Pwned

I lost a library book a while ago and paid the replacement fee and all ($30 in total), only to get a call on Tuesday from a clerk in my previous unit asking if I'd left a book of poems behind, because the chief clerk accidentally put it in her drawer and had forgotten about it all this time. Not cool.

Anyway, I met up with the guy at Jurong Point yesterday to get the book back, as I had the night out. Another clerk who was with him told me something that made me laugh harder than I have in a week (but only because I'm a bad person). Apparently, he and three or four others got busted playing Counter-Strike on the Information Resource Centre computers yesterday, during working hours. No big deal. This is the good bit: they were caught by the commander himself (a full colonel), who was showing the facilities to the Army RSM (!) at the time. One of them almost told him to fuck off before turning around and realising that it was, in fact, the commander speaking and not someone playing a prank.

Sweet, sweet schadenfreude. What a good thing I wasn't there—I'd have been playing as well.

13375p34k

I noticed this amusing letter in yesterday's ST (and would have blogged about it then if not for Blogger's innovative, evening-long 'Unexpected Error OMG!!!11' feature).

Singapore should get rid of the word 'elite'

WHEN Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong spoke recently of an 'elite' group he tried to make clear that it was not to be based on pedigree or class but on merit.

I believe the term 'elite' is not compatible with the society PM Lee envisages for Singapore. Why must there be an elite class to lead the non-elite?

The question that needs to be answered is not who leads, as we know that the most capable have to lead, but can the leader survive without the critical mass of those he leads?

It must be remembered that however brilliant a general, there must be the private willing to go out to fight and die for the plan to succeed. Is the private then not also elite?

Sadly. . . no. Someone needs a dictionary.

I read on a plaque, some years ago, about the organs of the body having a discussion about who should be boss.
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In the midst of the heated debate there came a small plaintive voice asking to be chief. It came from the opening at the lower end of the alimentary canal.

After overcoming their initial shock, the other organs began laughing. The keeper of the portal through which residual chemicals and deceased microbes made their exit was insulted and clamped his mouth shut.

After a few weeks when nothing was passed out and the toxins were re-absorbed into the bloodstream, the other organs capitulated and the anus was proclaimed chief.

The moral is that one can become chief in more ways than one. One does not need the word elite to do a good job; one can be a gatekeeper.

'You think you're the shit, huh? Well I'm the asshole.'

'[T]he opening at the lower end of the alimentary canal'—I love that.

Thinking soldiers

The cisterns in the canteen toilet have signs on them reading 'WATER NOT FOR DRINKING.'

Tonguetied

I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but it looks like even the National Arts Council's been bitten by the sexyblogger bug. Have a look at this.


I am Most Displeased.

Oh, what the hell. It's no point fighting it any more. For your viewing pleasure: sexymiffy, the Buttermilk bunny.


Now go away.

U Penn students don't need no steenking TASTE!

So, Sonic Youth's going to be the main act at the University of Pennsylvania's Spring Fling concert. Let's play a little game of word association. I say Sonic Youth, you say?

"Who are they?" College freshman Elizabeth Jefferson asked. "I've never heard of them."

Wharton junior Lloyd Thomas said he feels "disappointed," especially considering what some other schools have performing this year.

For example, Snoop Dogg will be headlining Cornell's Slope Day concert and Ben Folds will be playing at Brown's Spring Weekend.

"I think we deserve a bigger name," Thomas said.

For more righteous indignation and some amusing quotes, read Michelle's post.

Truesdale's Law: Ninety percent of everything is, like, really gay

What's wrong with science fiction today? Two-bit critic and 100-proof crank Dave Truesdale has the answer: liberalism. Oh, and fairies.

I find that many more of our personal freedoms are in danger from the political Left than from the Right, and Robert Silverberg points up but one instance of this in his column. Politcal Correctness (and in the case of the instance written about in Silverberg's column, the fallout from Political Correctness, but that's another essay), has run amuck. Now, it seems, an active imagination and artistic freedom are under siege by those on the Left who have the power to punish us for what we think, and it ain't those mean old, uneducated, bible-thumping, red-state bubbas who are to blame. It is those on the Left, often-called the Elite Left—those who believe, in their heart-of-hearts, that they know what is best for us, that we are incapable of making our own decisions (again, fodder for another essay).

All of which led me to wonder if SF is going soft these days. One doesn't often see hard-edged political stories in short SF anymore—at least not many of them in the past twenty, twenty-five years or so.
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It's as if much of today's short sf has become metrosexualized, a term I'll co-opt from one coined to label the metro-sexual male. You know, a yuppie sort who isn't ashamed to be seen in the male equivalent of a beauty salon, a contemporary male who struts around with his hair carefully coiffed and shaped with Product, his carefully manicured nails bling-blinging in the sunlight as he straightens his Queer Eye for the Straight Guy tie, who has been convinced by his small circle of elitist, liberal, faddist (and also mostly brainless) friends who keep him insulated from the rest of the world outside the yup fashion district. Sometimes I have this unnerving and spine-chilling thought that too much short SF today is naught but metrosexualized SF. Boy, it sure looks great in its polished and coiffed literary clothes, but is what is underneath any different—or better? Is what is underneath (the actual story itself) any better for the clothes?

Nick Mamatas has a characteristically entertaining and on-target response to this nonsense, which is a good thing as I'm stuck in camp and so am in no mood to blog at length.

Give that god a Tiger!

This made my lunch hour.

Okay, so I had a boring lunch hour.

Andy Ho = hack

I didn't have much to do in the Signal office after area cleaning this morning, and Andy Ho's column (on the Terri Schiavo business) in today's Straits Times caught my eye, so I ended up chicken scratching a letter to the forum in my little black notebook. Then I realised I couldn't remember if NSFs are allowed to write in to the papers, so I'll just post it here instead. The letter's nothing new to the blogosphere, but I'd feel very silly not doing anything with it, so here it is:

For a column labelled 'Science Monitor', Mr Andy Ho's piece ('Death by decree: An issue that will live on', ST, March 28) shows a surprising disregard for science. He claims that 'the assumptions of both the lack of awareness and its permanence are not medical facts but. . . unprovable guesses.' This is factually incorrect. CAT scans show that Mrs Schiavo's cerebral cortex has mostly or entirely liquefied. That higher cognitive function is impossible in such a state is not in question, nor is its irreversability.

