I have been duly humbled. I shall shut up for once.

If any of you had any doubt that America is the Land of the Lazy, lay aside your doubts no more, for I bring you proof that there is no greater languid society in the world than the ol' US of A.

I mean no offense to all Americans out there, but you gotta admit this is truth, and further denial is perhaps, well, there is not much point of denying anyway.

On television, there is an advertistment for a jar opener. A jar opener?? What the hell? A mechanised machine to open a jar? While hands are not good enough, nor strength or intelligence, a machine is required to open a jar? C'mon I thought everyone knew, put the lid under hot water and it pops open more easily. Why? Why a machine? I think this is the epitome of redundancy. And the advertistment touts, "Hey buy one for your loved ones!"

I have so no idea what else is coming next. It's completely dumb. Sure, driving down the street to post a letter is dumb, or drying a poodle in the microwave is dumb, or suing McDonalds for obesity is dumb. But to devise a tool to open jars? I am at a loss how to describe this.

Note: Yeah, I know that this might be useful for sufferers of Alzheimers and really old feeble people. But c'mon, seriously, do they really open jars all the time?

I guess this is kinda bad, but what I really want for Christmas is an entire set of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Yup. An encyclopedia set.

Damn, I'm such a geek.

This the season,
For hibernation,
Fa la la la la, la la la la.

Thanksgiving has passed, but the Thanksgiving weekend is still here. Someone told me that Thanksgiving is all about eating all you can, 100,000 calorie meals, so that you won't eat on Friday, Saturday and Sunday so that you can fit back into your pants. There is some truth to that. Now that I have somewhat fattened up for the winter, it's time to hibernate.

*burp*

Looking back on a certain post, dated March 29 2003, I re-read it with much amusement and joy. There is a wry smile on my face as I wonder what was my initial reaction, trying to imagine the outright shock and disbelief that is clearly seen from the dropped jaw of a sceptic.

I don't need to imagine far again. Somehow, I just realized some thing again when I was in the shower, playing back the memories of the day. I must complain that this is the fault of a hectic registration process. Anyway, thing is, my younger sister just told me that my elder sister's boyfriend sort of proposed to her.

I should not be publicising such news as of yet as superstition probably says I shouldn't. But I'm not the superstitious sort. And I have faith in them.

But I'm still shocked.

What do I mean, 'sort of'? Well, sort of, you know, not exactly, not indirectly either. He sort of asked her to marry him after three years. He asked her over the phone. Now before I blast him for the unromantic gesture and the crappy way of proposing and the lack of a ring and other small nuances, I remain somewhat unaffected by the whole thing until just now when the full shock has registered approximately 12 hours later.

What are the implications of this? Firstly, this event is of huge monetary benefit to me, considering that I would enjoy certain perks which my sister's boyfriend would have to pay for, including an airfare to wherever the wedding is. And yes, a flight from New York to Malaysia isn't exactly the cheapest of all things. For starters. Then there would be a lot of other things, including and especially feasting.

But the real true and most significant implications are those that sneak up from behind when you're not looking and boink you over the head twice over for good measure. The problem with weddings is that when someone close to me, say my sister who is two years older than me, gets married, all the evil, old crones on my father's side of the family and my mother's side of the family looks at me and my state of singlehood and starts getting ideas. They look at me closely with their cronish eyes and say, "You're next!"

And I squirm and twitch and realise that the inevitable is upon me. People don't grow old by days, instead they grow old by years, or even worse, decades. One day you are 20, and the next, your sister is getting married, you're old and everyone is harassing you to start a family. But fact of the matter is, you're old. Someday, I'll have my revenge, at a funeral home, when I see all those old crones, then I'll poke them and say, "You're next!"

