Praised by the Wise

"Whoever attentively reads a small number of the countless speeches of Buddha is soon aware of harmony in them, a quietude of soul, a smiling transcendence, a totally unshakeable firmness, but also invariable kindness, endless patience.

The intellectual content of Buddha's teaching is only half his work, the other half is his life, his life as lived, as labour accomplished and action carried out. A spiritual self training of the highest order was accomplished and is taught here, a training about which unthinking people who talk about 'quietism' and 'Hindu dreaminess' and the like in connection with Buddha have no conception; they deny him the cardinal Western virtue of activity. Instead Buddha accomplished a training for himself and his pupils, exercised a discipline, set up a goal, and produced results before which even the genuine heroes of European action can only feel awe."

Herman Hesse, German writer and Nobel laureate

a food entry oh gosh

this is not a food blog and im not a food blogger. but i feel i need to do justice to a place i just patronised.

it was my mum's birthday dinner and i suggested Prince Coffee House, or 太子咖啡座, an old-school fusion joint i saw on tv that somehow decided to freeze itself in the 70s, when it first opened at Shaw Towers.

yes. neatly arranged tables with cushion chairs from the 70s. red-white checkered placemats. a full set of cutlery regardless of what you're eating, probably for convenience' sake. an antique cash register.

from the 70s.

pardon me, cos you see, the place isnt just retro. or, it isnt retro for the sake of retro. it really is the 70s (forgivable too if labelled 80s). the props and the atmosphere bring you back to your parents' younger days, when they were having all the fun.

the place is also adorned full, due to their Shaw connection, with pictures of the owners in their younger days serving superstars of yesteryear 林青霞, 秦汉, 刘文正 and 林凤娇.

Prince Coffee House was featured as a 老字号 on a food program. dont mess with them when it comes to that title. yes we've all heard of stalls that date back half a century. but this place kept everything a carbon copy of Day One. the founders still personally serve customers, albeit a little more wrinkled. the man of the house insists on preparing daily their signature stewed oxtail. the menu and the presentation remain exactly the same.

when my brother sat down, he developed a hunch - this turned out to be his old haunt at Coronation Plaza when he was schooling at NJC (writer's note: many of you will remember it if you hung around Bukit Timah much some years back. Prince is now tucked away amidst the shisha outlets at Arab Street, much nearer to their old iconic location). he immediately struck up a conversation with the extremely pleasant boss, recalling how when he and his mates celebrated birthdays there, the towkay-neo would get them to pick 4-d numbers.

but my point is, this is nothing. the tv show featured generations of families who grew up and grew old eating here.

by this point, i was already consumed by the history and magic of the place.

the moment we sat down, the boss, a man well past 70, quietly and gently went around placing brochure-like cardboard menus (old-school!) in front of each of us. this was the longtime owner, serving brats like me and my sis. i was truly humbled.

with the ice broken the mood livened up, helped by the fact my mum likes to talk to new people. strangely, even as the owners were being so hospitable, my gut tells me "no, im sure they're nice to everyone."

dinner hadn't started and im already won over. good game.

but it's only just beginning, trust me. somehow guessing we're damn hungry (it was 830pm) and cos we'd only just ordered, the boss served complimentary garlic bread.

now where did that come from. this isnt some upmarket restaurant, it's a coffeehouse, for goodness' sake.

and this kicked off my parents' falling in love with the place. more than just the decor, this appetiser and all the food that followed are, according to them (and the helpful tv hosts), a kickback to the origins of "Western food" in Singapore - meat drenched in some oriental sauce, paired with lightly boiled greens, for example.

we noticed it's branded a Hainanese-Western fusion coffeehouse. huh? my mum duly explained the Hainanese interacted a lot with the British during colonial times. so maybe, what we know today as "Western food" may have Hainanese influences, just like Hainanese food could be westernised.

i ordered the highly-rated beef horfun and stewed oxtail. the latter is superb, period. the former, ordinary as it looked, had horfun so perfectly cooked prominent food blog ieatishootipost called it "gem of a find" and "finally managed to find what i was looking for". and the beef, oh man. how something so inconspicuous on the plate is such a star confounds me. hear this: apparently they fly in US beef for their horfun.

still, i should mention the beef horfun stood out probably for flipping expectations - it looked that dull. but put beside the best, like the one in Geylang, it probably has to concede.