Instead of science, Mr Ho would rather base his opinion on a video the court found to have been heavily and selectively edited. The unedited version shows Mrs Schiavo's 'responses' for what they are: random movements unrelated in any meaningful way to external stimuli.

Mr Ho devotes the last third of his column to a lengthy account of death by dehydration, a manipulative tactic that conveniently ignores the existence of administerable drugs to ease the process and the presence of trained doctors and nurses to oversee it.

Tellingly, the piece ends with the claim that the Schiavo case ought to make physicians reconsider their stand on the removal of life-prolonging equipment 'if only on a gut level.' I can only be thankful that despite the intervention of moral crusaders like Mr Ho, the relevant authorities have remained clear-headed enough not to let their gut feelings overwhelm rationality and respect for human dignity.

Championing the arts

Unbelievable. Simply unfuckingbelievable. From Friday's Straits Times (which I only read today):

Literature winner read only 3 novels in 2 years

A TEEN who prefers news magazines to novels has won an international award for ENglish Literature students.

Candice Wan Shu Ting picked up the 2004 Angus Ross prize, an annual award for the best performancein the A-level English examination by candidates outside Britain.

The former Saint Andrew's Junior College divinity student, who confessed to reading just three novels in the last two years, makes no apology for not being a bookworm.

At this point in the article, I assumed that she had, instead, been reading short story and poetry collections. I was wrong.

"What's important about Literature is being able to appreciate the text for what it is, and to have the genuine passion to sit down and apply the skills we've been taught," said the 18-year-old, who attended Crescent Girls' Secondary and Radin Mas Primary.

Seldom have I seen two phrases as unequally yoked as 'genuine passion' and 'sit down and apply the skills we've been taught'. Then again, maybe I'm inappropriately old-fashioned for my age—my definition of what it means to have 'genuine passion' for literature would include, well, reading it.

Explaining why she does not read novels, she said: "As I've grown older, I've developed my own style of writing poems and short stories, and no longer need to read novels for ideas or to emulate techniques."

I don't recall having heard that before from a writer under 50, but if you do the math, you'll see that Candice Wan achieved this remarkable feat at age 16. Someone give her a prize!

Oh. Right.

Understandably, certain people seem to find this inspiring:

CANDICE WAN.. man.. she sure is the role model we shd look up to.. Literature Book Prize!!! She sure did SAJC proud.. and not forgetting to mention THE ARTS FACULTY.. yea!

Incidentally, those three novels she did read? They're by. . . Dan Brown. Go figure.

I wonder what Miss K thinks of all this.

Mad pimpage

Put On Your Jesus Skin Boots

Ben's a pal of mine and needs to learn how to truncate news items, but that's just two strikes against him, right? Read his blog anyway.

Secret life

Jeff VanderMeer is Joss Whedon!

The company that occupies the first through fourth floors of the building has a secret name. This name is never spoken aloud and almost never written down. A few people have seen its syllables, at night, in confidence. The name glows a fiery gold when looked upon. Those who see it are said to be changed forever. Some leave the building immediately. Others rise so fast in the company that they ascend to the fifth floor and few ever see them again. The secret name of the company is older than the company itself. It will remain long after the company is gone. ('Secret Life')

Hmm.

Link thanks to Matt, who describes the story as 'Dilbert on absinthe', which is fair. Give it a go if that sounds like your thing.

Fear me, I'm a poet

Chicago poet seized as fugitive killer

Poet Norman A. Porter Jr.'s greatest work might be his creation of J.J. Jameson, an anti-war, pro-labor Chicago poet who has been spinning and spouting his verses in the city for nearly 20 years.

On Tuesday, Porter's life as J.J. Jameson of Maywood came to a shocking end when authorities arrested him for being a fugitive from the law. Porter, they said, killed two people in his home state of Massachusetts. The arrest came the same month he was honored as Poet of the Month by the Web site ChicagoPoetry.com.
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In 1960, he was arrested and charged with the execution-style slaying of a store clerk in Saugus, Mass., police said. While awaiting trial, he attempted to escape, killing a jailer at a Middlesex County Jail in Cambridge, Mass., police said. Porter later pleaded guilty to the slayings of both men.

After he escaped from the work-release facility in 1985, he made a new life for himself in Chicago as part of the city's lively poetry scene.

Porter was known for his comic poems and his slow, pronounced tone, said C.J. Laity, a friend and the publisher of ChicagoPoetry.com. In 1999, he also published a book called "Lady Rutherford's Cauliflower," Laity said.

It'll be good for his sales, at least.

(The follow-up article includes a sample of his poetry. It's disappointingly staid.)

And I'm not afraid to use it

Found, a bit late, on Neil Gaiman's journal:

Prison Guards on Strike Over Antique Guns

Greek prison guards will go on strike next week demanding a change of their American-made weapons that date back to the U.S. wars in central America almost a century ago.

While antique shops would be eager to get their hands on them, prison guards just want to get rid of their obsolete 1911 U.S. Cavalry revolvers. The guns do not scare inmates any more as safety experts have advised guards not to fire them.

Yes, that would do it, I'd think.

Having his lips stolen by Ye-won, he threatens to marry her

The mindboggling back cover of a VCD my sister bought for a friend:

Just another victim of the ambient morality

Shortly after I made that last post, I experienced a sudden conviction: discrimination against homosexuals in Singapore isn't something we'll see reduced to acceptable levels in our lifetimes, because never mind homophobia, racism is still mainstream. Unreported, but mainstream. It's acceptable—even usual—among the rank and file of the SAF for Malay women (bear in mind the context of my last post) to be disparaged as 'brown like shit', and for all assembled to express collective disgust at the notion of Indian women ('hairy', 'smelly', 'black'). It's acceptable to make jokes about 'invisible men' and how they have to smile so you can see them at night, at which point they become 'Oreos'. It's acceptable to refer to an Indian whose name you don't know as 'that one, you know, the aneh—the tall one, not the fat one'. (Compare: 'that nigger—the tall one, not the fat one'.) It's acceptable to refer to a Sikh as 'the turban'.

Okay, you say, these are teenage (or close enough) boys, some of them not very educated or with little exposure to the Other. Of course they're pricks; it's a phase. I say: bollocks. I've heard the same, in more polite terms, from DXOs, classmates of both sexes, cab drivers and so on. I once overheard a Christian lady on a bus tell a group of companions how you can't blame the 'aboriginal' races for rejecting Christ, because devil-worship is in their blood. Reaction: sagely nods from all. Even someone very close to me (who shall not be named) has been know to remark that Malays do badly in school, and maybe it really is genetic. . . ? If casual racism is something people grow out of, it seems there are enough others growing into it to replace them.