First and foremost, I must extend an apology to God, for taking the trouble to stand up for Ivan. I know he must be busy up there in heaven on his computer trying to reply e-mails requesting miracle, and he must have got Ivan's call for help and from there left a note on my chatterbox telling me that I should not use Ivan's name in vain. I duly pointed out that Ivan is an anagram of vain. So however you use it, you must use the letters I-V-A-N in the word vain, so technically everyone, even God uses Ivan in vain. Sorry God dude! You just done it again.

Anyway, yeah, with my Ivan-bashing out of the way, I'd now get down to type. Today I went to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. It was closed for quite a while and today was the grand reopening so admission was free. Wonderful right? Except that the line was all down 6th Avenue, then up again, then down again, so it took me, and a bunch of dudes from my floor, about one hour or so to get to the main entrance of the museum. Did I mention that I didn't have breakfast and lunch, and it was 4pm in the afternoon and the weather was slightly drizzling?

That was an enjoyable start. Fortunately the museum wasn't all that bad. The displays were pretty cool, and like most modern art, the pictures are mostly non-sensical, but throws a message somewhere which I can't catch. There were a few artists I recognise, Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol and Van Gogh. And then there were some artists who somehow just had painted a canvas completely black, entitled Abstract. Sure... abstract, yup, I get it... then while walking down again, I saw another canvas painted white. The title? Twin. Okay, that might be pushing it. So I walked on and saw a canvas painted completely blue. Hmmm... Somehow I don't think it's art anymore, more of blatant repetition. The title? Blue Monochrome. At least name it something remotely artistic.

Somehow I just think that most artists are out there trying to convince people that what they draw is mostly art. Either that or they sort of enjoy having nude models posing for them and drawing nudes. There were a lot of Pablo Picasso's works there, mostly of nudes and of the human body. Yes, pretty much distorted, twisted and unlike Greek art which accentuates the sensuality and beauty of the human body, these modernist artists just paint in manners that does not show the beauty of the human body, but rather every day people. I guess I can't comment much, but somehow I feel that the focus shifts away from the perfect human form to other more normal views of life.

I saw this interesting model of a man. Carved at angles, I have no idea what it was made off. Anyway the interesting thing was the man had no hands. This is nowhere near a Greek sculpture because the model was black and at angles and the human form was just all angled. The title of the artpiece? The Serf. I thought it to be very fitting.

One thing I've learnt from modern artists is that they have this sort of preoccupation with individuality. They are somehow looking for a difference among similarities and similarities among differences. There was this display of about 8 by 4 paintings of Campbell's soup by Andy Warhol. I guess it's open ended for discussion what it means. Andy Warhol said "I think it should be for the mass of American people". So there's basically a different flavour of soup, 32 different flavours for everyone. I found it interesting. Though I thought it from a different way. I figured that each can of soup was like a person, and form and design was basically the same, but inside is all different and there were small differences on each label saying what sort of flavour they were. Sort of like the differences among people who do look generally the same.

I finally understood this when I saw this weird display, when there were 19 fiberglass buckets displayed out on the floor. Yup, that's art, each fibreglass bucket glazed and colourless. Thing was, although there were 19 of them, each was in essence a bucket, but they all were different for small nuaces. The explaination of the display was about finding differences through similarities or vice versa.

Granted that my feet now hurt for over five hours of walking. I don't feel like bitching much about it, and just going straight to sleep. Anyway, it was a good trip and a good day.

With unwritten permission off a website, I apologise firsthand and tell me if you really mind.

I just paid a visit to the Freakatorium at the Lower East Side of NYC.

No, Ivan, there were no displays of you there. There were exotic freaks there, not the freakish freaks, so there's no tribute to you whatsoever. None at all. I left them a note about you, so maybe they'll look into your life.

Anyway, back to the Freakatorium. The highlight of the Freakatorium was this two-headed live terrapin. Yeah, it had two heads. Both were moving, both heads complete, both heads look like typical normal heads, both heads breath and eat and both heads were just damn out of the ordinary. Just imagine a two-headed terrapin. Wonder if I can pull a picture of the two-headed terrapin off the Internet. Oh wait, I just did.

