cheers!

sometimes when i'm on my 3-6k run (depending on day/mood) along the dirt path to rummelsburg, i get a whiff of some real sour intenzio sewage-like smell.

i can't exactly put my finger on where the smell came. let's see, it could be waste treatment, body odour, wild boar manure... the list goes on.

but this more-than-pungent odour reminded me of army days in tekong, where we used to get up and run at an ungodly 6:15am in the morning. somewhere around bmtc school 1 basketball courts along the ippt route by the channel of where the painful penguins ply, there was always this awful smell.

i used to suspect the sergeants did this on purpose such that you'd have the motivation to run faster. now that i smell it again here in germany, i have to doubt my previous theory.

some smart alec will say it's "german gas". well no, because i smelt it in singapore.

nonetheless, until someone enlightens me, this will remain one of life's mysteries. what is NOT a mystery however, is how dreadfully obsolete army cheers are.

all that running and that familiar tekong smell, led to another sensory assault when the army cheers from years ago started to flood into my mind.

there was this one about not having time to do xxx, but there's always time to do yyy. that song defies all logic i could swear.

soldiers have got to be the most horny people on earth, yet one of the lines go "got no time to meet my girl, but got time to clean rifle".

uwotm8? that has to be the most ridiculous shit i've ever heard. sure, you could be gay, that's a possibility - but you wouldn't then be meeting "your girl"? and of all the things you LIKE to do in the army, i'm pretty damn sure cleaning a rifle is not one of them.

nice things of army include: booking out, canteen breaks, and for those who like a little bit of a challenge, maybe completing SOC. heck, i'd even accept field camp.

cleaning the rifle is one of the most MUNDANE and POINTLESS endeavour, for the next day when you draw arms to go out and fire more blanks, the whole cycle restarts.

please, whoever wrote the lyrics to this song.

there was another one i remembered from OCS Sierra Wing. despite the supposed improvement in one's ability to think when in occifer school, the words to this are just plain laughable.

"we marched last night ah, we marched the night before, now we march like we never march before, ah!"

clearly the writer for this thought about this like he never thought before. god i am so ashamed for you.

firstly, what is the fucking point of this whole marching story? i don't remember the rest of the cheer well, but i vaguely recall it to be along the lines on how we enjoy marching. still doesn't justify the first line.

secondly, it's not well defined on what it means to have never marched before. on the first day i came to BMT, i had no marching experience. so i marched with my left hand and left leg at the same time. is that what you meant, songwriter?

gee i felt like i just insulted all songwriters. anyway this is a rather obscure cheer, other than that time in OCS where some joker brought it up, i've hardly heard it after. we can talk about more mainstream stupidity.

purple light in the valley. apparently where we all want to be.

have never trained in any valley in singapore - the only "valley" i know being river valley. and then there's the purple light - which is a reference to...? none of the colour disks i know make a purple light with the torch.

i paused for a few seconds after the previous paragraph, but no i still do not get where the purple light is coming from. is it to make up the required number of syllables? it could have well been "yellow light", that's closer to torch colour reality.

or "lime green light" from the luminous sticks. heck, any kind of two-syllabic light is more realistic than a "purple light" i've NEVER seen in my army days.

light colour aside, you might also notice that there is a logical flaw in the last line, which goes..

"with my rifle and my buddy and ME"

okay. then who were you referring to in the rest of the song? i assumed that doing IPPT and SOC was all you.

basically, if the ippt/soc bit of purple light were to be summarised into one line, it would read something like "soc, ippt, pt is all sibei jialat but i like doing it with my rifle and my buddy and me."

you like doing it with you, eh.

hahahaha i could go on forever but my brain has run out of RAM. if you have more army songs/cheers please send them to me so i can dissect its stupidity.

cheers. no pun intended.

fish sauce

Although I've never mixed you in
As often as I should
You have served me so damn well
As I knew you would

Bought you at the Asian mart
Ten million years ago
You still possess the good old taste
Of ajinomoto

Lettuce, carrots or pak choi
It matters not to me
You can turn any dish of mine
From a one to a three

Hordes of Asians swear by you
A taste not to be missed
If sauces were all humans then
You'd be Chuck Norris

flatten the curve

today i want to talk about something very serious.

as you can see from the title, it's about flattening the curve. not sure if you have any opinions on how the CB has been going on; but if you ask me it's definitely not working.

the f**king CB (not literally), if anything, is making the curve much worse than before.

i've found a picture on the internet to describe what i'm talking about.

..

..

..

..

..

this is what my chopping board looks like. messed up.

i swear, i just went to sleep one night and the next day, the chopping board had a curvature that would make beckham proud.

as google can answer so many things now, i was ensured that i'd find out the reason for this unwarranted curvery. from my understanding, apparently it has to do with uneven moisture content on different sides of the board which causes expansion and contraction of the wood through absorption of water.

i shall have to be very careful the next time i go swimming and lay on the beach to suntan. for all you know that could cause some serious back curvature.

thankfully, there seems to be two simple solutions to flatten the curve.

the first is to leave it alone. when the damp side's moisture content lowers, the board moves back to its original shape.

the second is to use a hot iron or some heavy stuff to press down upon the board. the pressure eventually will flatten the board.

unfortunately, i only have one f**ked up chopping board, so i couldn't test to see which method works better.

otherwise, the humble little wooden chopping board could be an indicator on how to handle flattening other curves. after all, this is science, how can it be wrong?

plurali

today there was some good chit going on in the waterpolo aka haters chat i'd be remiss not to document this.

never doubt the flow of a conversation when it somehow lands on (or up) the final processor of the digestive system: namely, the anus.

ck brought it up today. i forgot how, but that's irrelevant.

for another unknown reason he had to talk about its plural and we arrived at the debate if it should be anuses or ani.