my sis had tried the chicken cutlet at CP, so we got that too. this easily walloped the Hainanese pork chop in my opinion. mad succulent and flavorful, while the chops are typically drenched in ketchup, not the kind i like considering ive tried many good Hainanese pork chops.

the kailan was fine, but their 铁板豆腐 is the messiest 铁板豆腐 ive seen. in a completely positive way. it's got tofu, egg, prawns, fish slices, different kinds of mushroom, onion, celery, carrot, capsicum, black fungus, coriander... (i only remember these). it was like a pot of potluck.

thoroughly satisfying.

oh have i mentioned cos my brother finished his barley so quick, the nice owner replaced his glass with iced water, again quietly.

and, wait for it. we were done and dusted, when he popped up again with complimentary ice cream for each of us! not just was it super (it's coconut i think), according to my folks it's also similar to old times at coffeehouses!

that's it, free desserts done, pay up and leave.

wrong.

as if in a contest to outdo himself, the boss had prepared at the door a bag of yam cake, another signature, for us.

i wanna conclude this post, but im trying to gather myself, why am i writing it? i realised i might not be objective enough. but i also conclude im writing a tribute piece after a great dining experience, an experience the sum of all that happened at Prince, be it the food or being treated like, yes, family.

Prince Coffee House, the epitome... no, the crowning glory of early-Singapore Western fare.

p.s. readers are warned that some prices are steep. stewed oxtail for example is $20 and pork chop is $12. our bill came up to $90 for 5pax.

p.p.s then again our $80 meal last week was crap.
p.p.p.s. we got home to realise via the receipt they didnt charge us for our six big portions of rice.

Michael Moore vs Marilyn Manson

Filmmaker Michael Moore talks to shock rocker Marilyn Manson regarding the Columbine shooting, after groups and activists accused his music of motivating violence.

Manson: "When I was a kid growing up, music was the escape. That's the only thing that had no judgments. You know, you put on a record, and it's not going to yell at you for dressing the way you do. It's going to make you feel better about it.

I definitely can see why they would pick me. Because I think it's easy to throw my face on the TV, because in the end, I'm a poster boy for fear. Because I represent what everyone is afraid of, because I say and do whatever I want.

The two by-products of that whole tragedy were, violence in entertainment, and gun control. And how perfect that those were the two things that we were going to talk about with the upcoming election. Then we forgot about Monica Lewinsky and we forgot the President was shooting bombs overseas, yet I'm a bad guy because I sing some rock-and-roll songs, and who's a bigger influence, the President or Marilyn Manson? I'd like to think me, but I'm going to go with the President."

Moore: "Do you know that on the day of the Columbine massacre, the US dropped more bombs on Kosovo than any other day?"

Manson: "I do know that, and I think that's really ironic, that nobody said 'maybe the President had an influence on this violent behavior'. Because that's not the way the media wants to take it and spin it, and turn it into fear. You're watching television, you're watching the news, you're being pumped full of fear, there are floods, there's AIDS, there's murder, cut to commercial, buy the Acura, buy the Colgate, if you have bad breath they're not going to talk to you, if you have pimples, the girl's not going to fuck you. It's a campaign of fear and consumption. The whole idea to keep everyone afraid, and they'll consume."

Moore: "If you were to talk directly to the [shooters], what would you say to them?"

Manson: "I wouldn't say a single word to them. I would listen to what they have to say, and that's what no one did."

As seen in 2002's Bowling for Columbine.

Lies About the Human Body You Learned in Kindergarten

source: Cracked.com

You Only Have Five Senses

Sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing. Them there's your five senses. Since kindergarten, you've probably been told that anyone who thinks she has a sixth sense is either a television psychic or M. Night Shyamalan. This original classification is widely attributed to Aristotle, so if you try to argue that there are more than five, you're basically arguing with the guy who invented being smart.

The Truth

Scientists still aren't quite sure of exactly how many senses you have, or what even constitutes a sense, but you'd be hard-pressed to find one who believes you have five. Depending on how they count them, they usually wind up with something like 14 to 20. The five you learned about in school were just the five most evident senses, aka the boring ones you could have figured out for your own damn self. The rest are far more interesting.

The Harvard School of Medicine lists six extra ones that are pretty hard to argue against. Close your eyes, then touch your nose with your index finger. How did you know which one was your index finger without looking at it? How did you know where your nose was? Did you smell your finger to your nose? Did your sense of touch somehow tell you what the air molecules you encounter along the way to your nose feel like? Nah, that's proprioception, your body's awareness of where it is in relation to itself.