Anyway, there were a lot of interesting things. There's a real Jivarro's head. It's about the size of a tennis ball and I had ideas of playing tennis with it. Then there's the Feejee mermaid. A monkey and fish stiched together that earned about $1000 a week back in the times of P.T. Barnum. That's a lot of money from a lot of suckers.

There were a lot of weird stuff, and I guess the strangest was this picture of a man with a parasitic undeveloped twin conjoined with him, sticking out of his chest, from the neck, two arms and legs. I have no idea of the authenticity of the thing, the guy died in a trainwreck. Anyway, just to help imagine this, just imagine a young kid of about 6 sticking his head into a man's chest. That's it. Yup. Disgusting. Yup. I think so too. I guess things got really freaky, ala Ivan, when he said he could feel his twin's arms and legs when they are touched, but he has no control over them. Hmm...

There were the other human oddities, small men and JoJo the Dog Boy. JoJo is a sort of legend, one of those stories that gets retold so many times that it's iconoclastic of the Freak Show era. Anyway I think I remember a story about this kid who looks like a dog. He looked furry all over, especially on his face. Then one day, all the hair just dropped off. So there goes another story. He left the freak show because he wasn't a freak anymore.

There were also stuff like the skull of a two-headed cow, and foot of a pig that was sort of split into another two smaller legs. There was a couple of books in fine print, I think there was the Bible in like half a cm in width and lenght. God only knows, and God would probably know, how does one read that book. Comfortably.

If this is anything, well, this exhibition is not for the squeamish or faint-hearted.

I have been reading Feynman. I wish I could have read the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, but then I guess I never really got past A.

Anyway, genius does inspire. Usually the saying goes, "Genius inspires genius" but then I'm not sure about the second genius part, so I just stick with "Genius inspires".

I haven't posted in a long time. Been busy.

Weekend trip to Boston was great. Got to see Harvard and MIT. Harvard looks like one heck of a sweet campus. Well then again it's probably because there is no campus in NYU.

Anyway, it snowed while I was there. And I was looking up at the snow, and the snowflakes fell down from the black sky, and it looked rather very much magical.

BUT it was damn bloody cold, with my head up in the clouds, I stepped into a puddle of freezing water. Dammit.

Socratic dialectic is the process of searching for the answers. Dialectics believe more in the finding the truth, whereas sophists and rhetorics are more concerned with convincing people that they are right. But I think a good argument has elements of all three, because the fine lines are hardly noticable. Socrates, a great practitioner of dialectic was sentenced to drink hemlock because he was accused of using sophists methods to corrupt the youth of Greece.

I guess everything comes out when you are asking and answering questions. The idea of phrasing a question takes into consideration what the answer ought to be, and the answer takes into consideration how to phrase it perfectly without ambiguity. A situation is clearest when questions are being asked by someone else. Assuming nothing, knowing nothing, and without assumptions and preconceptions, a good answer is suppose to communicate all of these across such that while the listener receives the answer, he picks apart the answer, absorbing one bit at a time so that every assumption, notion and idea could be handled one piece at a time.

We tend to bundle all our thoughts together and label it as the collective consciousness. Therefore all things are interconnected in our minds, and hence the process of understanding and the process of self-critique becomes hard. Where do we assume is one idea, and where is the next? What criteria? Can our minds even see the boundaries of our interconnected ideas?

Matthew Goulish in his essays on Criticisms draws the relationship between rain and the play, Rhinoceros. Where therefore lies the boundaries of the idea? As a fresh idea, it appears as two seperate entities without our formal assumptions of any connection. Then we start to assume. We draw lines, draw parallels, draw on imagination and finally we draw the relationship between the two. But the bridge used to construct the two ideas are an intermingling twine of ideas crossing and supporting like a huge suspension bridge and finally we see the bridge as a whole, not the sum of it's parts.

