why wy?

I have discovered a secret talent for picking out children's books. However, my best find has to be a floating toy that sums up the duality of good and evil - duckie on top and sharkie below, or the other way around if you're inclined.

links if you're bored

sushi flash drives - yummy tuna and urchin
listen to a theremin - the real deal is a strange machine that produces music when you wave your arms in front of it. sounds like the wooo-eeeee noises that alien spacecrafts make.
cuddle a microbe - the common cold is the cutest

the weather's been fab, sheela and paul are fab, the producers is fab, anatomy was fab.

i've been turned off by musicals after the andrew lloyd? mackintosh series of mega-budget, mega melodrama singing soapies. but the producers was actually funny and oh so camp. It's mel brooks, so you know it's going to be corny but good corn. and it had good ole bert newton. (bert is a melbourne/aussie tv icon, hosting a breakfast show and he has a lovely dry wit).

wondering what to get my very own mr corny- a dream gift would be a trip to space. i calculated if i saved $1 a day, it would take me about 920 years before i can scrape $350,000, assuming zero inflation and that S$1=US$1 (fat hope on both counts). For it to take place in the current lifetime (jury still out on reincarnation), i would have to save $1,000 a month for the next 29 years. i better think of something else.

currently playing on the ipod: sammi, faye, jackie, leslie, soundtracks to last temptation of christ, until the end of the world

On sex and the city last night, carrie pondered whether women have become too cynical for old-fashioned romance, after her current flame composed a tune for her on the piano and read her poetry. She and her date ended up at mcdonald's, after she fainted from all the romance and missed the opera. Just like our valentine's day tradition, but without the pink oscar de la renta dress and manolos. (joe is very glad.)

Sadly, I think she's right. When I was 17, someone gave me a poem from bryon, i bit my tongue and tried not to snicker. (i'm sure it would be different if the poor boy had been one of the sex and the city men.) This raises an interesting question: If a suave, good-looking man (insert name of dream date here) were to mouth corny lines - like your dad must have been a thief because he stole the stars for your eyes - would it still be corny? Or would the sheer attractiveness of his presence blot everything else out? I'm leaning towards the latter. It's not everyday you get to go out with (insert name of dream date here).

And the truth is out. Titanic - the movie outlawed by the geneva convention for cruelty to the audience - has zero romance in it, according to researchers on sexual chemisty. Which is really funny, because some people actually cried buckets and saw it repeatedly, took their own i'm flying jack, i'm flying photos, etc. The highest rated films were when harry met sally, casablanca, breakfast at tiffany's (both which i never really got into), pretty woman and lost in translation.

well, I thought kill bill 2 was pretty romantic. anyone else wants to stand in my corner?

a rose from the haunted house next door. 

tulip festival in the dandenongs - it could be a nippon paint ad. 

Nick got me to take a personality test, in exchange for an hour of his body (it's not what you think - he's my patient for my exam and I need to practise).

It turns out I'm an INTJ, along with a row of people I didn't recognise, with the sole exception of stephen hawking, and two very ugly women. It means introverted nerd thinking judging, no hang on, the n really stands for intuitive. So much for being intuitive ha ha.
My personal belief is that personality tests are like reading your horoscope - it's vague enough to be true.

Saw two movies on telly over the weekend, in between the mugging. 101 Reykjavik was a funny icelandic flick about a loser guy falling for his mum's girlfriend. The last tango in paris had a pre-fat, pre-old marlon brando swaggering in turtlenecks (cream, maroon, grey - joe is surprised that i remember stuff like this and nothing of the plot) and doing an elegant backward roll.

quote of the week from the label on an organic pizza base: May all be loved. May all be healed. May all be happy.

Was thinking of returning to singapore in a month and the reality just hit me - no car and no free 1P/2P parking. I don't know how i'm going to adjust.

the durex survey results are in... and singapore is not the last, which may be cause for a small and quick celebration, but we'll get to that later.
We beat Japan (46 days a year) with our score of 79 (works out to every four days). Five years ago, we were at the very bottom with a score of 63. Thank goodness the japanese are having less sex, otherwise we might not be second last. But we are too efficient when it comes to foreplay and cuddling, spending an average of 16 min, compared to the global average of 19.7 min.

Quote of the week from Singaporean Alex Tan, 26, an IT professional: 'Why waste time? Better quickly do it before the girl changes her mind!'

terry posted this link - to a very funny job ad. I don't think the position is still available though.
And this is an incredible story of a woman who was a sleepwalking streetwalker. They found the problem only after her partner got suspicious with the large quantity of condoms strewn around the house...

Check out the ignobel awards. Things I have learnt from the 2004 winners:
1) Country music causes more people to take their lives.
2) The five-second rule is not effective on a contaminated floor. However, on a clean floor, food is pretty safe.
3) Coke tried to rebottle the thames as drinking water. The original river water was safer than the final product because the technology used introduced a carcinogen.
4) There is a US Patent on combovers. This is not some wimpy ah pek or deluded ceo hairstyle, it's supposed to be a mother of all combovers, one that fools people into thinking you are not balding.
5) The peace prize went to the inventor of karaoke.
6) The Vatican has outsourced prayers to India, don't ask me how.
7) Herring communicate by farting.