Damned if you'll ever read anything about it, though. Instead, crack open any government produced publication on anything that involves the common people and odds are it's supposed to have shown the harmony and cohesion between the races—photos of Chinese and Malays working side by side (always that phrase) to fight SARS, or terrorism, or help tsunami survivors, and sentimental accounts (there are many such in Shoulder To Shoulder, for instance) of how 'in NS, the colour of your skin doesn't matter; all do the same work, and if anything happens, all kena tekan together'. Apparently harmony means restricting one's racism to when other races' backs are turned (thus avoiding riots, yay!).

Yeah, I know none of this is news. I guess it's just that online forums and the blogosphere have spoiled me; there are racist and/or homophobic idiots out there, sure, but it's a rare forum where such people don't immediately get shouted down by a dozen saner minds, and as for blogs, even the most extreme blogs, if they have any significant readership at all, have to at least code their racism/homophobia (and will probably end up getting picked apart anyway). This simply isn't the case in meatspace, at least not in little this corner of it.

I never thought I'd say this, but the internet has given me more optimism about humanity than is warranted. Events over the past few weeks have slowly brought the reality back to me.

Here's what your tax dollars are paying for

Internet access for me to blog and my platoonmates to look at women in lingerie.

Three cheers for the SAF.

Things I am studiously ignoring

For the good of my blood pressure:

1) The Media Development Authority on Safehaven's concert permit application—'We are unable to agree to your application as performances that promote alternative lifestyles are against the public interest.'

2) Vivian Balakrishnan on censorship—'Far from wanting the media to be pro-People's Action Party, the Government's main concern is that the media be honest, accurate, and pro-Singapore' (from the Straits Times)

3) Tony Pierce on Xiaxue—'i like your blog very much and i am glad to hear that you are becoming so popular on the blogosphere'

Human lettuce must live

If there's one thing I hate about tragic events aside from their, well, tragedy, it's the terrible poems they spawn:

Vegetable Nation
by Stew Albert

Republicans love Americans
turned to vegetables,
on their lies and fake news.
fighting vigorously,
human lettuce must live,

Bush rushing to the White House,
he even concluded a vacation
for signing on
to Terri's right to stare blankly forever,

getting away from the stink
of executed corpses
of thinking humans
he left rotting in Texas graveyards. . . .

Well, what did you expect from a poem that starts 'Republicans love Americans'?

As for the issue itself, enough said. RIP Terri Schiavo. Soon, I hope.

Observations

1) New recruits marching resemble nothing so much as go-go dancers.

2) Today's cookhouse dinner, the 'Seafood Burger Set', included chicken, sausages, baked beans and papaya soup (!), but did not actually contain any seafood.

iPuke

Found on Boing Boing: Make your own furry iBook!



Yick.

First against the wall

One of the cleverest blog entries I've read in a while (link yoinked from Richard): Scenes From The Cultural Revolution

The Left has taken over academe. We want it back.

Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News columnist
CU is Worth Fighting For
March 4, 2005

In this great Cultural Revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.

Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China
Resolutions of the Eleventh Plenum
August 1966

Read on.

The greatest empire that never was

Over the past week, I've been reading bits of Angélica Gorodischer's Kalpa Imperial (translated by Ursula K. LeGuin) in the bunk before lights-out, having given up on Don DeLillo's explosively tiresome Cosmopolis. ('He stood a while longer, watching a single gull lift and ripple in a furl of air, admiring the bird, thinking into it, trying to know the bird, feeling the sturdy earnest beat of its scavenger's ravenous heart'—Wanker. Go away, Don Delillo.)


Kalpa Imperial (subtitle: the greatest empire that never was) is that troublesome and increasingly overpopulous species of book, the collection of linked stories. I could make up some bullshit about how the protagonist of the book is the empire itself, and so each story is the equivalent of a chapter of the protagonist's life, and so it is in fact a novel—but no, it remains a collection of linked stories. And it is a damn good one.

Each story is told from the viewpoint of a storyteller (not as redundant as it sounds). Whether it is the same storyteller for every story isn't made clear, and anyway it hardly matters. There's a certain amount of tweeness inherent in that, and sometimes it becomes annoying ('Well, well, each of you has an imagination; not a very big one, or you wouldn’t need me'). For the most part, though, it works. There's a surplus of writers writing 'modern fairy tales' these days (not that there are so very many; not many are needed to begin with), but Gorodischer is the real thing. The big theme here is the exercise of power, and there's no better to fit both the 'modern' and the 'fairy tale' parts of that description.

Admittedly, I'm being just a bit disingenuous with that last sentence, because the truth is that so far, the story I think is strongest is possibly the one least focussed on that theme, and the one that's the purest distillation of it—a bitty piece about a thief captured by soldiers of a great, incidentally hermaphrodite general of the Empire and forced to service him sexually, ending with the destruction of the general's army—I find fairly sterile. The former story is, amazingly, available in its entirety online.

The storyteller said: He was a sorrowful prince, young Livna'lams, seven years old and full of sorrow. It wasn't just that he had sad moments, the way any kid does, prince or commoner, or that in the middle of a phrase or something going on his mind would wander, or that he'd wake up with a heaviness in his chest or burst into tears for no apparent reason. All that happens to everybody, whatever their age or condition of life. No, now listen to what I'm telling you, and don't get distracted and then say I didn't explain it well enough. If anybody here isn't interested in what I'm saying, they can leave. Go. Just try not to bother the others. This tent's open to the south and north, and the roads are broad and lead to green lands and black lands and there's plenty to do in the world—sift flour, hammer iron, beat rugs, plow furrows, gossip about the neighbors, cast fishing nets—but what there is to do here is listen. You can shut your eyes and cross your hands on your belly if you like, but shut your mouth and open your ears to what I'm telling you: This young prince was sad all the time, sad the way people are when they're old and alone and death won't come to them. His days were all dreary, grey, and empty, however full they were.

It isn't the best beginning, and the syntax in that first sentence prejudiced me against it from the start, but it gets much, much better, and I ended up loving it despite myself. Read it. Then buy the book. (Living in Singapore is no excuse.)

Why I like syntaxfree

Michelle takes largely lame threads and extracts all the funny. My favourite Band Name Made More Reasonable: Groove Flotilla. That's genius. Runners up are Warm Warm Warmth, Strained Relationships Scene and the succinct A The.

