and resources put in to at least install fans within the compound. Sure, they did use white tentage, but how much heat can that actually deflect? It feels much like a failed attempt at heat isolation from the inside, and I observed many people fanning themselves with their booklets. You see, if you are going to hold some event at 'The Top of the 8' then you better at least give people some fans so that they will find it acceptable. Think about it logically, if J8 is right next to them, fully air-conditioned, and knowing that Singaporeans seek only comfort, then isn't it obvious that most will not venture into the Youth Got Heart road show?

An alternative might be to hold it on level two, where the stupid outside shops are. Just like clear them off and shift everything there, there's bound to be alot more people coming in to visit. Plus, you save on the tentage and fan setting-up costs. The only downside is that the place might be more expensive on rent, and I believe that it was because of this that they had to stuff it at the Top of the 8 area, which is a very elusive place not many people know off. I, for example, didn't know it existed until I saw the banner.

Yeah, so that's just a learning point on organizing such events in the future. Meanwhile, on more recent news, I have been selected to go for the German Immersion Programme, and thus will miss Phase 2 & 3 of the Spec Course. Mr Yap made arrangements for me to go for Phase 1 in March, which is alot better because then, I also get to p0n NCC Camp, hahax! Still, I'm quite scared because I don't know a thing about mutuals and stuff like that and its like only two weeks away. Fail >.>

My sis is going back to Australia today. So sad! =[ But she's going to come back anyway in December so, its not like she's gone forever. Ok so, then she'll go back and come back another 2 more times before she permanently either stays there, or here. I bet by then, it wouldn't actually matter to me. xD

Quotable Quotes

"If you want to teach in Singapore, come to the PE Department. Best department in the whole country. I'm serious."
-MDC, on why PE teachers have unfair slacking/playing times

"Their office room opens up to the gym. How cool is that?"
-MDC, on why she would become a PE teacher if she could

"'Gerrymandering' is the redrawing of political boundaries."
-EK, explain the term
"Like the PAP!"
-Edmund, giving an example

"And so, this person committed suicide."
-KYap, retelling a story
"Again?"
-Izzat

"I tell you, never give Izzat an opening, otherwise he'll crawl right into it."
-KYap, using nuances

"If pro is the opposite of con, then is progress the opposite of congress?"
-BumSoo

"Sir, you suck!"
-Edmund
"Yes, that's right!"
-KYap, talking about how he felt as a failure in secondary school

"I'm such a noob."
-KYap, making a random comment

"People get 10As and one B and cry over it, saying that they are a failure!"
-KYap
"Naishad!"
-Everybody in class, giving an example
"Then, there are people in the Normal Academic stream who get 3As and think they're on the top of the world!"
-KYap
"Nigel!"
-Everybody in class, giving another example

Singapore Flyer Experience

2009-02-23T00:53:00.005+08:00

So on Saturday, we had our RINCC Singapore Flyer excursion to earn our Total Defence and National Heritage badges. The original plan was to meet in school at 7am, then reach there at around 8am and get the free 2009 tickets and get on the flyer. After JYap called them up and got some info, he pushed forward the time to meet in school at 6.45am, and asked 30 of us to come early at around 6.30am to queue up for 4 tickets each for the rest of the company.

I was one of the 30 since my house was relatively closer. As it turned out, Dad didn't like the prospect of waking up early in the morning to send me to the Singapore Flyer, especially when he had to send my brother to rugby in ACSI after that, and then rush back to KCPSS for a church building meeting, and then pack up his stuff at home and take a taxi to Changi Airport where he would then board a flight to Dubai, for an 'exam' apparently, as he deems it.

Still, he did send me, and I was able to reach there by 6.15, and queued up at the surprisingly long queue. I estimated at least 300-400 people were already in the queue. Do your math. 2009 divided by 4 tickets per person is 502 remainder 1. So in other words, I barely made it. In less than 5 minutes, people started filing in behind me, and by the time JYap got here, he was already around 30 people behind, and so was the rest of the other NCC dudes.

