Film Review: Winter Days

Review for 冬の日(Fuyu no hi), also known as Winter Days
Dirs. Kawamoto Kihachiro et al.
Runtime: 105 mins

"Trust the Japanese to make a one-hour documentary about a 30-minute animation."

Fuyu no hi marks its debut in the English-speaking world with its screening at Singapore's Animation Nation minifestival in June 2004.

The animation film is a print-to-screen adaptation of the seminal renku (連句 chain poem) written by the mid-17th century master haiku poet Matsuo Basho (松尾芭蕉) and his fellow poets. Just as Basho et al take turns to compose verses for the lyric poem in 1684, 36 master animators - including 3 Oscar winners for animation - around the world take turns to visually interpret each verse of the original poem.

Drawing from specialities as diverse as coppperplate engraving, bunraku (traditional puppetry), calligraphic drawing, stop motion filmming, as well as traditional and modern cell-animation, the creators of Fuyu no Hi adopt the aesthetics and production techniques of the original renku literary form and make it a wholly new, as well as a captivating feast for the senses.

On its own, the animation film manages to capture the abstract and impressionistic effects of chain poetry and haiku, but like all obscure poetry, a reader might actually gain a better understanding of what IS going on in the original interpretive community the poets operated in, by reading the footnotes. Hence, the (page-long) footnote is to a 3-line poem, what the hour-long documentary is to the 30 minute animation.

And this is what Fuyu no Hi (the documentary) achieves, in its alternating show-and-tell and interview segments for each verse of the poem/film.

From the simplest explanation of a renku, its structure, and its rules of composition and reading, one understands how each animated sequence relates to the previous, and sets the mood for the next, and how much leeway for free, unique, and personal interpretations each animator has in his/her adaptation of their assigned verse.

It is nevertheless apparent from the interview segments that the understanding of the literary allusions and codes of the renku is not a consistent value in each and every animator. The average pieces came from contributors who had an adequate cognition of the original verse; the best and most original from the artists' re-cognition and re-interpretation of the poetry to their own modern understandings; and the really boring and bland ones came ironically from mis-recognition.

If the animation portion sought to place the animators in a parallel position to the poets, the documentary seeks to recreate the film audience as the 'reading community' of the period, who understood the same literary rules, codes, and allusions which the poets worked within.

Of course, it is precisely because such a community of readers no longer exists that we need to have copious footnotes to even the shortest traditional poems, and why a film made in the philosophy of a traditional poem would need a much longer documentary to make sense of it.

It is then a marvel to realise at the end that it actually works, and works beautifully.







-End-

Notes. This reviewer is frankly disturbed by the fact that many in the audience chose to leave the cinema after the 30-minute animation concluded, without bothering to watch the documentary. Perhaps these Singaporeans were expecting to watch an anime instead of an animation piece.

冬の日 is also showing this month at the World Festival of Animated Films in Croatia, and will screen at the New York Asian American Film Festival later next month.

Official website for 冬の日: http://www.fuyunohi.com/

What Just Might Happen in November

GW Bush: (Holds a round object to reporters in the White House press room and proclaims)
Behold, the head of Osama Bin Laden!

Crowd: No, it's not - it's a large pumpkin with a pathetic moustache drawn on it!

Not A Nigerian Moneylaundering Scam Email

filed under: and now, for something completely different

urgent

request for urgent financial relationship

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i am lynn cheney, wife of the vice president of the united states of america. $180 million dollars invested by my husband's company, halliburton is presently trapped in nigeria. in order to commence this financial transaction we solicit your assistance to enable us transfer into your library the said trapped financial goods.

the source of this financial opportunity is as follows; during the last military regime here in nigeria, the hallibrton corporation made "improper payments" to government officials.the securities and exchange commission has set up a formal investigation. there is also an iquiry by the u.s. justice department.

however, by virtue of our position as financial officers and members of this corporation, we cannot acquire these funds in our names. i have therefore, been delegated as a matter of trust by my colleagues of the panel to look for an overseas partner into whose bank we would transfer the heretofore mentioned illegal funds. hence we are writing you this letter. we have agreed to share the profits thus; 1. 20% for the nigerian government. 70% for the halliburton corporation 3. 10% to be used in settling taxation and all local and foreign expenses. it is from the 70% that we wish to commence the financial transaction.

