This is a rather bad photo, with bad memories attached to it. The first of 4 finals that I would lose.

Still..I suppose it was worth it to even come that far. I really miss Dunman.

This has been niggling at me for awhile. There is too much emphasis on writing impressively rather than writing clearly. People are blown away by dead metaphors, long words, and stuffy tone, while forgetting the purpose of the written word in the first place. I was reading a writing guide by The Economist (and they would do well to follow their own advice), and decided that the education system has instilled bombasticism over elegance.

An example: Use short words, like about, instead of approximately. These shorter words are natives of the English language, with Anglo-Saxon origin, rather than longer, Latin or German based vocabulary. The word vocabulary itself comes from the French "vocabulaire", which in turn comes from the Medieval Latin "vocabularium". Although English is a bastard language, it has evolved into a separate linguistic entity, and it has words for most things. Therefore there is no excuse to use "per annum" when one can use "per year" or "beyond one's authority", not "ultra vires".

I recognise that style is a crucial part of writing, and sometimes tone or individuality call for sesquipedalians, but they should be exceptions rather than the norm. Simple words don't make you sound like a moron. They are powerful. For instance "To be or not to be, that is the question." , "We are such stuff as dreams are made of", or in a modern context "You cocky little shit." Besides, writing is always more accessible when it reads like normal, grammatical speech.

I change my mind. I've just read the whole article, and it has excluded about half my vocabulary. Not everyone can write like Economist journalists, and even they make mistakes. So as long as I don't have to strain to understand it, and it doesn't make me cringe, it's fine with me.

Go here, if you can be bothered. http://www.economist.com/research/styleGuide/index.cfm?page=673913

From the front page of today's Straits Times:

"The trouble now is that Singaporeans believe that we'll always have a PAP government." This allowed the oppposition to say that if voters chose the opposition, "then the PAP governemnt will have to give them more."

I have suggestions for the men in white to combat this problem, that seems so enormous that if they don't solve it, Parliament will collapse, the MNCs will take over Singapore, there will no longer be any hope of air-conditioned underwear, and (gasp!) chewing gum will be allowed on the streets!

One part of the problem, as seen by the statement, is that Singaporeans think that the PAP will have power forever. There are 2 paths they can take to address this. First, they can make Singaporeans stop believing it. They can stop meddling around with GRC boundaries, screw up the budget, and stop suing oppposition party members. To be more interesting, they should go along Orchard Road selling flags to raise funds for the party. Their slogan can be "Help us! We're only paid in peanuts." This will prompt a mass outcry, followed by an investigation, with some lowlifes being sent to jail, hopefully leaving some space for the opposition.

Alternatively, they could make sure they stay in power forever. This is easier, but more boring. It involves doing exactly what they have always done, with the inclusion of hijacking all the hawker centres. Then they can threaten those constituencies who don't vote for them by saying "We will shut down all the hawker centres with our 90% majority!" This will scare the shit out of people who are concerned about bread, butter, and ba chor mee issues. Since the PAP believes that most Singaporeans are like that (and their believes are always correct), Singaporeans will continue to keep them in power in order to eat chwee kueh and chee cheong fun every morning.

If they really are worried about having 3, instead of 2 opposition MPs, would result in them having to pay more attention to constituent opinion, there is a brilliant solution to their quandry. All they need to do is announce mass resignation from Singapore Parliament, and let the opposition take all the seats. Then, they don't have to pay attention, or "give more", since they will have no mroe responsibilities! This would free up enormous amounts of time that would allwo them to put their excellent qualifications to use.

For example, they could use their expertise gained from the encouragement of the math and sciences in the education system during their day to develop a production technique that wrings water from wet hair fresh from the shower. Do you know how much water is wasted when you let your hair dry? I mean, if we manage to utilise hair-water, we could cut our dependency on Malaysia by 11%! You could even extend it to squeezing and refining the damp from bath towels! No more need to clean up and drink all that pee! The possibilities are endless!

Or, they could help us solve the ageing population problem. A long ignored statistic is that 15% of Singaproean children are conceived under trees. I propose that they start a nation wide campaign to turn our "garden city" into a forest. That way, there would be no shortage of trees for the conception of our future. We will put our little red dot on the map for replacing the term "red-light district" into "greenery avenue". Perhaps they could look into creating parks right next to office blocks, to facilitate those career minded people who would like to have a family, if only they had the time and place.

Personally, I don't see what the problem is. They just need to get a little entrepreneurial, enterprising, creative, considerate, unique, engaging, or whatever their word for the day is.

I hate thurdays. I hate thursdays because I have 6 periods lined up in a row. So maybe this happened everyday at dunman, but my attention span has shortened considerably since then. i suspect that ths has been a combination of burn out from o levels, and the wonderful 5 period break that I have on mondays. But I suppose I can't complain, since I am always ponning the econs lecture anyway, unless cook's doing it.

Today Sonya came to crash our lit tutorial. I am impressed, and confounded at my own stupidity. Harris seemed much happier after she and 2 other people came in. Before that he was trying to force out some noise from my class. He started making the noise himself after that, especially when Sonya called the stanzas of This Excellent Machine "paragraphs".

Can't wait to see the gays tomorrow.

'Tis a delicious controversy that has the most disinterested poodles licking their chops. (if anyone knows exactly what "chops" refers to, please tell me. I was never able to figure it out) Round and round it goes, where it stops, nobody knows. Hmmm... we will wait and see.

Spent today quite ambivalent about everything...hummm.

If anyone finds out who nosey parker passerby is, please refer him to the PW group otherwise known as BBSVY. I think they may have a bone to pick. They would probably want to pickle passerby's carrot as well, but what do I know. My PW group, however, is very peace loving. All we want to do is help autistic children and save the world.