The queue behind me at around 6.30am

People had actually camped here overnight, since 9.30pm the previous night. I think those over-kiasu people are just wasting their time because they make themselves sleep uncomfortably for around 6 hours, and waiting for at least 8 hours, and all just for 30 minutes of a free ride up the Singapore Flyer. If you are looking for racial harmony, you could find it right there. People of all heights, genders (ok there are only two genders), ages, races all come together as one to attempt to 'cut-queue', quarrel over who came here first, and push and shove.

I was queueing up beside a couple of Chinese-speaking oldies and they were talking about how they went around counting the people in front, and saying, in Chinese that, at most only got 300 people in front of them, so they have a good chance of getting the free tickets. I looked at the other possibilities. Sure, they may have counted 300 people, but what if people cut-queue, or just stand in with the rest of their friends? This became more and more prevalent as the hours passed and more and more people streamed into the open-air building, unrelenting in their quest for a free Singapore Flyer Ticket.

The hordes of hopefuls were so rampant that the queue actually went one big round around the shops, and then another round, all the while circling the little nature park in the middle, and it was hard to distinguish between the queues.

The queue in front of me at around 7.00am, notice that two queues are formed, its actually the same queue the second one on the right is just going one big round around the center to connect to the original queue

Barriers were quickly set up in order to prevent any accidental or intentional cutting of queues. It also became rather hazardous for people who were trying to walk by because of the mere density of people standing around, discussing the probability of them getting the free tickets.

The queue behind at around 7.30am, the guards decided to seperate the two queues distinctly with barriers

As if to answer all their questions, this lady came forward with a loudspeaker and announced to the people who were no in the outer circumference of the circular queue that they will definitely not get the free tickets and that they shouldn't waste their time queuing unless they want to purchase the tickets at a promotional rate of half-price. The real reason for the free tickets and promotion prices is to rebuild the flyer's reputation after its epic fail break down last year.

Finally, at around 7.30am, the queue actually started moving. I was playing GTWT on my handphone and also watching abit of Step Up on Dylan's Ipod. Halfway through, we were given a yellow slip of paper which was given to those who would definitely get free tickets, so all we had to do was to fill it in and then pass it to the people at the counter. Then, we would get 4 tickets.

The four new different designs of the Singapore Flyer Tickets

After around 4 hours of incredibly long waiting, we finally got our tickets and only boarded the flyer at around 10am. The entire ride lasted for around 30 minutes. We had a special tour guide with us, whose name was Joyce. She pointed out all the interesting sights that we could see as we rode in the capsule, which could fit around 28 people each, so we went in 3 separate batched (we had around 24-25 people in each capsule). From here on its the pictures that do the talking.

Looking at the people below from the capsule

A nice skyline

A similarly nice skyline

The hippo bus, zoomed in on from high above

Ships with a greyish backdrop

Very nice background picture with the highway coming across the center

The white box down there is supposedly the back-up generator which will take over the powering of the Wheel to ensure last year's incident doesn't happen again

Nice view of three boats and the bridge behind them

The Marina Barrage, from an aerial view. It looks like some mini-golf course

The Durian Esplanade

A mess of buildings

The Part Cs

Horizontal shot with boats turning towards the center, catching also the next skyline

Vetical shot, which is centered in on the boats

This picture looks much like a natural curve as the buildings bend according to the shape of the road

We had National Day Parade here

Count how many cranes there are in this picture

Zoomed in picture of the precious one, can you spot the ship in the previous picture?

The number 13 building

The Singapore CBD Skyline after the Casino has finished construction, the ones of the left are in Diam position.

We saw many different sights, and I was taking pictures the whole time. If the ride was slower, I would have taken much more pictures, though.

I was quite disappointed that it didn't last long, and Song Yuan commented on how dumb they were selling telescopes in the souvenir shop after the ride instead of before the ride. I suggested it was to encourage people to come back another time. xD Actually, if there a people who were willing to go twice, they'd either be dumb or have a really good reason for it, because for one, the scenery won't change much unless you take the timespan of around 2-3 years.