please,note that this transaction is 100% safe and we hope to commence the transfer latest seven (7) banking days from the date of the receipt of the following informatiom by tel/fax; 234-1-7740449, your company's signed, and stamped letterhead paper the above information will enable us write letters of claim and job description respectively. this way we will use your company's name to apply for payment and re-award the contract in your company's name.

we are looking forward to doing this business with you and solicit your confidentiality in this transation. please acknowledge the receipt of this letter using the above tel/fax numbers. i will send you detailed information of this pending project when i have heard from you.

yours faithfully,

lynn cheney

note; please quote this reference number (ve/s/09/99) in all your responses.

(from keywords.oxus.net)

Dispatches from the War on Cliches

"There is no smoke without fire." This is a proverb that's been around for ages, but apparently is more often than not misunderstood and abused by its users.

This proverb is generally understood to express the real-life observation that "wherever there is smoke, there is fire". In predicate logic, the relationship is transcribed as "Fire only if smoke", or in more mathematical terms, (Fire → Smoke).

In logical terms, a necessary condition can happen on its own. So while you can't have fire without smoke, you can have smoke without fire.

However, the standard understanding of the proverb precisely believes that you can't have smoke without fire.
How is this a 'misunderstanding' and an 'abuse'? That's adequately illustrated by how people apply this proverb in real life.

"There can't be Rumours without Some Truth"

This new proposition is phrased in parallel with the original proverb. From predicate logic, again we note that while you cann't have Truth without some Rumours of it, it's entirely possible to have Rumours without any Truth.

But try convincing that to any idiot who spouts that proverb (in either form) to you.

And if you sincerely believe there can't be Rumours without Some Truth, or there can't be Smoke without Fire...

Tell that to the innocents who died in witch-hunts.

Tell that to Joseph MacCarthy and the victims of his hunt for Communists in America.

Tell that to victims of slander and character assasination.

Tell that to the millions of Americans who believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 bombings because their leaders kept insinuating and suggesting it, even without any proof, and indeed are now known to have LIED about it.

Tell that to the thousands of prisoners the coalition forces arrested and detained in Abu Ghraib on grounds that they could "possibly be dangerous", and the US Senator who claimed that those prisoners are all thieves, murderers, rapists, who deserved it, and the Red Cross, who says that the majority of the prisoners were actually innocent, and were detained without even knowing their charges.

There isn't any rumour so false and baseless that people won't believe eventually, because they believe that "there can't be smoke without fire".

Return from Planet Reagan

AKA it's been a fun week with nice speeches, grand ceremonies, hagiography and a secular canonisation, but let's get back to reality.

From the BBC:

US probes trainee soldier beating

The US Army has opened an investigation into injuries suffered by a serviceman who was beaten up during a training exercise.

Sean Baker says he received injuries from fellow soldiers while posing as a detainee at the Guantanamo Bay camp for al-Qaeda and Taleban suspects.

He blames officers for the botched exercise, and says he suffers seizures as a result.

Mr Baker, 37, was a member of a military police unit based in Kentucky when it deployed to Guantanamo Bay in 2003.

He argues that other participants were not made aware that he was a soldier.

During the exercise, Mr Baker says, military police choked him and slammed his head against the floor. Mr Baker says he told them he was a US soldier but the beatings continued until the jumpsuit was yanked down, revealing his uniform.

Impeach them. Impeach them NOW.

On Maid Abuse

It's not even Sunday, and the Straits Times has splashed pictures of the mutilated boobs of a maid working in Malaysia, right across the front page of its Asian news section.

We should look carefully at what kind of 'horror stories' from foreign countries that our papers play up, give prominence to, and what kind of domestic horror stories are underplayed and under-reported.

For example, recent cases of school-going teens committing suicide out of maltreatment or emotional stress imposed by teachers have been reported in the Chinese press, but the English papers have been silent about.

Now, what of this piece of horrifying maid abuse? The Straits Times fails to inform its 4 million readers in Singapore is that "almost a hundred Indonesian maids had died falling from tall buildings in the island republic in the previous three years" - according to Chalief Akbar of the Indonesian embassy here, quoted in a BBC article. In addition, 10 to 20 maids flee their employers and seek refuge with the Indonesian embassy here each day.

