I'm mourning Patrick Swayze's death.

Got a shock this morning when my big boss came up to me and said, "Your Patrick Swayze has died.".

o.O My first reaction was, "Oh no! My books are not in yet!" followed by some disappointment. I mean, sure pancreatic cancer is one of the worst types of cancer and I expected him to off it soon, but not THAT soon, if you get my drift.

In any case, we have lost one of the sexist men alive. He was my epitome of male sexual masculinity.

He had sang and danced alongside John Travolta in Grease and later on brought into the limelight through Dirty Dancing. It was a B grade movie, had a really cheap budget and was expected to show only two weekends in the cinema before going straight to video. It became an overnight sleeper hit and had the highest international sales for its video. Not bad for a movie with a super cheap budget.



And after Dirty Dancing, he shot to stardom starring alongside Whoopi Goldberg and Demi Moore in Ghost. Whoopi won an award for her role in the movie and the poignant clay scene was the most copied romance scene in history (before the stupid Titanic one). Ironically, it is also perhaps the only chick romance flick I will ever love.



Lets not forget Point Break. The other movie that Keanu Reeves is famous for, asides from Speed, and it was the movie that catapulted Swayze as the Sexist Men in 1991. Wow wee. The surfing scenes are the best! And the classic scene when Reeves' character realize he can't shoot at Swayze is probably the first slash potential scene I ever saw... I think...



I am now thinking of catching The Beast. The last TV series that Swayze did before he was too ill to act anymore. I really wonder though how they are going to continue the series. Perhaps, it will just end there?

Happy Valentine's Day indeed!

Curiously, this year's Valentines is really quiet. Usually a week or two before the day, the streets will be filled with peddlers selling all sorts of Valentines' gifts, flower shops will be bringing out their billboards and the scents of flowers will be wafting to our noses, no matter if we want them or not. Perhaps my colleagues are all single and none of them are planning on celebrating Valentines? But I haven't noticed many couples out there armed with bouquets and presents. Well, there is a girl who was carrying a bag of V-day stuff and I saw a guy with a huge teddy bear running after a bus, but that was about it really.


I'd always thought that Valentine's Day is highly commercialized and all that hype is a scheme to make people buy expensive things for their girlfriends and boyfriends. But I'm slowly changing my opinion on this. Sure, it's still an excuse for commercialization and an opportunity for couples to celebrate, nevertheless, I'm beginning to see THE day as something a little more.

I read somewhere on Mind Your Body a few days that Valentines is a really stressful time for couples. And surprisingly, the number of break ups before and after Valentines is abnormally high. It helps to filter out those weaker relationships from the strong ones. It does kind of make sense I suppose, when you consider it in another way. Expectations are high and how your partner plans the day is indicative of how much he or she knows you. The best way to describe it is sort of like passing or failing a test.

And for those unattached: Happy Friendship Day! =)

In my line of work, I learn new words almost every other day.

WTF!! Bruce Wayne is dead!?

To the comic fans, you guys may already know this but if you don't, you may want to head down to the Book Launch Liquid City Comic Anthology at Orchard Kinokuniya this Saturday. Local comic artists will be there to make some speeches about their works and other stuff, like the difficulties of selling their work in Singapore and regionally.

Book Launch Liquid City Comic Anthology
Date: 29 November, Saturday
Time: 2p.m. to 4p.m.

Demonstration on Manga-styled Caricature Drawing by L'escalier
Date: 29 November, Saturday
Time: 4.30p.m. to 5.30p.m.

I've seen some of the art work and it's pretty neat. So if you support the local comic scene make sure you go!

Aspiring writers and illustrators take note! It's meant more for children's books but ah well... since I know some of you who aspire to write "professionally", thought I should let you guys know.

*Closing date is 27 February 2009.* For more information, check out http://www.bookcouncil.sg  

I really have other stuff to write but those take a longer time to think and write out. LOL So, I'm going to write easy things first.