My attempts:

National Central Bureau
Cat Suffrage
Ernst Ferdinand
The Juliana Hypothesis
Biplanes to Brazil
Godspeed You, Emperor Of Colour!

It's fun. Try it.

Dreams of dead horses

There's some unexpectedly balanced coverage of the Homosexual Problem in today's Saturday supplement to the semi-official mouthpiece. It's essentially a blow-by-blow (pardon!) account of the recent history of attitudes to homosexuality in Singapore—not a particularly good or thorough one, but balanced. Most surprising to me was how the writer, Lydia Lim, picks up on the argument (made, among others, by one Alan Seah in a Forum letter) that in order to fight AIDS within the MSM community, it's first necessary to decriminalise the act of man-on-man sex—'How do you teach someone to do something more safely when the very thing you are teaching them is against the law?' Yes, the views of the religious right are also given an airing again, things like 'We are not here to condemn homosexuals but we are not comfortable with them trying to promote their lifestyle as an alternative' (another one to add to the AI-baffling arsenal), but this time the space given to them is fair, and more significantly, there's no attempt to paint this as the view on the ground.

Frankly, this article doesn't (if you discount the inordinate fondness for beginning sentences and even paragraphs with 'And', 'But', etc.) read like it came from the same newspaper as the previous articles on the topic did. Am I being overly cynical, I wonder, to suspect that rather than it being due to some 'ohmigawd we screwed up; it's time to set things right!' reaction on the part of the ST (which I do realise isn't a perfectly monolithic entity), it's more likely due to word from the top that the effect of previous articles was 'not in the interests of national cohesion' or sommat? My suspicions are reinforced by the accompanying photo—two hands reaching for each other across the page, bisecting the whole article and taking up a good one-third of the available space—and the headline, 'Time to reach out and talk?' Both have rather little to do with the meat of the article, but are typical of unity in da community literature.

Also from this article: something I wasn't aware of before—

No homosexual has in recent memory been prosecuted for what he does in the privacy of his home.

But the police do carry out anti-vice operations in public areas.

And some of these involve young male police officers posing as homosexuals. When gay men try to pick them up, they are arrested. Most are charged for molestation or committing an obscene act.

I hope it's forgivable that my sense of moral indignation at this is eclipsed by amusement at the idea of policemen 'posing as homosexuals'. How do they do this? With the aid of manicures? Tight shirts? Just carrying themselves in, well, a gay manner? What? Our chief weapon is surprise, surprise and couture. . . .

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Edit: The opinion piece on the facing page, which I missed earlier, pretty much seals the feature as damage-control. It's by Paul Jacob and is titled 'Debate, discuss but let's not be divisive'. It's about as full of shit as you'd expect with a title like that. Essentially, it's an attempt to spin the outrage over the Balaji Hypothesis as evidence that the gubmint's 'consultative approach' is succeeding, with an admonition not to get too worked up thrown in. Notable bits:

A more consultative approach by the Government has now opened wider opportunities for interest groups, religious leaders, conservatives, liberals and the like, to let fly.

That's fine except when there's more heat than light thrown on the issue—especially if emotions start to get the better of us.

I would like to say this shows that the writer has no grasp on reality, but as he is a trained propagandist journalist, that would be naive; more likely it is an intentional denial of reality. 'Quiet down guys, don't take things personally. I mean, people are only saying that you don't belong in society and that your lifestyle will lead to the downfall of civilisation and destroy the morals of little children everywhere. P.S. You're going to hell.' No doubt Mr Paul Jacobs would have had something quite similar to say about women's suffrage or the end of apartheid.

And so caught up were we, yes so many of us, by this wider window of opportunity that it took the Prime Minister to remind us all that, consult as it might, this Government doesn't rule by the dictates of those with the loudest voice and widest reach.

Translation: people can talk, but the gubmint doesn't have to listen. I don't think anyone really needed to be reminded of that. (Aside: 'And so caught up were we, yes so many of us'—is this what passes for English in the local press these days?)

Those who participate in the process can view their involvement in two ways: a waste of time and energy, or a useful contribution they have made to help hone a final decision—even if it is one they do not agree with.

I'm sure homosexuals everywhere will be comforted by the knowledge that even if the outcome is that homosexual acts remain illegal, and that its illegality starts to be enforced as an anti-AIDS measure, the decision to make it so is one they helped to 'hone'.

Fiddly bits

I'm trying out HaloScan's Trackback feature. Anyone want to ping me and see if it's working?

Edit: It's working. Hit me, guys.

I use my powers for good, not evil

This comes a bit later than accepted timelines would have it, but the last neanderthal has left the building:

hmmm....... No point reading... this blog is down.....for now and forever more.....

Hurrah!


Or maybe not.

Guess I'll just have to keep mocking him, then. In that vein, I really liked this:

I am supposed to have stop blogging. My blog is supposed to me down like 3 times already...But I am succumbing to evil again...

I forgot to take medcine and so my hand vibrated today.... And for those of you who know what I am working as, a vibrating hand is not very useful hor...

Oh buggrit

I just got my landmark first extra duty ever. Three, actually. Sodding temporary camp passes and their inability to stay in place.

Fuck.

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On the bright side, the border around my blog title is finally displaying correctly. Many thanks to LancerLord for that.

Poetry is like society

In that everyone knows exactly what's wrong with it and will tell you at great length given half a chance.

English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in America, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust. From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated north-eastern industrial town), I recognised commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America. Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M&M's chocolate candies. A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise longue, said in a twanging Southern drawl: "I'm an M&M peanut / Toasted to a golden brown / Dipped in creamy milk chocolate / And covered in a thin candy shell!" Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly towelled in her monogrammed candy wrap. I felt then, and still do, that the M&M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

As so often is the case with such articles, I'm not sure what to think of it. Aside from the (to me) frankly ridiculous bit I just quoted, it's difficult to argue with what Camille Paglia says—I mean regarding the cliquishness of the poetry community, the impotence of most criticism to actually say anything important about poetry, and other less than earth-shaking observations—but at the same time the whole piece is impregnated with a sensibility that annoys me, which is that poetry is Sacred and Vital and must be brought to the doorsteps of the common people to be worthwhile.