The official story is that these maids, coming from rural villages in Indonesia, the Philippines, and subcontinental India, are unaccustomed to working in high-rise flats, and hence scores of maids fall to their deaths here each year while climbing out of the building to clean windows.

I can't see how anyone can take that laughable explanation seriously. It contains several blatant biases and fallacious assumptions:
1. There is no urban centre in the Philippines, Indonesia and the Subcontinent.
2. Because these are backward countries, unlike modern Singapore.
3. Hence, all maids who work here are unable to deal with an urbanised landscape, and kill themselves by falling to their deaths accidentally.
I don't know whether to be shocked at the assumptions in the argument, or at the fact that people buy into this story.

Since two years ago, it has been mandatory for maid agencies to include safe work training in their maid courses. That's not to say that no maid agency has prepared its maids for urban-based domestic work. Now despite all the (compulsory) safety training in the last two years, the death toll still remains at around 100 maids a year falling to their deaths.

Let's look at the figures again: every day, 10-20 maids run away from their Singaporean employers to seek refuge at the Indonesian embassy. Total number of deaths is therefore about 1/3 to 1/6 of runaways. The more likely explanation is that while some maids have the guts to run, other maids sink into depression - being forced to work more than 18 hours a day, without rest days, without permission to socialise outside of their 'workplace' will do that easily. What do depressed, isolated people stuck in a foreign land do? They might well jump to their deaths.

Now, add to the maid fatalities the hundreds of construction workers who lose their lives or are mangled each (normal) year in our building projects... What kind of country do we live in anyway?

The Rise of the Creative Class

One wonders why our bureaucrats here are so enarmoured with the creative class theory.

The article in the link explains the allure of the theory for civil servants with particular mindsets, and the pitfalls of the theory.

Straits Times fails at reporting news, leaves out key Rice 9/11 quote

Condoleeza Rice testified last Friday morning (Singapore time) to the Senate about the 9/11 attacks. Our national newspaper gives her a glowing report on Saturday, despite the fact that her testimony was clearly damaging to the administration. What's unforgivable is ST's reluctance to print the truth, to leave out key information in its reporting.

Rice said, "I don't remember the Al Qaeda cells as being something that we were told we needed to do something about." And that's a quote you'll never see in your newspaper, and it took me under half a week to hunt for the transcripts to the hearings.

(As an aside, you can actually get a transcript of any Senate/Congress debate or speech within a week. How long would you have to wait for Parliament to publish its Gazette? And how easily accessible is the Gazette?)

The Straits Times should realise it IS in our national interests to show that Singapore does not have a monopoly on incompetent civil servants.

Future PM redefines marginally employed as entrepeneurs

I can't imagine Mini-Lee could be so shameless as to do that...

It's one thing to 'salute' the ITE graduate selling chicken pies, the NTU undergraduate turned undertaker, and the security guard cum part-time artist for their tenacity and will to survive, but it's bullshit to hail what are acts of desperation in the race to the bottom as "entrepeneurship".

For the second year in a row, Singapore's largest group of retrenched people belong to the white-collar PMET class. By extension Singapore's most unemployable group of people are the tertiary-educated - think of all the graduates and the would-be graduates who have been trained for the nonexistent PMET jobs.

Go tell these bunch of people when they finally give up hope of decent employment, give in to desperation, and open stalls in hawker centres, pasar malams, that you salute them as entrepeneurs. That's a very neat excuse and diversion to cover up the depressing fact that our Great Leaders have been incompetent and incapable of resurrecting the economy, don't you think?

Public rituals

First off, I'd like to condemn the news reporting of the Falluja incident where "4 US contractors" were killed, and their corpses then mutilated and lynched by public mobs in the Iraqi town.

Let's not get all mushy about this and treat it as though it's Black Hawn Down all over again: these weren't innocent "contractors". That's standard military doublespeak for mercenaries, paramilitary soldiers whose activities and functions are semi-legal and politically troublesome, and cannot be performed by the official coalition forces.