Maybe the most interesting one they left out is your sense of timing, which might seem like it's only a sense in the way that fashion is a sense. But leading neurologists like David Eagleman think it's the most important of all the senses, since it's the thread that ties the rest of them together. An apple is just a series of different sensations without your sense of time telling you they're all happening at the same moment. Still not convinced? Try staring at a white wall in a totally silent room. Your sense of time tells you how much of your life has been wasted because you didn't take us at our word.

It's also worth noting that this sense your kindergarten teacher failed to mention can operate like a freaking superpower. For instance, if you're walking in the woods and a bear growls in the bushes behind you and to your left, the bear's growl hits your left ear a millionth of a second before it hits your right. Your sense of time is able to pick up on that infinitesimal difference and allows you to perfectly triangulate the bear's location behind you.

If you were only relying on your sense of hearing, you would only know that the bear is somewhere on the left side of your body. Your ears don't swivel around like a dog's, so you would have to turn and use your eyes to pinpoint the bear. A blur of brown and black fur would be the last sight you ever saw.

The Tongue Map

One of the first things many of us learned in science class was that the tongue is organized like a factory floor plan, with each region assigned responsibility for its own highly specialized tasks:

 

If you spent your childhood shotgunning Pixy Stix like the rest of us, you may have noticed that you could taste sugar even when it was bypassing the tip of your tongue at 70 mph. You were left to conclude that your teachers were liars or that there was something hideously wrong with you, depending on whether you were raised Catholic.

The Truth

Your teachers were probably just being fed the same line of bullshit that's been passed from biology class to biology class for decades, and it's totally false. As with the myth that spinach is rich in iron, this one started with a mistranslation of a century-old German study (maybe stop relying on those, science). In 1901, German scientist D.P. Hanig conducted a taste test and found that some volunteers experienced certain flavors more intensely in certain regions of the tongue. Forty years later, a Harvard academic appropriately named Dr. Boring mistranslated the results of the German survey, mistaking a vague tendency among a bunch of Germans (who were probably taste-testing four different varieties of sauerkraut) for the precision workflow chart you see in the tongue map.

Researchers have known for years that all areas in the tongue are about equally good at detecting different flavors. It's not an evenly distributed democracy of taste buds, but every tongue has different patterns of strength and weakness. Your tongue map is like your mouth's fingerprint, if the pattern on your fingerprint determines whether or not you like Brussels sprouts. Each of our "tongue maps" will detect different tastes, sometimes from the same meal. Also, far from being relegated to specific locations on the tongue, your taste buds go all the way down your throat into your digestive system. When you've eaten some bad food, the ones in your stomach warn your gag reflex that if it doesn't evacuate the building, the shit's about to hit the fan (and everything else within three square blocks).

The taste map has hung around 30 years after it was officially debunked even though it's less interesting than the reality because teachers need cool-looking color-coded maps to fill out science books, and fat-cat wineglass makers like to pretend you need a golf bag's worth of specialized wineglasses to direct different types of wine to the best possible place on the tongue.

"Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion."

Scott Adams, renowned satirist

"I wondered what it would be like to be your girlfriend."

life is like a dishwasher

Wei Ling: I think life is like a dishwasher.

Me: Explain.

Wei Ling: Lol. Dont know. A feeling.

Me: You have an explanation within you. Why would you not want to say it?

Wei Ling: No lah just something I felt when I was working in stewarding. When I faced the dishwasher everyday.

Me: Let me take a stab in the dark. Crap kept being thrown at Life, but Life churns out something better at the end of it.

Wei Ling: Wah.

(9 minutes later)

Wei Ling: I think life is like a dishwasher because sometimes the dishes get stuck. But we still have to move on.

Me: But you have to repair it, no matter what.

Wei Ling: Ya lah. Move on lor.

Praised by the Wise

"I have never been religious but if I were i'd be a Buddhist. Over the years I have come to know the Sherpas and I see that their religion has made them kindly, gentle, content and cheerful. Buddhism seems to have a wonderful ability to do that to people."

Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to reach the summit of Mount Everest

"You'll never be for sale."