Outside, looking at the flyer

We weren't dismissed immediately though. First, we had to 'take a walk along the Singapore River', which was pretty much 'take a walk to the MRT station' because no one was actually looking at the Singapore River, but were just thinking of going home. I went to Clarke Quay Station instead of City Hall Station, for proximity reasons (although walking distance is further, train distance is shorter).

Yup, so right now I still have that reflection thing which is supposed to be about CBD Area which links Total Defence to National Heritage to do...

20/2/09 Arts@theAtrium

2009-02-20T21:48:00.004+08:00

Several interesting things happened this week, for example, the much anticipated German Interview with, unexpectedly, two people from the Goethe Institut. The people at the counter gave us some instructions and I was shocked when it said that 'You will be interviewed in both English and German'. Then Wasiq and I started trying to remember phrases but then it was too late and I had to go in.

I followed the instructions:
1) Knock the door
2) Say 'Guten Tag'
3) Sit down
4) Begin

And then, I was surprised when they didn't ask me that many German questions, just a few easy-to-answer ones. I did though, ask the German dude some German questions about Neo-Nazi Demonstrations in Germany. Frau Heng pointed out that it was quite a sensitive topic, but luckily I could back that up with an excuse that I was just concerned for the safety since there was an outbreak of violence recently. So I think I substantiated that well, but I may not have impressed much. I don't know if they gave extra points for talking in German, but if they did, I epic failed.

Anyway, moving on back to the week. Today's Arts@theAtrium was performed by none other than 3M's John Lee Sen Jet! Apparently, he went to Tokyo and won this 'Excellence Award' (sounds like a Merit prize) for his 18-minute piano performance. He basically performed the same two pieces for this session.

The first song, he told me, was called, "Polonaise - Fantasie Op 61" and the second was "Ballade No. 2" both by Frederic Chopin. Here are the videos, because I split it in two because it was too long, once I've uploaded them onto YouTube (John may not be too happy about this, I'm aware). I had to split it up into two parts.

Arts@theAtrium - John Lee's Performance Part 1

Arts@theAtrium - John Lee's Performance Part 2

Disclaimer: The videos are set to private so only people who know my blog address can see it. =]

Quotable Quotes

"Good morning, Nigel."
-NC, when Nigel didn't greet him and was busy doing worksheets
"Huh?"
-Nigel, dumbfoundedly

After a saga of KYap's demanding of the culprit admitting to his mistake of sticking the broom out of the window, Ryan Seah came into class and LL points to Ryan Seah, suggesting that he was the culprit.
"What?"
-Ryan Seah, upon which the whole class laughed

"So the event happened, but there was no culprit."
-LL

"As long as you're facing out."
-LL, correcting the people getting punished on where to face
"Don't jump ah."
-LL added, because they were standing over the edge

"Don't worry about your TA 2. If you think you failed... yes."
-NC, a bad attempt at encouragement

"I didn't hear him."
-Wei Tai, when he thought that MDC wanted him to repeat what another guy just said.
"He didn't hear you!"
-MDC, clarifying that it was him who failed to repeat what Wei Tai said. MDC later labels our class a miscommunicative class.

"I read, but somehow I didn't see."
-Yun Zhi, trying to explain why he didn't do the question on the worksheet
"And somehow I believe you."
-MDC, reusing the word 'somehow'

"Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in their shoes. Then criticize them, but you're a mile away, and with their shoes."
-Dehn, and his lame joke

"When the heads roll are they chicken heads?"
-Edmund, hinting at something unknown to me

"Grow up, Nigel."
-NC, so true

"He was coming in from India, at the gate in terminal three, but I think we missed him."
-KYap, about picking up scholars
"Sir, cannot see!"
-Anonymous, trying to explain why they missed the scholar

"Congratulations in your debates."
-NC, to Basil and Teckwei
"Three."
-NC then read out their TA2 marks out of 10

"Fluffy little rabbits going 'la di da di da'."
-KK, showing that the book 'Watership Down' is not any old rabbit exploration book.