I got a chance to look at a friend and have this long dialectic conversation, I hope I am forgiven for looking at this from this point of view. I believe now that the truth cannot be told, but can only be discovered for oneself, because otherwise, the truth is not accepted and the value of truth is lost. And we talked, and we questioned, and it went both ways, and I found myself on the defensive towards the end. No longer was I the one asking questions, and no longer was I the one leading the direction of the conversation. In exchange for that, I got a chance to learn a few things about myself, look in retrospect and witticism shows up in times of crisis to come up with wry lines.

All hail witticism, may my wit never fail me again! Yeah, I know where I stand in your life, and that is at arms length too.

If 500-1300CE was marked as the Dark ages, the 1300-1600CE marked as the Middle Ages, the 17th Century marked as the Renaissance, and the 18th Century marked as the Enlightenment, I guess the 20th and 21st Century is better marked as the Age of Apathy.

Despite all the positive and negative sounding names, the ages do not really reflect on the true nature of their names. Dark ages were not just a period of little scholastic work, and the Middle Ages were not all about God, and the Renaissance wasn't just return to Greek Antiquity and Enlightened philosophes were more of self-centred and fighting for their own personal causes while denouncing everyone else. I am a child of all these ages. A progeny of a millenia or two of conflict, ignorance and intellectuality.

And somehow I feel jaded and tired by all these struggles of the past. Enough? This is the age of apathy. I'm disillusioned by everything already.

If we are on the brink of annihiliation, how would we know it?

Okay. I need to make a post. But I'm pretty busy these days. Honestly. Stuff's been cropping up. Had my first actuarial exam on Thursday morning, a turned-down essay Thursday afternoon, Friday bad sleep as well as classes that didn't make sense, I took the rest of Friday and Saturday off, then Saturday afternoon, studying for midterm on Tuesday, then Monday I need to decide what my thesis on Conversations of the West is on, then Wednesday there is an assignment to hand in. Yeah out.

By now, a million bloggers out there would have talked about the United States of America Presidential elections.

My heart goes out to all the Americans out there who have been swindled by the Bush Administration. Just like Bush himself said, "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me... you can't get fooled again". Bush, among many other things, stand corrected again.

Man, I could do a better job as president, any day of the week, twice on Sunday in my sleep. I watch in disbelief as the American public gets swindled, conned, ripped off and played beautifully into the hands of the Republicans amidst fears and doubts. If there were ever any thing as terrorists on American soil, they are in Congress and the White House, using careful fear, shock and awe tactics to manipulate the American public general hysteria.

Now what happens? Oh let me lament:
It is the best of times, it is the worse of times,
It is the age of wonder, it is the age of fear,
It is the beginning of a new era, it is the end of days.
Die Bush die! Why won't you stay dead?
Choked on a pretzel, blue in the face,
The world is going to hell and you know it,
You put it there.
So much sense, so much logic, all down the drain,
Oh wither life, come suffering and pain.
How do I count the votes? Let me tell the ways,
27 in Florida, a present from Jeb.
20 in Ohio? You've hardly been there.
Oh woe is intellectuality, woe is freedom,
We wonder in fear what is on your mind,
You would be remembered in history,
As a great leader? As a great conqueror? As a great idiot?
Put an end to it all, put an end to it all.
We lay down prostrate to our fate, we bow down to the stars,
The fates no longer smile on us, the Church now rules,
What do we do? Where do we turn? What happens next?
Iran? Malaysia? Indonesia?
Maybe there be terrorists there, maybe there be WMDs there,
But there's defnitely oil there,
And so America's great leadership says, lets go!
In a flurry of bombs a columm of tanks,
Boom boom boom! Another 'regime' falls, a 'democracy' rises.
What do we do now? Where do we turn? Is there any hope left?
A Watergate! A Halliburton! A Lewinsky!
Oh the chances of a great nation only rests,
In the salvation of a scandal.
I cry, I cry, I cry,
This is the end, can human folly go no further?
Oh today is a poor day for this country.