I realise mine is an unpopular opinion to hold, but I don't see any real reason beyond the purely selfish to aim to 'make poetry matter' to society or anything like that. I would rather see the general populace read more (proper) non-fiction or even good novels than poetry; it would certainly benefit them more. Even blogs would be preferable. The only reason to read poetry as far as I'm concerned is for pleasure, because you like poetry. If someone doesn't, it's not of much concern to me, at least, no more than it would be if the person had, say, poor taste in music.

In the same vein, I see nothing wrong with writing to impress one's fellow poets if one's fellow poets are the people best suited to appreciate the sort of thing you want to write. It's only logical.

(As a bit of an aside, I've long thought it an injustice that 'impress' in this sort of context has turned into a perjorative. It connotes self-indulgence and empty displays of skill, when really it shouldn't; how often are even poets impressed by poems which did not also entertain them and/or move them in some, not necessarily emotional, way? I write to impress and make no bones about it, because what impresses is a damn good poem.)

I do not mean that poetry should studiously ignore non-poets, or that the poet's poet is the best sort of poet to be. My point, which I'm always surprised isn't made more often, is that a poem (or poet) whose ideal reader is another poet is not somehow hollow or inauthentic. It's just a different sort of poem from a different sort of poet.

Lost that loving feeling

JH, here's a link specially for you: Nippon Feel. That's just awful. Link thanks to Simon's Asia By Blog post.

Which reminds me: I miss the time when people noticed my posts. Now my rants just sort of sit there and stew in their own bile. Poo. I could do without certain people noticing my posts, though. For instance, the anonymous coward who decided to lightly spam this blog with links to stopgays.blogspot.com. Fuck off.

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Aside: I still have no idea how to fix that border. Anyone?

Intervention

I saw a strange thing on the 189 heading home (yes, I do have to stay in now, as mentioned; my platoon was, as is common for us, given the night-out). You know those little slots next to the entrance of the bus where route information flyers are supposed to go? They were all empty (not unusual) except for one, which was occupied by a small stuffed animal (unusual!). I suppose a child must have put it there and forgot it, though it'd be a hard-to-reach place for most children of toy-carrying age.

Anyway, there was something magnetic about it, so as I was getting down at my stop I suppressed my embarassment and, well, pocketed it. (Thankfully there weren't many people on the bus, and they were mostly at the back.) It's a misshapen little thing that reminds me a little of the bunny of the month club, but I've grown fond of it already. It is a little dirty, but that can be fixed. Here it is:


I'm naming him Wallace.

If at a later date I turn up dead with a frozen scream and tufts of off-white toy stuffing on my face, or if I am struck down by anthrax or flesh-eating bacteria, know that it is probably, in some way or other, his fault.

Take me now, Jesus, you big stud

Harpers.org has a marvellous article (and what a title, too) on the Left Behind series. Pardon the biggish excerpt; I just liked it that much.

There’s a scene in Nicolae in which Buck Williams, by now a so-called tribulation saint and married to Rayford Steele’s daughter, hears on CNN radio that Nicolae the Antichrist has nuked Manhattan. (Although, of course, the godless media don’t put it that way.) Fleeing Chicago, Buck sees a mushroom cloud rising near O’Hare airport. Thinking fast, he drives across the median, whips into a Land Rover dealership, plunks down a company credit card, and drives off—"carefully," we’re told—in a "beautiful, new, earth-toned Range Rover." . . . Even the most rudimentary realism is beyond the LaHaye-Jenkins team’s imaginative reach. World War III has begun, the city is under nuclear attack, and car salesmen are sitting around the showroom writing up contracts and—somewhat improbably—accepting credit cards.

Before long, in the name of peace, World Potentate Carpathia has also dropped megaton devices on London, Montreal, Toronto, Mexico City, Dallas, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Washington. The “wrath of the Lamb” earthquake has exterminated one quarter of the world’s surviving population. Yet the Tribulation Force warriors experience no difficulty zipping all over the world by Learjet, keeping in touch by cell phone, spreading the Gospel over the Internet, and tracking Nicolae Carpathia’s schemes on CNN.

Psychologically speaking, the series makes the average Harlequin romance look like Madame Bovary. Consistent with fundamentalist preoccupations, the only sins are sexual, and no sooner does Rayford Steele understand that his wife and sons have been raptured off to heaven than he’s cured of Hattie Durham fever at once and forever:

He knew Hattie was not a bad person. In fact, she was nice and friendly. But that was not why he had been interested in her. It had merely been a physical attraction, something he had been smart enough or lucky enough or naïve enough not to have acted upon. He felt guilty for having considered it.

As to whether Hattie is short or tall, blonde or brunette, slender or zaftig, readers haven’t been told; only that she’s "drop-dead gorgeous" (an unfortunate cliché, under the circumstances) and much younger. And now that Rayford is a Christian, he’s duty-bound to save Hattie’s soul, even after she becomes Nicolae Carpathia’s mistress—and especially after she becomes pregnant. (God can exterminate millions on a whim, but it’s crucial that nice, friendly Hattie not abort the Antichrist’s baby.)

Confession time: I've read half the books in the series and probably still have a couple copies lying around. Okay, so I used to be a real opiated mass. Sue me.

Interestingly, just like with Christian rock, the sense that Left Behind was actually, erm, pretty shitty steadily increased as I grew more disillusioned with Christianity, quite independent of any real improvements in my taste. (It has to be said that as works of art, Left Behind is a lot more shitty than any Christian rock I've heard so far.)

Finally, someone who'll tell it like it is

How to Blog Good

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In other news, I happened to notice (as someone brought a copy to camp) that the New Paper has joined the Straits Time in its orgy of sensationalist dumbfuckery. I won't bother fisking it; it's the New Paper fer chrissakes.

Edit: Just thought I'd point out that my ex-host Adri also has two good posts on this topic.

Gay Parties: The Return

Page 10 of today's Straits Times carries that most unexpected thing: an article even worse than the one on the Balaji Hypothesis. Title: 'What happened at Sentosa gay parties'. Seeing as there's a whole article ostensibly devoted to this topic, you'd expect it to be something less than self-evident, right? But no—

THEY come to party, but many end up pairing up and going off to hotel rooms.
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People—both homosexual and heterosexual—who have attended the parties told The Sunday Times that couples, both same sex and otherwise, lock lips and grope each other discreetly on the crowded dance floor.

But the real action happens outside the party when it ends at 5am. David, 30, who works in the IT industry, said: "After a few drinks with hormones pumping, people slip away to hotel rooms or their homes for sex."

Newsflash! People often hook up after parties. Betcha didn't know that.