Steve Jobs is no more

Jobs to John Sculley, former President of Pepsi who moved to Apple, then later ousted Jobs:

Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children, or do you want a chance to change the world?

later, an anonymous software developer to Jobs, after Apple dropped Computers from their corporate name to become Apple Inc:

Steve, do you want to sell colored plastic all your life or do you want to change the world?

alcohol and metaphor

In a 2009 interview, Plain Dealer music critic John Soeder asked Don Henley this about his Hotel California lyrics:

You sing: "So I called up the captain / 'Please bring me my wine' / He said, 'We haven't had that spirit here since 1969.'" I realize I'm probably not the first to bring this to your attention, but wine isn't a spirit. Wine is fermented; spirits are distilled. Do you regret that lyric?

Henley responded:

Thanks for the tutorial and, no, you're not the first to bring this to my attention—and you're not the first to completely misinterpret the lyric and miss the metaphor. Believe me, I've consumed enough alcoholic beverages in my time to know how they are made and what the proper nomenclature is. But that line in the song has little or nothing to do with alcoholic beverages. It's a sociopolitical statement. My only regret would be having to explain it in detail to you, which would defeat the purpose of using literary devices in songwriting and lower the discussion to some silly and irrelevant argument about chemical processes.

from the song Le Kua Simi, by mr brown:

You must wait long long time because patience is a virgin.

i like motion pictures

"The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug."

The Hurt Locker "is not about explosions, but about hoping that none will happen. That sense of hope is crucial. When we merely want to see stuff blown up real good in a movie, that means the movie contains no one we give a damn about," said acclaimed film critic Roger Ebert.

director Kathryn Bigelow did what the great Alfred Hitchcock taught in his 1972's Frenzy. she sets up a deadly explosion at the opening of the movie, and keeps us fearing another. it's about imagination, what Ebert said about "The imagination of the audience is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of any director of suspense. We see what will happen when a bomb explodes. Then we spend the movie fearing it will happen again."

Ebert further added, "Bigelow uses no phony suspense-generating mechanisms in this film. It is about personalities in terrible danger. The suspense is real, and it is earned." Hitchcock had said that when there’s a bomb under a table, and it explodes, that’s action. When we know the bomb is there, and the people at the table play cards, and it doesn’t explode, that’s suspense. The Hurt Locker perfected that.

the story is so spellbinding because of the characters, as soldiers and as men, their job, and its risks. Sgt James' job is "all the more remarkable because in certain scenes, it seems fairly certain that the bomb maker is standing in full view — on a balcony or in a window overlooking the street, and is as curious about his bomb as James is. Two professionals, working against each other."

there are no elaborate speeches in the film. it's not cluttered with dramatic but useless facts. it's probably one of the shortest scripts. but when it's over, we are pretty clear of what just hit us, and overwhelmed by what a blockbuster might not be able to achieve.

reasons for addiction:

1. bombs need to be defused

2. nobody does it better than Sgt James and he knows it

3. he needs the adrenaline to make him forget about his life outside service

he keeps a box of souvenirs from his missions. a box full of things that "almost killed me".

the subplot of the DVD-peddling Iraqi boy nicknamed Beckham reiterates that this is no ordinary war-bashing film. Sgt James is no superhero. he's just a bomb expert. as he attempts to make sense of the boy and an espionage plan, like many of us make sense of war, he fails. there is none. "outside his narrow assignment, he's useless."

The Hurt Locker received no assistance from the US Army to shoot a film about their own. Transformers, on the other hand, was taxpayer-bankrolled and had the backing of the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.

the screenwriter, Mark Boal, said, "I literally had a conversation with a guy who was telling me how realistically that movie is in its depiction of the military. I said to this senior military guy, 'What part of fighting aliens is realistic?' He replied, with a straight face, 'If we were going to fight aliens that's how we would do it'."

Ebert participated sarcastically, "Yes, that's how the Army would fight aliens, by playing a supporting role to a college kid, his girlfriend, his best buddy and his parents, who turn up in Egypt and save the day. And depending on the Egyptian military not noticing U.S. Army fighting with robots who are ripping apart the Great Pyramid."

combustion

you: me and him, no spark.

me: then we got spark?

you: i think we got fireworks.

A news story should be like mini skirt on a pretty woman - long enough to cover the subject but short enough to be interesting.

Fabian Ng Yong Kiat, former Editor-in-Chief of Nanyang Chronicle, IOC Young Reporter, former intern at Reuters and Bloomberg, and one of my CS buddies. LOL.