tim's off to greener pastures. in the UK. while i'm still in NS. WTF?!?!?!?!

pardon me but i've always found the sport of formula racing rather drab.

firstly it's repetitive to say the least. i can't imagine getting excited about cars going round and round the same route like a gazillion times. true, they are going rather fast but then it only means they're gone in like a millisecond which makes it all the more pointless. unless of course there's an accident then things get interesting but that's rather macabre innit?

furthermore, let us not even begin counting the carbon footprint such an event leaves. the senseless fuel guzzling, the frequent changing of tires, the CO2 emissions etc. it really is one of the most environmentally unfriendly sport ever.

moreover, everyone is wearing too much clothes! you have the helmet, the visor, the layers of protective clothing und so weiter... heck not even a bit of skin is exposed. of course you always have the "grid girls" who do provide the skin but they're strictly speaking not really part of the sport per se, more like the marketing so i won't cheat and include them.

and most importantly, thanks to the F1 being here in SG, i have to be on high alert in camp and am awake 3 hours earlier than is normally permissible. that does not please me.

the ONLY good thing that i grudgingly admit is the retail opportunities. discounts! it's really time to shop. once i book out 2nite that is.

okay time for me to go snooze and pretend to be on high alert. *yawns*

i'm sure everyone knows about the docu-comedy Mad About English. i chanced upon this site www.engrish.com while reading 8 days and it just proves that no only the chinese screw it up.

here are some of the funny examples i picked out there:

now we know why china has such a booming population

now you why tamil sounds so rushed. they have so much to say

haha talk about a draconian rule. the funny thing is, it's not even mistranslated!

haha holy homos??

ytd was jizhou's 19th and the pre-party was held at his work place DYMK, which incidentally stands for Does Your Mother Know. know what, i leave it up to your conscience haha. very interesting concept - it's like a cafe/bar, perfect for chillax-ing. must check it out.

haha i really have nothing to say to that

haha that's not how you do it btw

we live in a society where race and religion are immune from any attack. therefore, it is imperative to appear racially and religiously neutral, at least on the outside and in any public debate. hence it is with the line "i have nothing against foreign workers" that the infamous Serangoon Gardens residents begin their speech to their MP. having performed their social duty to the golden tenets of racial harmony, they proceed on with the rest of their polemic, promptly displaying that they actually do have nothing against foreign workers. in fact, they just have everything against them.

let us now examine some of their "valid concerns". first and foremost is perhaps safety. they have elderly and children at home alone when they go to work and are understandably concerned for their well-being. however, what they fail to understand that when they actually leave for work, most foreign workers are already AT work and when they come back from work, they are still AT work.

furthermore, such an argument would brook a presumption that these foreign workers fork out considerably large sums of money to come to Singapore in order to sneak into private residences for whatever motives they can possibly have, and then run the risk of our somewhat draconian justice system.

residents are also worried they will sneak in when they're out and have trysts with their maids. as mentioned above, that is likely to happen only on weekends and there are very simple solutions. one is to give the maid a day off. so if she must have a tryst (she is afterall human too and susceptible to the same hormones as we are), at least she doesn't have to have it at home. or they could install spy cameras and make no secret of it. the prospect of being caught and sent back shouldn't be a very tempting one.

such a spectacle only highlights one thing - their selfishness. for, if the workers are not housed in their estate (which really isn't the case as the site is on the outskirts), they have to be housed near someone else's estate. and if no one wants them near estates, they have to be dumped in the middle of nowhere, which goes beyond selfishness into inhumanity.

they act as if foreign workers are asylum seakers, that it is a favour to them if they have a place to stay at all. that is not the case, for they are legally and gainfully employed to do the jobs that we don't wanna do. surely that warrants some understanding, if not respect.

if they were to be brutally honest, they might as well just say "we don't want them near us because they are black". you don't hear them complaining of white foreigners not living near them but AMONG them. and if you wanna stereotype all foreign workers as dirty subhumans who have a propensity for crime, why don't you stereotype say the italians or the french who have a penchant for women and protest that the security of your spouse is at stake?

there's a simple answer to that. because they are white and they belong to the same class as you. therefore you can all snuggle up and be complacent with your lot in life and peer down your nose at those who actually build your middle class homes for you. nevermind if they're also human 'coz that's where the similarity ends.

so much for a gracious society. i am disgusted.

on 98.7 stripped 2day, they played Natasha Beddingfield's acoustic cover for Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars and i loved it. the light background music just brings out the beauty of the words that the original sorta masked. a good time to relive a good song.

i was however a trifle annoyed when Shan was doing the UK top 20. because Katy Perry is still #1 but we all can't hear her song. why? because it's titled "i kissed a girl" *gasp* you can't even find the MTV on youtube 'coz apparently the video "is not available in [our] country".

i agree with Shan. we can watch all these violent graphic movies but "the government just deems us not material enough to deal with lesbianism". go figure. so much for how we should move away from a nanny state before we develop a "crutch mentality".

i wonder what a "i-can't-figure-out-what-is-good-for-myself mentality" means then. i suppose the pundits think it's okay 'coz you know, "we really do not want singaporeans thinking far too much for themselves. 'coz they may actually end up voting for the opposition! especially now that we've bent over our backs to allow them some small concession vis-a-vis political rights so they can demonstrate at speaker's corners. we have to be careful"