Even though the Shitty Times described these 4 men as "civilian contractors", a blatant lie that even the US media wouldn't be caught dead telling, the contractors were paid mercenaries working for Blackwater USA, which recently hired ex-soldiers from Chilean ex-dictator Augusto Pinochet's infamous and brutal military forces. On a professional level, Blackwater is part of the huge US industry that acts as a black hand of the Pentagon around the world, implementing its political policies on the sly, and often under the guise of providing "security services".

So, not only did the US illegally invade Iraq, part of their more illegal 'peacekeeping duties' are also farmed out to clandestine groups.

Now, if the 4 slain US citizens were members of the military, I would've given my sympathies - no questions asked. Ditto, if the 4 slain US citizens were civilians working there. 4 US mercenaries got slain, and their corpses defiled publicly? Don't cry on me.

Spot the Fake News Article

Every April Fools' Day, the Straits Times will include one fake news report in its broadsheet, often on the front page itself.

Here are the two frontline stories in today's edition of the ST:

Singapore exams go regional, where it seems there are actually fools in the Ministry of Education who want to export our exam system, and fools in other countries who want to buy it.

The other headline?

Commuters to share train security costs. Where Singaporean citizens will pay for the extravagant, needless, and ineffective "security measures" that our paranoid leaders will be installing for our rail network - armed marshals on every train, along with selective luggage checks that will make a mockery out of the phrase "Mass Rapid Transit".

It is a sign of the times that the second story is NOT the april fools' joke, and the improbable news is actually from the first headline.

Linguistic legacy of Singapore leaders

I propose that 50 years from now, historians will point to the coining of new words as the most important contribution of our leaders to their nation and the world. We have already redefined artiste to mean artist, and bohemian to describe the very bourgeois and poser-esque Holland Village. And that's not coining precious phrases like Confucian ethics and Asian democracy.

Sidenotes:
Artiste, in most dictionaries, refers to
1. musical or theatrical entertainers, like music-hall artistes or circus artistes
2. More generally, a person with artistic pretensions

Bohemian: lifestyle associated with liberal, penniless, and new artists or literary circles.

Bourgeois: mostly yuppies hang out at Holland V to imbibe expensive coffee and masticate gourmet food that real bohemians can't afford. These yuppies also hold artistic pretensions while posing at the Holland V bistros.

Today, our former Minister for Education, Teo Chee Hean, continues this rich legacy of linguistic deviation by coining a new use for an old word. The headlines have it: Public servants must think more like insurgents.

It's like watching a comedy in English, performed by Japanese actors who aren't quite sure what the N-word means...

Our poor minister clearly wants to say that the Civil Service needs to "take risks", "think out of the box", to be "less risk-averse", etc. It's just puzzling why his speechwriters chose the word "insurgent". Or mis-use the word and blame Gary Hamel for it.

Insurgent, according to the Webster
1. Person who rebels against civil authority or established government
2. One who acts contrary to policies and decisions of their own political party.

Onelook has it even better:
3. a member of an irregular armed force that fights a stronger force by sabotage and harassment

How should we make sense of the headline?
I can't choose between the following interpretations:

A. Teo welcomes insurgents because the government is afraid of mavericks. (linguistic faux pas theory)
B. Teo urges civil servants to take arms and rise up in revolution. (Webster, sense 1)
C. Teo urges civil servants to sabotage Singapore. (Onelook)
D. Teo admits that Singapore civil servants are members of the PAP. (Webster, sense 2)

Budget Roundup

It wasn't a case of writer's block, though I wish that is the reason why I haven't commented on it. Unfortunately, I needed to resist the urge to scream at my television screen, at the radio, and tear up the newspapers every day for the past 2 weeks of nonsensical speeches from our overpaid and underperforming clowns in Parliament.

The trade-off? Instead of an almost daily rant and snipe at our great leaders, Dear Reader, you will be subjected to just one long, but calm and measured post from me.

What can one write about without ending in a rant or a primal scream? I'll have to skip the great ideas from our leaders about the baby issue, or Sentosa Casino, or what I call the next big white elephant to rival the Tang Dynasty Village and the Esplanade. Or the budget, which Morgan Stanley's analysts complained was one of the most miserly, and certainly Not A Very Good Thing For Our Domestic Economy.