"I notice Basil and Marcus. You are teaching each other's fingers."
-JTan

"老师，不是那个电脑，是那个‘歪耳’."
-Ryan Seah, trying to say 'wire' in Chinese
(Teacher, its not the computer, its the 'slanted ear')

Valentine's Defence Day

2009-02-16T21:30:00.004+08:00

'Tis the season of love. But it doesn't mean much to me. What is important about Valentine's Day, though, is that it's Lizzie's birthday. Yup, so I made her something, after convincing myself that unlike all the past years, when I never seem to remember anyone's brithday except my own, I should atone for my past misdeeds or something like that. No, it's not that I'm selfish, I'm just lazy and forgetful. Either way, it's a bad thing.

But what more can I say about Valentine's Day then? Nothing much happened on the actual day itself. It was like any ordinary day. Okay, except for the fact that it was the first time I led worship in the adult CG, and that we played Monopoly upstairs (but never finished the game), but other than that? I didn't actually feel very Valentinish, but I figured it was pretty ordinary.

So maybe I was supposed to sing for worship that day, and I'm terribly sorry. I still don't understand why I don't receive worship emails nowadays, and I am clueless as to which team I'm now in, never got into the habit of asking. xD okay, admittedly I should. It would be quite hard if I had worship on days when I have Leadership Studies because LS ends at 12noon in school and I get home at like minimum around 12.45pm. Bathe, eat lunch at 1pm, and then finish at 1.30pm. Chiong down to TM for worship. Ha, just barely made it.

Anyway, besides Valentine's Day, it was also Total Defence Day on Sunday, which was also ordinary unless you count the siren we heard as we were passing J8 to get to S11 coffee shop. The skits on Friday were mildly entertaining. Firstly it was because we had two retarded emcees, Ern Xu and Ryan Seah, and secondly because NCC didn't freaking participate and there was nothing said about the most hard powerfully important 'military defence'. xD

Yeah, so that was pretty much epic fail. I was surprised because alot of 2Q people acted in it. For example, Vijay, Deepan, Ding Yue, and neither Jeremy/Jason. There were sveral scenes, one about an argument in class, another about a guy whose neck broke off after the paramedics tried to help him, another about a bomb in the bus. We then watched some epic fail clips.

They were mostly epic fail because the sound quality was horrible, and kept scr3wing up. For some reason, whenever the sound was heard, it was too loud, and when it wasn't too loud, it wasn't heard. Several clips suffered from this, and we watched them boringly in silence (okay, we were laughing all the way because it was too fail). The people adjusting the audio were having some kind of 'technical error' so they had to replay the stupid 'Shapes' video filled with random people making random squeaky noises and where the audio is super jumpy.

A random noob wanted to replay one of the earlier videos, because he apparently thought that the audio was working already. He replayed it and then after 30 seconds, he realized that there simply wasn't any audio coming from the speakers and said, "Nevermind. The clip is faulty." So much for Total Defence.

Quotable Quotes

"You just sub in."
-Nigel, on how to solve a Co-ordinate Geometry problem
"Uh-huh..."
-NC, with a sick intonation

"You have 25 seconds... started 15 seconds ago."
-LL

"All Sec 3 students to Staffroom 3, then whole cohort knock it down!"
-LL, being absolutely random and criticizing an announcement

"'Sadder', you understand me right? So there is such a word."
-LL, proving that the word 'sadder' exists

"Eh? Why so small? Subscript ah?"
-LL, when Nigel wrote small words on the board
Nigel then writes the word 'enormous' in super big letters

"Ok, nevermind, I don't need any witnesses. My word counts."
-LL, after we claimed we didn't hear anything

"Whe nthe sun sets in the east, the moon will laugh."
-LL, on one of his Confucious theories

"You can come on 'thirsty'."
-Herr Spindler, trying to say 'Thursday'

"我做了很多朋友."
-Benedict, meaning to say 'I made many new friends'
Direct Translation: I did many friends.

"Huh? I'm sure!"
-Samuel, surprised
"Yes, I'm very sure."
-KYap, in response