Here's a priceless bit from somewhere in the ellipses:

These goings-on at the annual Nation parties, which attract mainly gay men from Singapore and overseas, appear to back up what Senior Minister of State for Health Balaji Sadasivan said in Parliament last week: that the Nation parties might be the reason for the spike in Aids cases last year.

Apparently anecdotal evidence that some people hook up during a party (who needed to be told this? I guess Mr Brown 'gay men breathing on each other' joke was more on target than I'd thought) is proof enough that said party is the cause of an increase in AIDS cases. Brilliant.

The article ends off with two astoundingly off-topic specimens of 'family values' propaganda views from the public. First, quote-unquote family life educator Koh Su Yin:

By having the parties, we are sending the message to young people that such a lifestyle is okay. It also desensitises and normalises a behaviour which would be construed intuitively as unnatural.

We would not want young people to be attracted to the gay lifestyle as it undermines the basic family value of committed love, the importance of marriage and the stability of a family that constitutes mother- and father-love.

Do you see anything about AIDS in there? In fact, do you see anything about gay parties in there that couldn't have almost anything related to homosexuality substituted for it? Of course not. It's a total non sequitur. Never mind the appeal to what's 'intuitively' correct (the sort of appeal also much beloved of stay-in-the-kitchen-ists everywhere) and the shamelessness of listing 'the importance of marriage' as an argument against homosexuality, as if it wasn't people like Koh Su Yin who make the two mutually exclusive.

Then there's that old reporter's fall-back on anything vaguely 'moral': the mother's view. As if procreation brings with it a special sort of moral wisdom.

Agreeing, Ms Linda Kwek, 32, an advertising executive and mother of two toddlers, said: "Homosexuals, like anyone else, have a right to whatever lifestyle they fancy. But if this right becomes a potential threat to family values, then I would rather live in a country that is labelled strait-laced than one plagued by Aids and heartbreaks.

"We don't need such parties on our door-step. Call me selfish, but they can happen elsewhere."

See, double-speak isn't just for the government any more! If an omnipotent artificial intelligence ever conquers the world, I will cause it self-destruct in time-honoured science-fiction style by challenging it to reconcile the statement 'Homosexuals have a right to whatever lifestyle they fancy' and the disclaimer 'But if this right becomes a potential threat to family values'.

And again, where's the relevance to the topic? Yeah, sure, the words 'Aids' is in there, but it's thrown in the way desperate JC students, realising at the last minutes that their essay's irrelevance, will conclude with an almost word-for-word reiteration of the assigned question, except without the question form. The Linda Kwek says it, you'd think AIDS is a concern because it's 'a threat to family values', not because it, you know, kills people.

Oh, and gays, too.

I suppose the upside of all this is that whatever Neanderthal views the general populace holds, public lynchings are unlikely. I mean, who'd dare? They might catch AIDS.


Edit: I could have saved myself the trouble. This says it all.

In the category 'mildly cool'

Neil Gaiman auctions off the rights to name a fictional cruise ship

Be immortalized in Neil Gaiman's upcoming novel Anansi Boys by placing the winning bid on this CBLDF benefit auction. The winner of this auction will have their name or a name of their choosing given to a cruise ship in the book, and will receive a signed, first edition of Anansi Boys when it is published this Fall.

Neil Gaiman writes: "I've got to name a currently unnamed cruise ship in Anansi Boys. I have no idea what to call it, and, a couple of days ago, realised that my utter lack of inspiration could do good things for the CBLDF. If you wish, you can bid to have the ship named after you, your loved one, your dog, or even your favourite word."

All proceeds from this auction will benefit the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a 501(c)3 not-for-profit organization that specializes in the defense of First Amendment related cases on behalf of comics authors and retailers.

It's not exactly on the order of, say, naming Charles Foster Kane's sled, but pretty nifty nonetheless.

Cynics are the new sheep

There's been a bit of noise about Dr Balaji's Gay Party Hypothesis. I didn't mean to blog about this because it's simply not news—member of Singapore gubmint makes apparently wrongheaded remark about non-traditional problem/issue/community! Semiofficial mouthpiece treats it as priority news despite wrongheadedness! Cognoscenti stunned! No, sorry.

What leads me to write this isn't the story. It's the reaction to it. Essentially, the claims made by the good doctor are as follows:

1) New cases of Aids infection are up 28% from the previous year. Of these, 9 out of 10 are male and a third of them gay.

2) This is due to predominantly gay parties which give local homosexuals opportunities to play hide the sausage with foreign positives.

Number 2 is obviously a silly stretch which, while admittedly only a hypothesis at this point, should never have been let loose on the world with such flimsy evidence (read: no evidence that we can see) behind it. Unsurprisingly, everyone gathered around and clubbed it to bits.

What about 1? Not a peep, except to point out that 1/3 of a quantity is not most of it (well done, Poirot). Does the local blogosphere accept these figures as accurate? How about the use of the phrase 'Aids infection', a sign that someone at ST (or Dr Balaji himself) is sleeping on the job—are we talking about HIV infection rates or AIDS affliction rates? How can we take seriously a report that fails to distinguish between the two? And what about the time lag factor between contracting HIV and developing AIDS, and the fact that Nation only started in 2001?

Let's say we accept those figures, though, and likewise take the terminology used on good faith (i.e. that 'AIDS' really means 'AIDS' and not 'HIV', and that 'gay' really means 'gay' and not 'MSM'). That would mean that out of every 10 new AIDS sufferers, 3 are gay men. It doesn't take a statistician to realise that would make the proportion of gay men in the AIDS-afflicted population very much larger than the proportion of gay men in the general population. Nor does it take a statistician to realise that it's a proportion more than twice the cumulative proportion as given here. How, then, can one go on to pooh-pooh the implication that AIDS in Singapore is or is becoming largely a gay male problem? To concede the figures is to concede the argument.

Singapore has become too used to being spun by the state, to the point where spin is the only thing people will question. The most important thing about this article is not the gay party angle (100% spin at this point) but the claimed statistics (the real meat). A good fisking is more than just making fun of the fiskee's apparent absurdities; that is just coffeeshop talk.

It's time we saw a good fisking here.