And there's nothing better than stinky cheese than old stinky cheese. Check out this comic title The Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters #7. I don't know what happened in #8, but the review is here.

met another great joe yesterday, this is organic joe - he's from lebanon and lost an arm during a bomb attack. Ended up in Australia, embraced the organic lifestyle. He insisted that he had seen us before, even though it was the first time we entered the shop, and gave us two apples to take home. They were the sweetest apples ever.

and in the news today...
They've decided to ban smoking in pubs and clubs from 2007 because everyone's worried about the health of people who work in such places, which is a fair point. The ban includes cigar rooms but excludes - wait for it - crown casino's high-roller room. Moral of the story : You can kill yourself if you are rich enough.

McDonalds is under fire for a happy meal neopets promo they are running. Neopets, for those not under 10, is a virtual tamagotchi thing where you raise a brightly coloured creature and feed it, house it, etc. Not so innocent is what these creatures get up to.

Unfortunately, the neopet world, like our own, has casinos where kids can play roulette, poker, keno on behalf of their pets. If they win, they get food for their pets. But losers "need to visit a online soup kitchen to keep their virtual friends from starving'', says the herald sun. Moral of the story: McDonalds is evil? Too easy. How about - it's never too early to start screwing around with young minds.

me, i'm just cracking up with the mental image of washed-up dirty furry things standing in line.

howard has won (note aside, internet explorer shut down before i could finish typing his name - a sign of crap software or something deeper? hmmm) and life has gone back to normal.

Which is a pity because this is the party that is prepared to launch first-strike attacks on neighbouring countries to counter terrorism (yes, we are baaaad terrorists committed to the liberation of sheep everywheeeere.) They also made this big fuss over how the other party would hike interest rates but in reality that's dependent on his good pals, bush and greenspan. It's not something the liberal party (yup, that's what the conservative party is called here) can control but i guess voters don't realise that.

Spring lasted all of two weeks, with the mercury shooting up to 30c today.
On a more cheerful note, mr brown has a funny article on today about ah bengs, live fish swallowing and sex. The the almost daily grind is back, as life in mono.
Dave McKean screensavers here, based on the books he did with neil.

Instead of a form letter, I got a personally autographed copy of cerebus! It all started on neil's website and here too. So I sent a letter to Canada, telling Dave Sim about the weather, about osteo and finishing with some forearm stretches for the wrists. (He was signing over 1,000 copies at this time).

Dave writes: Actually my hands are still okay - years of practice taught me not to hold the pen very tightly... but thanks for the tip.
And he drew a smiling cerebus below that. Will put up a scan when I have the time.

Some time ago, a futurama episode featured the professor developing a giant smellometer for space. Now, nasa is developing a nose for space, no kidding.

Our anatomy lecturer told us about families who had a genetic defect, so the boys start out as girls and turn into boys at puberty. Finally found a reference here and here on the net. Unless you live in the Dominican Republic or Pupua New Guinea, it's nothing to worry about. Now, does anyone know the truth about the Italian cheese-worm delicacy, do the worms eat each other and then you eat the last worm standing?

Philosophy related, we were watching the iron chef, and the challenger went to Italy and studied under an Italian chef who doesn't believe in cooking the same dish twice. Anyhow, he returned to Japan but decided to give it up - and became a taxi driver - because there wasn't a restaurant up to his standards. It reminded me of the confucian gentleman, who puts himself away like an umbrella (i think) when the Way is not in practice.
By the way, the taxi driver-cook won.

Hilarious summary of the taiwan snotball incident at mr brown.
It's funny that the very same reasons that make the holga a crap camera technically result in great shots.
Sex and the City is back, and it's perfect eye candy. I've realised you can identify the seasons by the love interest and the current one is a Russian artist played by Mikhail Baryshnikov. Quite the charmer... if only histology was this interesting.

one more for the road: cat watching cat watching cat watching... you get the picture.
the infinite cat page

Ananova - Fruity sweet wrappers spark complaint

A Catholic school claims the fruits are having sex on the wrapper - have a look at the pictures and tell me what you think.

one of the most eloquent arguments against war, originally by Bertrand Russell, found in an interview with British comic Stephen Fry:

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician, got into terrible trouble by writing quite fearsome articles against the first World War when it began. He got all these letters from people who said, “My child is prepared to lay down their life for their country. Don’t you think that sacrifice demands some respect?” He wrote this extraordinary essay in which he said, “Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice. And we’re seeing that in the Iraq war.

Go read it at the link. It's good stuff. He's got great things to say about Homer Simpson and religion too - all very sensible.

This is too good not to post: Bush and Kerry are having televised debates soon, but they are not arguing about policies... yet. Here's what's been settled, from herald sun-

After weeks of gruelling pre-debate negations, the Bush team won a clause to keep the temperature inside the venue above 21.1C.
Apparently, Kerry sweats big time, and we all know sweating = nervous = nixon

No shots of one candidate while the other is talking. Each candidate can choose his own makeup artist.
They need all the help they can get.

At the insistence of the Bush team, the lecterns will be 3m apart so as not to accentuate Senator Kerry's 13cm height advantage. Mr Bush is not allowed to boost his height.
Maybe they should hire the guys who did LOTR special effects - reverse hobbit height?

Each can choose his own type of pen and paper
This reminds me of the joke about a student who got this grade on his assignment "Not only is this the wrong ink, it's also from the wrong type of tree".

They cannot ask each other questions.
Although it has been billed as a _debate_ maybe americans have a different definition.