• I told planetvenus and angelic_mel about this virtual reality online game that allows one to create a character and basically live another life in it. This documentary actually narrates two real life examples where the players got too involved and jeopardized their personal lives as well as family. I found the name of the game! Second Life has ruined yet another couple.
• If you think movies don't add value to the society in anyways except entertainment, you're sorely wrong. New movie blockbuster, Australia starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackson has more than just pretty faces and entertaining value.
• New movie called Milk is out (scheduled this year, I hope in Singapore), starring Sean Penn and er... other very well known actors! I haven't heard of this guy Harvey Milk until I saw the news on the movie. The movie is based on a real person, Harvey Milk who was one of the pioneers of pushing gay rights politically. Should be interesting.
• Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince's official movie trailer is out!

It looks better than... the last three movies. Very dark, I like. And it seems to be following the book more closely this time round. I really do hope Alan Rickman has lost some weight in this installment as we're probably going to see more of him this time round. Yippee!

It has been a while since I last browsed through a copy of URBAN (The Straits Times) so when I picked up today's newspaper, I noticed a number of changes.

Firstly, under the HEY GOODLOOKING section where they post up street photography, there is a remarkable difference in type of people featured. When they used to have ordinary people in street casual (whom don't look like they deserve to be on the page), they now feature more mature and formally dressed characters. I really believe this is due to Vogueite's critical comments on what they did before. LOL Even with the marked improvement, I still think they don't get it. I feel that people with an interesting individualistic sense of style is better than expensive, follower of trends style. But ah well, that's just my opinion. 

The sections on Spring/Summer 09 trends (pages 10 to 15) seems like a severe rip off from popular local fashion bloggers like Vogueite and Fashion Nation which makes me think that maybe bloggers can do a better job than these bloody journalists. I'm not eating sour grapes, I swear.

However, I thought the write up Pretty In Pose and the interview with Nina Garcia was good. Why can't we have more of those?

Oh yeah, I need someone's Kinokuniya card because I want to buy Garcia's new book The One Hundred.

Okay, I take back what I said previously on the SGP. Yes, the circuit isn't perfect but because of that I can appreciate how great the drivers are. With each lap, the race got faster and faster. Like wtf.

After yesterday's fluke, Alonso finally got a win but I was vouching for Lewis Hamilton (he looks like a nicer guy with better sportsmanship anyways). Thanks to the circuit, there were a lot of technical problems with the cars. Many of the lesser cars gave out and giving the whole race a new twist. Hahaha, who am I kidding?! The sadistic side of me totally embraced the fact that there were many crashes even though Ferrari was out of the race. They very sueh lah... My brother-in-law was talking about the pit stop incident claiming that the lack of the "lollipop man" was the main reason it happened. True enough, they sent out the "lollipop man" in the next pit stop. LOL

Hn... Another four years of SGP to go!

P/S: I think the F1 grid girls suck. Totally.

I just watched my five minutes worth of the Singapore F1 race. Decided it ain't worth watching for the next two days as well. To me, the most exciting thing about the F1 is speed and the circuit is simply going to be the death of the race.

For one, the track is too narrow. This makes it very challenging on the turns as well as any drivers wanting to overtake the one ahead. Having the white barricades up don't help either. Besides that, the circuit has too many turns, too little straight courses on the circuit. This puts a stamp on how fast the cars can go which is NOT much. Probably not any faster on a GTR car. Actually, I think a GTR has better chances at beating the F1 cars. Wait, ALL THE DRIFT CARS WILL BEAT THEM.

I think the drivers are damn frustrated. I would be... The Singapore Grand Prix is boring.

I first heard this speech by Martin Luther King back in secondary school. I was inspired. Still is inspired.