"It's the economy, stupid"

Our ministers have never been good orators, or skilled in any form of rhetoric, or cunning lingustics. They would do well to steer clear of the rubbish they've nevertheless uttered over the past 2 weeks, such as this little gem of a phrase from our infamous Manpower Minister, to "re-take jobs for Singaporeans".

What kind of jobs does our great Million-dollar Minister want to take back for our thousands of unemployed Singaporeans? Choice jobs in the marine, cleaning, and nursing industries, where there is a "shortage" of labour.

Translation: We want to be known as a nation of modern coolies, amahs, and nurses.

This is despite the fact that PMETs "were the biggest group of local workers retrenched last year", according to the Straits Times and the Manpower Ministry. Now, when Professionals, Managers, Executives and Technicians (i.e. just about the white collared middle classes) form the largest group of unemployed Singaporeans, our great minister wants to solve the unemployment and recession problem by taking back the marine, cleaning, and nursing industries for us.

Why no one rubbished Mr. Ng Eng Hen in Parliament is a great mystery to me.

We have a shortage, really?

Having sources in nursing, I'll just talk about this sector and its apparent "shortage of labour" that needs to be filled by Singaporeans.

Firstly, there is NO SHORTAGE of nurses in Singapore's healthcare industry.

For almost 20 years, Singapore's national health system has systematically relied on employing and training foreign nurses for the industry. Nurses from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and China are a mainstay of our healthcare industry. They sign 5 or 10 year contracts with our hospitals, and our efforts have paid off - Singapore healthcare's "professional and dedicated" image is solely due to these matyrs.

There is a giant sucking sound

And that's the sound of disgruntled expat nurses voting with their feet. Year after year, expat nurses choose not to renew their initial contracts with Singapore hospitals, despite promises of an automatic PR status as a 10-year long service award gift. Instead they flock, not back to their homelands, but to Australia, New Zealand, the US and UK.

Over there, our former expat nurses (great export product, by the way) work much less for much more pay, and are offered PR-ship one month after they arrive, and that PR-ship is extended to their immediate families as well. This speaks very much for the "working climate" of the hospitals here, and how great our Human Resource departments are.

This situation has gotten so bad that most expat nurses here really treat Singapore like a stepping stone to a much more humane, sensible, and better-paid job in another country - they just need to suffer for a short while before hitting paydirt overseas. Even expat junior doctors from less-privileged countries working here see how lucrative and imbalanced things have become, and actually make the switch from being doctors, surgeons, and researchers... to nurses.

Thank you, Singapore, for fucking up the global healthcare market.

And this is why, this time round, our PAP Ministers have "learnt their lesson", and will now resort to hiring people who cannot escape Singapore, to become nurses. Yes, they are taking back the nursing industry for Singaporeans.

Or perhaps, will thousands of Singaporeans take up the exhortation to be nurses, serve their shitty contracts, then leave for greener pastures with the magic bullet vocations?

Schadenfreude

The Singapore Sentosa Cable Car Challenge is on! Only here do you have a contest that's designed to eke out the maximum amount of suffering from contestants for the maximum pleasure of the viewers and media.

Consider the rules: Couples are required to spend 7 days on a cable car. They can get out of the cars as often as they like, except they're limited to a total of 10 minutes a day, total. Even the Guiness Book of Records has some notion of human rights when they set the break times for record attempts.

I just heard an interview on the BBC, where one of the organisers boasted they had to "make the event exciting and memorable", hence justifying the horrific rules and 'temptations' that they distract participating couples with.

Well, I know ONE WAY to make this competition even more exciting and memorable. Let's subject the contestants to another Sentosa cable car disaster!

Testing for Failure

Remember the little quiz I gave 2 weeks ago?

Given:
A. Some holidays are rainy, and
B. All rainy days are boring.

Which of the following statements can be deduced?
1. No clear days are boring.
2. Some holidays are boring.
3. Some holidays are not boring.

Most people I asked got it correct: only statement 2 can be deduced. The problem is, they couldn't quite explain why statement 3 was wrong.

Some of the reasons given for rejecting 3 were more right than others... but they all betray an ignorance of the logical underpinning of the exercise.

