did you know..
..that the upcoming CNY ushers in the year of the EARTH rat? and there are other rats as well, like water, wood, fire and metal. the next rat year in 2020 will be the ‘metal rat’.
ditto for the rest. i used to think the 12 animals were just that.
..also, there’s a vietnamese zodiac and the rabbit’s not in it? apparently it’s replaced with the cat. how can!
barber of fleet street.
the place: the dark surroundings of london, industrial london i think. for there was thick black smog that was abound, somewhat mismatched with the beautiful architecture that typifies london. where the rich trod on the poor, where the law was freely and unjustly effectuated by one man.
and this was where a story of love was set. love so strong it lit the streets so dark. strong enough to drive three men on paths irreversible.
there was the barber, separated from the love of his life, driven to madness and relentless vengence. his thirst for revenge grew so strong that it, alas, outgrew his love and good sense and in an unfortunate twist, this vengence took his lover even further away when she had once been a breath away.
and there was a journeyman, good-natured and well-intentioned but timid. driven by love to great heights of courage, to stand up in the face of authority and bodily pain and the odds.
and the third man, perpetuator of the law and in the upper echelons of society. who would rape and banish, who would sentence a young child to death without batting an eyelid. and yet this same man breaks out in song and tears, for this love so true in his eyes. this love clouds all good perception, and where the barber was once an enemy to him, the barber became a friend on the simple lie that his love has come back for him. and it is with this love he goes to get shaved like everyone else and dies like everyone else, coming down from a pedestal, however sickening, that he built for himself.
and for all the blood, the emphasis may not really be on the gore and violence seeing how it’s really fake, like as if there was no attempt to make the blood look real. sweeney todd’s a tale of love, i say.
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if you need another reason to watch sweeney todd, the reaction of the audience to sasha cohen is just pure magic. before he could say a word, his ridiculous costume (deja vu?) and comedy facial expression (hmm..) had the crowd roaring in laughter before he even spoke. the laughter got harder as he began, speaking in a funny accented manner (erm..) which sounds less of italian and more of kazakh (ah.) no one else could have done it nearly as brilliant. cohen is such a legend!
just an idea..
..to combat cars driving in bus lanes, slowly down buses and making bus rides a pain in the arse, here is what i propose!
now if someone could get me some contacts..
shootout: commodore x64 vs macbook air
they did not mention that the macbook air can fit in a manila envelope……
Picture taken from this site, one that i don’t find very endearing but this is funny nonetheless! plus i guess it’s only fair for some of the windows crowd to want to “respond” to the many anti-windows sites and ads……
drops of jupiter
“All praise belongs to God, Lord of all the worlds”
- from the Holy Qur’an. people WAY BACK then also believed in the extraterrestrial, and they didn’t have movies like ‘ET’ and ’signs’…
rehab
“they try to make me go to rehab, but i say no, no, err okay fine yes”
love and peace or else.
the fog of war clears, and what remains is an unnerving picture of the status quo, grim and yet beautiful all at once. it is not to say that the anxieties are gone, nor that life is back to normal.
the soldiers let down their guard a little bit. their fingers are no longer on the triggers of their old wooden rifles, and the skin around their beleaguered eye sockets no longer as depressed as their souls from squinting into those small holes in their scopes. the weapons are still close at hand, on a sling though, over their battle-weary shoulders.
when the dust settles, all that the people want, regardless of rich or poor, is for normalcy to return, for things to be the same again, and for this fragile peace to last longer than it has ever done before. the soldiers still circle, the vultures descend, but if from this landscape of despondency rises a new bud of hope then all that fighting, death and smell of gunpowder could hopefully be banished to an insignificant corner of memories sooner rather than later.
did you know..
..that mixing coffee and milo powder produces a surprisingly awful but powerfully stimulating and awakening concoction?
..and that I can debate in chinese almost as well as students from oxford?
reply to a forum
this post is meant as a reply to the football forum here. It confirms a number of things (1) i’m really free at work; (2) i love my football and (3) i’m just not very cool responding to forums like that.
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Perspective, people. All that the article is trying to say is that Chelsea have coped admirably without their core spine of the team. For some time now, we’ve had to deal with losing our midfield goal-machine Lampard, our best striker Drogba, undoubted leader (I’m not sure about ‘best defender’) and our two best keepers, of whom Cech now is nowhere near his best. How would arsenal cope without Almunia, Gallas, Fabregas and van Persie? (i mean at the same time) or Manyoo without van der Sar, Vidic, Nani and Ronaldo? All but the most optimistic Gooner or Manyoo fan would fear the worst, as I and many Chelsea fans had. That the gap is still manageable now is good testament to the team’s overall strength.
All this talk about Chelsea “buying the title” is getting pretty old and tiring honestly. Sure, having money helps, but it is ludicrous to suggest that Chelsea have been the only ones doing it. In Manyoo’s glory years they spent more than most, and so have Real Madrid, Lazio, Inter Milan etc. It boils down to the fact that Chelsea being Chelsea will always be ripped off and made to pay that much more for a player and thus the numbers aren’t the be all and end all of it all.