Boring, real-life post

For someone who's been serving NS for just a little over a year, I've had quite the tour of duty. BMT, two months as a man in a rifle company, four months as commander's runner at a division HQ, three months as a clerk at a training school, and now I've been posted to an engineer unit as a signals operator. Being bounced around like this has been a bit of a headache (as is having to stay in again after half a year of staying out), but on the upside, whatever happens, it's pretty much been-there-done-that for me. I must say, though, that the unit practice of addressing staff and master sergeants as 'sir' is pretty bizarre, made more so by the fact that actual officers aren't saluted.

Ditkoheads

Adam-Troy Castro claims to have found the lamest science-fiction story of all time—

It appears in a comic book compilation called STEVE DITKO'S SPACE WARS, published by Vanguard; one of many books I just received, for possible review in SCI FI Magazine.
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A nameless professor calculates that the moon is headed toward Venus. "Some great force ray" is pulling the moon out of orbit and there's nothing Earth can do about it.

One of the miners, Bill Corwin, the nominal protagonist of the story, left behind when the others bugged out, is introduced at the halfway point. He is shown standing and looking up at the Earth, which looks pretty dang large to me; guess his co-workers left in REAL haste. His bosses from home videophone that they can never forgive themselves for leaving him. The plucky Bill says, "Well, I'll try to make the make the best of it," and, "At least I'm getting a free trip to Venus."

He loses contact with Earth and just stands around doing nothing while
Venus looms larger in the sky.

A fleet of spaceships leaves Venus and lands on the moon. One saucer lands a stone's throw from Bill, who says, "Well, I guess this is curtains for me!"

We are treated to the following face to face meeting between Bill and the Venusians. All punctuation is SIC.

Venusian: We brought your moon up here and have set it in orbit around Venus which has no moon!

Bill: You have no right to steal our moon! My people will fight to have it back!

Venusian: We are astounded that there is intelligent life on Earth but since you have explained so much about it, we shall return your moon to it's earthly orbit! You are welcome to visit our planet!

Bill: I shall enjoy it!

And the Venusians put the moon back, "much to the relief of lovers everywhere as well as practical scientists!"

The End.

I've read some pretty horrific things in the Whatnot slush pile, but for sheer lameness, yeah. Can't argue with that.

Sympathy for the Ninja

Quote of the day, from an arcade machine selection screen—

'I am a ninja. My life is lonely and difficult.'

Engrish of the Day

From a tin of biscuits—

It isn't consumerism if it's indie

I wiped out my wallet on CDs yesterday, but I'm not complaining. Matador at Fifteen isn't perfect, but it's good enough for me. Of course, I'd already own my favourite songs from it if I'd bought Electric Version, Turn On The Bright Lights, You Are Free etc. when they came out, the way every other right-thinking indie kid did. It's faintly ridiculous for 'Obstacle 1' to be my number one reason for being glad to own this compilation. But there you go.

I also got Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus on pure good faith in various friends' recommendations, never having heard a Nick Cave song in my life. The last time I did something like this I was stuck with Make Up The Breakdown, which I couldn't stand (I suppose I ought to give it another listen now). Fingers crossed.

Today's banality was brought to you by the letter M and the number 15.

QOTD

Actually from yesterday—

(A group of teenage males walks into Books Kinokuniya.)

Teen 1: Eh, what are we doing here ah?

Teen 2: Yah hor, good question. I hate books.

(Exit group of teenage males)

Help

By the by, the border around my blog title up there doesn't seem to be displaying right. Does anyone know how to fix that? I'm more or less html-illiterate.

Waffled through the turgid wood and blurbled as they came

So I was at the library the other day and ended up borrowing this book, Carolina Ghost Woods, simply because the writer was unknown to me, a rare thing, library poetry sections being what they are.


It's not a terrible collection, but I wish I hadn't returned All of Us (itself not so very wonderful) to borrow this. If I'd examined it closer, I'd have noticed that it was published as the winning manuscript for a (reputable) competition—not a certain don't-touch marking, but a disindicator for sure. Its contents encompass the following:

1) Bland, basically innocuous poems. For example: 'October', 'Winter' and the title poem.

2) Bland poems with atrocious lines sticking out of them. Frex: 'Scattered Prayers'—'Deep in the horned cave of the lacertilian winter' ('reptilian' or 'lizard-like' not good enough for her?), 'Sandbar at Moore's Creek'—'the delft-blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss' (how something can be 'strewn. . . with loss', I have no idea).

3) Simply atrocious poems. Frex: the first poem, 'Sharecropper's Grave', which begins 'The night is hoot-owls, wind-whistled flue, babies bundled in burlap'—no doubt while Peter Piper was picking his peck of pickled peppers—and ends, 'My children who won't hear. / The night full of cries they will never make.' In between there's stuff about the wind rising, clouds covering the moon, a dog barking. . . . Also notable is the last poem in the book, 'Dream of the End', not only because of plodding lines like 'When caught in silk and a bucket of rosewater, / it [the moon, that old standby of hack poets] told maidens how many days before marriage' and seppuku-inducing lines like 'I could cut out my own heart, / . . . and he would tear it apart, / scatter it to the four directions of the leached earth', but because it's sequestered away in its own section, also titled 'Dream of the End' and setting a high watermark for pretentious organisation in poetry collections.

It is the sort of book that fully deserves its blurbs—not what they say, but the way they say it. Here is James Tate:

"Carolina Ghost Woods is a startling first collection of poems—startling because of the bone-crushing violence and poverty, and startling also because of the beautiful and precise language the poet brings to bear on these scenes, violent or not. . . . The genius of these poems is that they insist on seeking the human despite devastating circumstances. Even the most wrung out individual must still have a soul. . . . I know of no book of poems like this. Judy Jordan has made herself a home in the house of poetry, and we are the richer for it.

Classic puffery. The book is 'startling', its 'genius' isn't that it's good, but that it is spiritually upstanding, and yep, there's that obligatory bad summing-up metaphor. The poet's made a home in the house of poetry (an unfortunate phrasing if I've ever seen one), and somehow this has made us (poets and readers of poetry, I assume) 'richer'—how does this work as a metaphor? Are we charging her rent? I quite like James Tate—his 'Goodtime Jesus' (it looks like it's lineated on the page I link to, but it's really a prose poem) is one of my favourite bits of light poetry—but I must say he's a wanker.

Then there's Agha Shahid Ali:

"'In the night of the soul's dance across luminous skulls, / it's the land the inherits' us. Such is the heartrending wisdom this poet has arrived at—with a grandeur very much in the American grain—whereby a Whitman-like abundance is able to meet a James-Wright-like compassion in a voice that never surrenders to bitterness. For despite much to be bitter about, 'Grief enough cleaves this wrecked lank with beauty.' How effortlessly the lyric is woven into these narratives so that even though 'the dead refuse to rot' and 'climb to the moons' in this poet's fingers and user her 'nail clippings as wings,' she neverthless can, when encessary, become air / and tremble above herself' herself.