"The category of not-boring is undefined, hence you cannot make deduction 3. You can't draw a Venn diagram to solve the problem..."
"Cannot be deduced.. since it is not known if non-rainy days are boring as well"
"clear days is an introduction of an extra term", or a resort to alegebra...

These are all commendable attempts at grasping the logic, but flawed ones.

The key phrase here is "Syllogistic Logic", or "Categorical Syllogisms". All sample attempts failed to recognise the type of logical exercises they were doing.

This is how to solve a syllogism. This is how to reject a conclusion as false or true, within the rules of syllogistic reasoning. There's even a link to a java exercise applet (in the first link) to test more interesting and difficult variants that aren't that easy to solve if you use the sample reasoning I quoted above.

You'd wonder, what's so great about this quiz?

Major corporations and the civil service of many countries require job applicants for managerial posts to take a barrage of tests - personality, IQ, critical reasoning, writing, and so on.

Now, one of the most popular critical reasoning tests, published in 1984 by The Psychological Corp division of Harcourt Brace has a "Deduction" section, and the example question is the one that we've been discussing.

Here's the official answer and reasoning from the test-makers. Look and weep.

"Example one, the conclusion does not follow. You cannot tell from the statements whether or not clear days are boring. Some days may be.

Example two, the conclusion necessarily follows from the statements since, according to them, the rainy holidays must be boring.

Example three, the conclusion does not follow even though you may know that some holidays are very pleasant."

Look, and weep! The reason why statement three is rejected has NOTHING to do with a logical proof or disproof! The real reason why statement three MUST be rejected, is because it commits the logical fallacy of the illicit minor. What the testers have done here is commit the fallacy of the non-sequitur, rejecting a statement on non-logical grounds.

Look, and weep! For anyone who's taken this particular test, you'll remember that the actual questions in the "Deduction" section... don't deal at all with Syllogistic Logic, but with Sentence or Predicate Logic (the usual, and more familiar operators of AND, IF, THEN, NOT, OR. Nove, and everyone else's algebra methods and mathematical approach will be correctly applied for a sentence logic question).

What I want to know... is how can a psychological testing corporation be even trusted to make a competent logic test?

Look, and weep! The critical reasoning test is broken into: inference Deduction, Interpretation, and Evaluation. Now, if you do well in the test... it doesn't mean that you'll make excellent decisions in the real world. Since when are real-world problems so easily bounded into a category?

Since when are we supposed to ignore, like in the Evaluation section, that all the evidence/statements offered MUST BE TRUE? I shudder to think that managers end up not questioning and looking critically at the data given to them, or applying multiple facets of 'critical reasoning' to attack a problem, from all ends.

What I want to know is... Why are these test-making companies even in the business, if the tests they make... make no sense?

In making decisions about important questions, it is desirable to be able to distinguish between arguments that are strong and arguments that are weak, as far as the question at issue is concerned. An argument to be strong must be both important and directly related to the question.

Now, that's rubbish. That's not a Strong statement they just defined; it's a Relevant statement they just defined. Would you trust a test-making company that can't distinguish a "relevant argument" from a "strong argument"?

If the world is so badly screwed up by idiots in managerial positions and complete baboons in the civil service, you now know who to blame.

Oh captain, my captain!

If transplanted to Singapore, this great fallen leader will begin by saying,

"I represent the People's Wing of the People's Action Party!

"WHAT I WANT TO KNOW.... is why there aren't any overseas job listings in the job sections of the local newspapers?

"WHAT I WANT TO KNOW... is why 80% of the job ads are for SALES, SALES MANAGERS, SALES EXECUTIVES, and SALES ENGINEERS?

"WHAT I WANT TO KNOW... is why most job ads demand a 2-5 year work experience, and demand that fresh grads Need Not Apply?

"WHAT I WANT TO KNOW... is why the Labor Minister can claim there are enough jobs for all Singaporeans?"

What I want to know... is why don't we get leaders like that here?

Featured Blog of the Day

Model Singaporean Employer

Ladies and gentlemen, no kidding.. Icepearlz takes great care to insist she is NOT a "model Singaporeans employer", by tabulating a calculus of all the nice things she's done for her ungrateful maid.