Manyoo have had an illustrious past, and thus they can “make their own money”. That’s well and good and I acknowledge that, though it just reeks of jealousy from them seeing they see their party of one or two potentially gatecrashed. It irks me to no end when people say Chelsea have no history just because it hasn’t been as successful and trophy-laden. It just happens that Chelsea haven’t been as commercially and sportingly successful, thus we could not have generated as much money as Manyoo could. Why is it wrong then when we have a shady, rich and now still innocent (until proven guilty) benefactor who spends more than the rest to catch-up to get us to the same level as you guys? If you guys are so big and mighty as you think yourselves to be then accept the challenge gracefully. I still don’t think the money spent brings us to such a level whereby we’re so high and away from the rest. Manyoo did win last season’s title didn’t they? It just proves again money alone can’t buy the league even if it helps. (see Inter Milan of past 10 years also)
As a side point, leave that history point alone, it’s useless to the argument totally. And it gets even worse when Gooners try to lecture us on history. 3 different names (Woolwich arsenal anyone?), 3 different stadiums and bribing officials to stay in the division. Get off that moral pedestal, please.
Finally it’s all just economics. Football nowadays is a business, and rich tycoons buy and sell clubs as they see fit. Abramovich bought Chelsea when we qualified for the Champions League for the first time in many years. If we hadn’t, would he have considered Chelsea a viable investment and done it? It’s not an unknown fact too that Abramovich had considered other clubs too so it could easily have not been us. But whatever it is since it has, most Chelsea fans just want to enjoy the ride and taste the success as it comes, success that we’ve rarely ever had in our history. We were a division one team not too long ago, and we’re just the outsider who happened to make it into the big time fast. Spending is and has always been part of the game, deal with it people. I dare anyone to claim that into stars, they would have had to spend way more too to even be close to where they are nowtheir team can win things without spending. If Manyoo were the upstarts challenging the traditional power-holders, they would have had to spend a lot more. If Arsenal didn’t have Wenger who seems so able to pluck unknowns (respect where its due) from nowhere and turn them into superstars, they would have had to spend way more too to even be close to where they are now.
To sum it up in the words of Joe Cole, I’ve never seen a dollar/pound/rouble note scoring a goal. Money helps, but they don’t buy titles. I have to be right here, or we’d see Chelsea will win the league every year (won’t happen, nice as it is) or QPR awarded the EPL right now since they’re richer. The “crime” that Chelsea is guilty of is spending more in a shorter period playing catch-up, upsetting the balance of power and leaving those up top bitter that their comfy little hegemony is being disturbed. I’ve tried to be graceful and objective and I hope the rest can give a bit more of the same. Thank you.
milk and cookies
drinking milk before running is not good cause it makes you feel heavy as lead and causes the rain to come.
what a mess.
something’s in the air..
hello there sexy…
below: big brother macbook pro
above: the macbook air
-cringes
“I would point to the fact that that Dr. (Martin Luther) King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done. That dream became a reality, the power of that dream became real in people’s lives because we had a president who said we are going to do it, and actually got it accomplished.”
- H.R. Clinton, implying that the white guy had to do the work that the black dude could only talk about. somehow her strategy of playing the race card and now trying to undermine dr. king’s legacy does not seem quite sound to me…
bedshaped
at times the feeling is just one of abject loss. they tell you that love is gonna be enough, but what do they know? i mean, they’re the ones comfortably on the outside, looking in through what is like forbidding panels of glass. glass so gleaming and squeaky-clean you’d think you would know exactly what it’s like being inside. you know, there are buildings that make you feel like that, but no it is almost always never true. at times i make myself go outside, you know, try to be adult and rational and all, and i think “hey this is not the worst thing in the world; there is far worse that can happen to me; i will survive” and stuff. but what do i know? this is me talking on the outside, and when the time comes i’ll have to go back in. so when i’m inside and i see the face, when i hear the voice and when i feel the kiss it feels as if everything is right, and it’s where i should be. right inside. this is how it feels. and at times nobody knows the pain, the pang in the chest when i think of the times that passed by like fine sand in some indeterminate hands. not even i. and i’m trying to hold on, i’m trying to be the determinate hand.
i just don’t know if it’s gonna be enough. but what do i know?
twist in the tale
like any half-decent soap opera, the u.s. elections took a twist today when clinton clinched a shock victory in new hampshire. and for sure, the drama still has a long way to run.
at the risk of sounding uncool, i declare that this elections is entertaining me more than any of those pop-culture serials out there!
and at the risk of sounding a bit silly, i am behind obama even though i’m not really sure of what he’s promising, besides “change” and “hope”. i love his style and searing rhetoric though, and i would believe that a certain martin luther king would be very proud of him.
i guess sometimes i’m just not that cool.
the phantom of manhattan..
(by frederick forsyth) ..is really a sequel to phantom of the opera!
in fact in early last year composer-extraordinaire andrew llyod webber had announced that he was working on the musical adaptation of the phantom of manhattan.
(somehow to me “phantom of manhattan” just doesn’t have the same ring to it as the original)
but if the daily mail (newspaper) is to be believed, and i am not commenting on its credibility in case i get sued in case anyone at all reads this, a somewhat strange mishap has put the production of the new musical on hold. seems like lloyd webber’s cat (a very rare turkish breed) had one day climbed onto his really really expensive digital piano and deleted the entire score! attempts to recover it have been in vain.
i remember the first phantom of the opera play i went to. it wasn’t that long ago really. but the romance, grandoise and excitement still remains lurid till this day, especially when the soundtrack’s playing on my ipod. every note resonates, stirs imagination; its corresponding images i gathered from my far-away seat at the esplanade display themselves like a long filmstrip of still photographs, except with more life, more light and more love.
quote-unquote
“It riles me when people talk about Chelsea buying the league. I’ve never seen a pound note scoring a goal.”
-Chelsea hero Joe Cole
an anniversary
two years ago, to this day, i lost my life. two years on, i have my life back. cheers.
say what?
“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”
- senator joe biden, democratic presidential hopeful, on front-runner barack obama. biden has since quit the race. (i wonder why..)