'Such is the heartrending wisdom this poet has arrived at' indeed! Aga Shahid Ali should win some sort of prize for most damage done to a book by quoting from it; I doubt I could've picked worse lines if I'd tried. Here, again, we see that strange tendency to praise the work's, for lack of a better word, moral virtuousness over any real achievements. We are supposed to read and like this book because the writer is wise (possibly the most used and least defined word in poetic blurbses), generous ('abundance'), compassionate, and not bitter—god forbid a poet should be bitter; he or she might turn into, well, Philip Larkin! So, is the book any good? The real question is, who'd be so gauche as to ask that question of the work of such a saint? It is as if people blurb and eulogise with the same parts of their brains.

To sum up, Carolina Ghost Woods is a mediocre collection made up for somewhat by the hilarity of its back cover. The Expressivist's verdict: BOO. Me no like.

Worn-out glass-cut mid-night blues

So here I am in camp. As duty clerk. In the middle of the night. On the internet. Blogging.

If anyone's found a more potent combination of different kinds of lame, I should like to hear it.

QOTD

From an unnamed warrant officer: 'So who is this Hitler guy ah?'

The Other Half of Homosexuality

Yesterday we learned that half of being a gay male is a fear of (funnily enough) cockroaches. Today I discover that the other half is navigating like a woman—

Gay men employ the same strategies for navigating as women - using landmarks to find their way around - a new study suggests.

But they also use the strategies typically used by straight men, such as using compass directions and distances. In contrast, gay women read maps just like straight women, reveals the study of 80 heterosexual and homosexual men and women.
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"The results support the notion that males' and females' cognitive abilities may be organised in different ways, and highlight the importance of accounting for sex-specific patterns of behaviour," Choi [a researcher of spatial behaviour] told New Scientist.

I wouldn't bother blogging this if it didn't have so much potential for humour, which Matt Cheney has mined to the point where I don't need to:

Suddenly I imagined a test used in future classrooms in the conservative school districts of certain U.S. states: a teacher studies how her mail [sic] students use maps, and determines that little Johnny has been using landmarks. Little Johnny gets sent to the God Room, where he's told that either he starts using the compass, or else God will punish him with death and eternal damnation. If Johnny continues to use landmarks instead of the manly compass, he's killed in a public sacrifice in praise of Leviticus.

Troglodyte of the Day

reflectingthoughts' journal

Thanks to my sis for the link. It's the blog of this slimy guy in her junior college. I usually wouldn't bother mentioning something like this—JC idiots are too common for me to spend many posts on—but this blog is really something. Sadly he's password-locked most of the best entries, but there're still some gems to be found (emphasis mine):

BLOGS ARE DETRIMENTAL TO A SOCIETY. I feel that society has changed. Diaries are now open to anyone, including classmates. It is not right I feel. Diaries are meant to be personal, only to be shared with a loved one.

Let me give you a senario. If a girl has a blog and reveals all her personal events online, will her future husband like the idea of other guys knowing so much of his wife???

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Clubbing, disco dancing, and MSN chat, are now a way of life. And this is wrong! Clubbing and disco dancing is used as a catalyst to drugs and moral decay of society. Mad people dancing and wearing scantily clad clothes is a norm at these places.
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MSN chat is a DETRIMENT to society. I repeat and stress on the word DETRIMENT. Okay, there is nothing technically wrong with msn chat. It is like chatting on the phone, right? But here comes the negative aspect. While it is all right for a girl to talk to a boy on the phone for a while, using msn chat can stretch conversations to more than an hour and I see that happening in today's world and context. When that boy or girl grows up, the spouse would not be happy to know his partner has talked to the opposite sex for a long time and they share a deep relationship.

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You see, I am half gay. I am afraid of roaches.

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With the liberalization and westernization of culture in Singapore. The media is liberaised and hence Singaporeans are given a greater choice of "art." Please remember that "art" is not good all the time. We look at the show mama mia [!]. The storyline was based on a child who potentially had three fathers. What does this imply?

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Poly students wear anything to poly. Meaning there is no dresscode. Some girls, you know, would take the opportunity to show off thier beauty and wear an array of clothes to show the different aspects of thier beauty. You know what I mean.... I was told that the traditional dresscode is jeans. And this is the crux of the problem. I DON'T HAVE JEANS!

And here's a classic which my sister saved before it was password-locked:

" Women should not work." This statement no longer holds true for many women. Women now want the freedom to choose what they want to do and no longer live lives under their husbands. This is a very sad phenomanom.

Women are made to stay at home and to work. THis is their purpose in life and their job in life. Similarly, a man's job is to work and to bring money into the household. With the rise of house husbands, and working mums, this is going to change. But, I still think otherwise.

A man, being sharper and physically stronger, are able to take on the politics [!] in the office and generally have more energy to take on the demanding work load of the twenty first century. Women, being physically less capable, will get tired easily. Hence, they should stay at home and just live life simply as a housewife.

Women are also getting fiercer.

Today, after leaving PJC to Nanyang poly, I got scolding by a bunch of girls who strongly disagree that " boys and girls cannot mix in seconday school." I feel, joining CCAs like guides, is detrimental to a girl's development.

A boy would crave for the girl and isn't this bad????

In JC, boys are more mature and hopefully, that does not happen. But the point that I want to make is that why are girls so liberal and want to mix with boys from a tender age of 13?

It can be argued that they want to widen their social network and there is nothing wrong with it. But. if many boys come into thier lives, how will she treat her hubby?

I give you an example. If you eat a papaya once, you will treasure the taste. If you eat it frequently, you will no longer treasure it.
As such, I feel that girls should have fewer boys coming into thier lives. They will then love and treasure thier hubby more.

And its sequel, now also locked:

I find that the the word "beloved" or "love" is used to loosely nowadays. Even between boys are girls these two words are used often. My point is if a girl says love to many boys, does she really love her boyfriend or husband when she loves or has loved so many boys before hand? People are like papayas. It is okay to smell and to sniff out the papaya, it is okay to look at the papaya. But it is not okay to touch every papaya. If not,all the papayas will be warm soggy and rotten.

Enjoy.