wtf? who even thinks about such things?

one might attribute it on the lockdown; but i could have as easily imagined this conversation in non-covid times.

miao checked it and surprise, surprise: both forms are acceptable.

well i didn't find that acceptable. i thought something was really wrong with the english language.

for starters, this "-us" to "-i" plural endings are not applied consistently across the language. sure we know english is a pretty messed up language with a million exceptions, but if more than one syllabus is syllabi and more than one anus is ani then surely more than one bus is bi?

okay fine so perhaps it's the exceptions that make the language beautiful.

now on to my main gripe.

don't know if you've read bookworm club books when you were young. they were popular in singapore back in the 80s-90s. it was a children's series, documenting the (mis)adventures of a bunch of seven kids in school.

the singaporean version of enid blyton's secret seven or famous five, if you will.

in typical singaporean fashion they had to make sure each race and gender was represented. so there was smarty, louie, kokku, simone, sam seng (how the fuck am i remembering all these omg), porky and last but not least..

FAT ANI.

did i ruin your childhood? you're welcome.

homework

in a rare moment of inspiration that occurs about as frequently as three-digit covid cases increases in singapore (i.e. used to be more common in the past, now not quite), i decided to maximise my stay-home experience by working my python skillz.

you can check it out the last exercise i completed here:

they sure know how to motivate their students

for the uninitiated into the world of computing, you might be a little fazed by all the colours and 'geeky' commands. however upon looking closely, practically ANYONE with a basic understanding of logic could get this. as it turns out, both "patriots" and "rams" were accepted answers. yes - i had to find out if there was a trick to this, but no, there isn't.

now am i wrong to say that as an adult, our homework is getting so much easier? (btw this is a python intermediate course, don't mess.)

i'd never have imagined anything as easy as this during the good old asknlearn days of iLearning at ri. obviously while now i look back with fondness of the "good ol days", i am sure back then i wasn't all that happy doing iLearning even alt-tabbing to neopets and runescape.

homework was hard. and i bet it still is for the ri boys today.

then i think i get the answer. it's hard until you pay money for it.

one might argue that schoolgoing children also pay school fees, but that is nothing compared to the course fees of an external course run by a company. and i guess, nobody likes to pay good money to be frustrated by difficult exercises and then feel like shit.

unfortunately, i'm paying good money for le python course and feeling like i just had my intelligence insulted... therefore feeling like shit.

but then, this course was paid for by my university. so i should feel better about that.

but then again, i paid for my course at university. so i am by extension, indirectly contributing to the cause that makes me feel like shit.

and in a very roundabout way, while we can talk about how spending money can make our lives better; inevitably it may still backfire like it did on me.

i decided to close the exercise and see what else was on offer for me.

 

apparently there's a lot of (quasi-free) stuff here

i can't comment on anything much except for the "practise while you're commuting" bit. it was then i resolved to be 100% committed to doing my python exercises on the go on every single commute i make during lockdown. that will be my lockdown goal and i expect to have infinite success at it.

(p.s. if you didn't get it 0/0 = infinity)

so thinking about how i've been only spending money to my own disapproval, it was inevitable that i had to make amends.

 

4 euro apple crumble

despite this being an overpriced apple crumble and may quite literally leave a sour taste in the mouth, at the very least i know it won't insult my intelligence.  

talk lock summit

who'd have known it was going to end up like this?

no i'm not talking about the coronavirus - i'm talking about my blogger account.

after spending the good part of the last decade in cold storage, it was frozen over and died a death so quiet that it might as well have not existed at all.

(un)fortunately, the internet never forgets. some 15 years after the talk cock summit was established, i return after a 7-game losing streak on dota amidst a 7-week lockdown. i'm just glad that unlike dota, at least there are no people commenting on what i'm supposed to do here lol.

anyhow, back to the blogger account. my failure to retrieve it not only adds to my recent list of failures (more on that another time), but it offered some insights into my previous life.

1. I USED YAHOO. the shame, the shame. blogger no longer allows you to log in using the old username, not that i remember it anyway. i ended up using a password recall and the service reminds me politely that an email was sent to ...@yahoo.fr. which then reminded me,

2. I STUDIED FRENCH. mon dieu. maintenant j'ai besoin de naviguer ce système tout en français. taking a deep breath, i dived deep into the recesses of my memory to find the damned yahoo.fr address i had been using, and returned with this: yj_ri4j@yahoo.fr.

i can already sense some judgment. like HAHAHAHA WTF USES THEIR SECONDARY SCHOOL CLASS AS EMAIL? (there's more coming, hold your popcorn.)

 

to win, select all pictures with cars!

 

now this is stupid. look at the top right hand corner. that's more of a camion than a car. do i select it or not? i did not in the end and to my great dismay, being overly technical with terminologies meant that i had to assess some other images to prove that i am not a bot.

come on yahoo. if i were a bot i'd be using google.

3. i have strong school/class identity. the painful step of identifying myself as human then led to another dance to ensure that i am the correct human.

flashback: from secondary to primary school

the best part is: after trawling through a convoluted web of old usernames and passwords, i was still denied access to talk cock summit. it was only through YL that i found out that it wasn't the correct email at all.

that brings me to the final two observations.

4. young crazy me had a gazillion email accounts. and for whatever reason that i created them back then, i definitely see no reason now. conclusion: some innocuous random shit you do in the past can and will come back to haunt you, innocuously and randomly.

not wanting to drag on the pain of trying to uncover weird email addresses or passwords, i capitulated and asked YL to send an invitation to my current gmail account. and here i am now, back to good old BLOGGER in 2020. kind of goes to show that...

5. in times of trouble, one reverts to the basics. i return to my most basic instinct, talking cock.