Martin Luther King Jr's "I have a dream" is delivered on the 28 August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

( Martin Luther King, Jr's  )
Resource: http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream.htm

So, our Singapore table tennis female team has bagged the silver medal for the Olympics. I guess, to many skeptical Singaporeans, this was expected and even if we did win gold, it would be like... China team number two won it rather than Singapore, if you know what I mean. In any case, they represented Singapore so I was willing to let go of certain misgivings and watch the entire game.

Er, we didn't present much of a challenge at all. Out of five matches, China managed to best us after three consecutive wins and in each match, they won by a landslide. Unlike the semi finals of the male table tennis team, Japan versus Germany. Now THAT was a phenomenal game and I highly recommend you guys to catch the telecast/ highlights/ clips from youtube. Japan despite losing the first two matches made a great turnover and won the next two matches. The last deciding match was nerve racking. I love the Japanese spirit. But the Germans were fantastic in their strategies and executed beautiful swings. T. Boll is my new idol (after Michael Phelps?). The rallies were adrenalin pumping!

What really irked me was the attitude of our Singapore players. Oh, I'm sure they want to win the game but the general impression they gave me was that they weren't as competent as the China team and bagging a silver medal was good enough for Singapore - a country that never had a medal since a long long while (1960 if you're a sucker for details). Or maybe I'm reading too much into things. Just pay attention to their facial expressions and I think you'll know what I'm talking about.

Ah well, I expect the radio stations, the newspapers, the internet and the news broadcast (and most likely tomorrow's National Day Rally) will be overflowing with gushings DJs, journalists and er... ministers saying how proud we are of our imported players.

I'd wanted to post something about our local papers, Urban for the longest time now but it seems like Vogueite beat me to it! In any case, he did make some good observations and opinions (and definitely a better job than I can).

Go forth and read And I said no, no, no

I've never managed to watch a particular sport in the Olympics in its entirety. But with the "luxury" of being unemployed, I managed to catch some of the best actions so far.

The swimming segment was awesome. Especially the male relay teams. USA bagged the gold medal and France came in second. You have got to watch the entire match in order to see the ups and downs of the laps. USA led the countries and then fell behind during the second and third swimmers. They caught up phenomenally with the last swimmer managing to pull up a body length difference from France. Phew! And oh, GO MICHAEL PHELPS!

USA has 5 WORLD RECORDS. @_@ It's been so exciting! I'm never an Olympics person (sports not being my forte) so I appreciate some information on this. Do the world records get broken that easily and at such a fast pace?!

The other segment I looked forward to was the men's gymnastics! Asides from getting to see scantily clad great hawt male bodies (and the Japanese has a number of really cute young boys! Is becoming a paedophile already~!), I never knew that the human body can embody such beautiful and graceful lines. :: faints ::

It's yet another heart pounding episode as the ranks crawled up. USA yet again stole the limelight for me. They came in SIXTH for the qualifiers. Performed marvelously, spectacular landings and unexpected surprising acts with the exception of the pommel. What a pity! If they hadn't lost two of the three players in this rotation, they would've gotten a silver for sure. Still, Artemev gave a crowd pleaser. I thought it was expected that China got gold. But my mum was complaining that the results were suspiciously favoring them... Hn... But yeah! Go Japan (and very cute boys)! In case you're wondering, China came in first, Japan was second and USA was third. Germany came in close at fourth and I believed that would have won if it wasn't for a deadly mistake during one of the rotations.

I missed the opening ceremony for the Olympics but I think I want to catch the recast tomorrow. After all, ZHANG YI MOU chereographed it.

I am going to lift from Mr Wang again. Read this interesting speech from Adrian Tan and really rings true for me. I learned the long and hard way though.

Life and How to Survive It

I highly recommend Adrian Tan's novels as well. I've read them in Secondary School and I still like the Teenage Textbook.

Headlines on AsiaOne News:

Woman held, abused by father for 24 years

Man sentenced to death in China for raping 21 girls

Japanese woman jailed for sawing up husband

Kids imitating sex acts seen on Web arrested

Gawds, what the fuck is wrong with society?!