The model Singaporean employer was shocked that her maid had unreasonably asked to have every Sunday off! That her maid had the temerity to ask to be let out of her house from 8am to 7pm on Sundays, and from noon to 6pm on Saturdays! The horror! The betrayal of a previously trustworthy maid!

Since the maid said she wanted the long hours out on Sunday because of church activities, the model employer has decided to inform the pastor of the situation, to keep an eye and ensure that the maid is indeed doing what she is claiming...

Now, she claims the maid doesn't know what's best for her, that Icepearlz's the best and most liberal Singaporean employer who's treated the maid "the best I can given the circumstances", that she's in no way inferior to an expat employer.

Really? If the maid is indeed released from Icepearlz's contract in September, I would like to recommend her a Singaporean employer immediately. A certain teacher of mine is not very nice to his students (especially when they're deemed too dense for him), his colleagues (when they're deemed his intellectual inferiors), and even the leaders of this country (openly and publicly criticises their policies)... yet he's capable of treating his maids with more class than this employer will ever have.

Mr. X insists that his maid stop work by 6pm every weekday. Just cook the food, and he and the missus can heat up the stuff when they return from work. Maid is free to get out of the house, and is encouraged to get out of the house after work hours, provided she's back by 10. Saturday's a half day and she's free to go out and stay out, for the whole of Sunday.

Despite his eccentricities and attitudes towards others, Mr. X has his head screwed on correctly here. Because a maid is a contracted employee. Employees are allowed to GET OUT OF THE OFFICE after work hours. They are allowed to take ALL Sundays off, not just public holidays that come 10 times a year. It's a basic human right, I think, not to be imprisoned in your workplace after working hours. The last time I checked, what you do after working hours are your own business too.

No matter how much trinklets you throw at a maid ($400 PCs??? She eats the same food that we eat? She *can* order the same food we do when we eat out?), the fact of her imprisonment within your home, the loss of one of her most basic freedoms, will continue to weigh on her. Regardless of the nice PC you installed in her room. It's just like decorating a hamster cage...

Failing Tests

Given:
A. Some holidays are rainy, and
B. All rainy days are boring.

Which of the following statements can be deduced?
1. No clear days are boring.
2. Some holidays are boring.
3. Some holidays are not boring.

The correct reasoning will be completely unexpected, despite the relative simplicity of the question.

Queer Eye for Chief Justice

This has nothing to do with gay marriages that are conducted by SanFran state officials in defiance and as a test against current laws.

This has nothing to do with Queer Eye for the Straight Guy either, but it's pretty close =D

Singapore's Chief Justice Yong Pung How undergoes radical makeover!

That's right... His Honour, Mr "Double Their Sentence", the appeals lawyer's worse nightmare, has done it AGAIN. Today will be the second straight day in a row that the judge has HALVED a sentence in his apeals court. (First case: Halves sentence for conviction on oral sex. Second case: Halves sentence on internet fraud.)

What gives? Short of a conspiracy theory - i.e. CJ really had a makeover from the wonderful Queer Eye crew, I can give only one sane explanation...

Elected Presidency 2005. The election is yours to lose, baby.

Not since Henry Kissinger

We must be living in some kind of alternate reality.

Some right-wing politican in Norway has nominated Bush and Blair for the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, for their "decisive action against terrorism".

Twiddledum and Twiddledee, the architects of the illegal invasion of Iraq, the self-proclaimed "War President" and his attack dog... Their infamous speeches in the UN Security Council... Their escalating warmongering and empire-building project (first Afghanistan, then Iraq. Tomorrow, Pakistan and North Korea?)... Their cluster-bombing of urban centres in Baghdad that needlessly took the lives of civilians...

These two people have been nominated for the Nobel PEACE prize. Which, in the words of Alfred Nobel, should be awarded to "the most or the best work for fraternity between nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses." And that describes all the actions of Bush/Blair since 2002?

Forgive me for believing that we live in an alternate reality, that the world we experience now must be a dark reflection of a True World that is lost to us.

I urge as many people as possible to sign the various online petitions and protests against the Bush/Blair nomination on the net.

Some of there are at : http://www.eskimo.com/~cwj2/actions/bushblairnobel.html
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/302184339
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1801773.stm