the weird recesses of greg's mind come into play again...

was talking to ollie the other day after reading about shevchenko's rallying for chelski to show unity, which kind of reeked of squealer spreading propaganda for napoleon in animal farm after the whole jose debacle. by the way, i'm gonna miss jose and his outrageous comments, though i'm not sorry to see chelski with a most inferior replacement. anyway, after furthering the discussion with ollie, i came up with this, which was published in football365's mailbox. woohoo.

and now, i put it here for your reading pleasure. in case you're not familiar, animal farm is a satire about the russian revolution. enjoy!

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Chelski Drama and Theatre Acting Troupe is proud to announce its latest production from Stamford Bridge in the form of Animal Farm, George Orwell's classic tale of power, politics and betrayal.

Boars Napoleon and Snowball (Roman Abramovich and Jose Mourinho) orchestrate a revolution that throws out Farmer Jones (played by the ever loveable Kenneth William Bates) and his men, leading to the farm being re-christened as Animal Farm, a utopian farm that is run by the animals, for the animals.

While the farm prospers under their leadership, Napoleon grows jealous of the charismatic Snowball and hatches a plot. Using a pack of dogs, played by Peter Kenyon, Avram Grant, Bruce Buck and Frank Arnesen he had raised since taking them from their parents at birth, Napoleon engineers a coup that sees Snowball ousted from the farm to the shock of the other animals. With the porker Squealer, played by the now-English-speaking Ukrainian heartthrob Andriy Shevchenko, as a propaganda machine, Napoleon and the remaining pigs rule the farm and tell the timeless tale of absolute power corrupting absolutely.

With John Terry playing the cantankerous ass Old Benjamin, Didier Drogba as the strong but gullible workhorse Boxer, Frank Lampard as Clover the horse and Ashley Cole as the frivolous Mollie, this production features an all-star, international cast that also includes Shaun Wright-Phillips, Claude Makelele, Michael Essien, Riccy Carvalho, Paulo Ferreira and Petr Cech with a special cameo by German superstar Michael Ballack who plays Moses the raven, who the animals hated for telling tales and not doing any work.

Playing now till December at The Bridge, call now to book your tickets and catch this spectacular classic. First 25,000 will receive free goodies!

Tactics, comrade! Tactics!
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after discussing with ollie about a quirk in microsoft word...

we have concluded that while the notion of meritocracy exists, nothing and no one is meritocratic.

a good day of football just seems to make the week seem so much better

a headache and acheing body i might have, but a good three hours in the sun with the ball at my feet was probably what the doctor ordered. a mixed, but generally improved performance was a real lift after a tough week. missed some glorious chances, but scored two tap ins, threaded one nice through ball for an assist and played some ok football.

all i need now is a good sleep.

and more time to read my textbooks. >.<

bishan: the first few days

gosh. i am absolutely exhausted. it's been hard with all the packing and moving around, especially with school and work to deal with. i'm positively beat and craving sleep at the moment though i think it's something that might be in short supply these 2 weeks.

while comparative politics has a very interesting aspect to it, it requires reading. lots and lots of reading. and at the moment, i'm very, very far behind. and obviously being sleep deprived isn't helping my attentiveness in class.

well, all those things aside, i guess bishan isn't a bad place to be. it's really convenient to get to town, though getting onto the train at bishan is like squeezing a tuna into a sardine can that's already jammed with sardine. not to mention food definitely easier to attain than at greja, since J8 is only a few minutes' walk away.

anyway, it's back to friedman. i really have a lot of sleep and reading to catch up on.

last post from jalan greja

it's strange when you don't really feel all that sad when you're leaving the place that you've called home for the last 23 years.

even though i've either always wished i didn't have to take the damned 14s that always took so bloody long to show up to get home, or that i could be following some of my friends home since they stay up in the north or west together, i somehow never really did mind so much about those long, sometimes lonely, journeys.

i mean, this place is the only place that i've called home for my whole life. i even remember bawling my little eyes out when i was 5 or 6 when we had to rennovate this place and i saw the workers knocking out the wall on mom's room...

heh. those good old days when i used to sleep on the floor on those disney patterned mattresses in mom and dad's room, with the clip on lamp hanging off the edge of mom's dressing room drawer. the first one was black i think, and eventually, it was replaced with a white one.

and then i remember how i was so 'fraidy cat to sleep here on my own that i resolved that when i turned 10, i would sleep in this room and claim it as my own. haha. though i hated using this shower because the water never heated up quick enough unlike mom's shower where hot water sprung forth the moment the faucet was opened.

then there were those troubled times, where i ran out crying from the house ater fighting with mom. i can't remember what we were fighting about anymore, just that i got fed up with mom caning me. i even grabbed the cane from her once and broke it. 'twas those horrible growing up days. i remember how i ran as fast as my legs could carry me away from the yelling and the pain, screaming back that my folks never understood me. eventually i'd tire, and while i usually ran off to the canal, there was one time i just ran the other way and stopped at the curb outside someone else's house. and for some reason, i'd just take out my rosary scapular and pray whilst still sobbing uncontrollably. i don't know why, but i just felt like the repititions just made me calm down and re-focus myself. there was once i remember granma coming out to find me, another time it was dad. i recall resisting once or twice, but there was also the day i'd actually walk back home on my own when i felt sorry enough for myself.

then there were those happy days. like those sundays where the whole gang came down to greja. and christmas eve and new year's eve and chinese new year. the feasting and merriment. ah. and godpa used to come over every saturday too.

and of course, my birthdays, esepcially the few that led up to my 21st. haha. it was crazy, but serving the guys and jumping around from group to group kinda taught me a lesson or two about hosting people, which isn't easy at all. but i relished every moment since it was rare that i'd invite anyone over to my place cos it just felt so out of the way. so much that i wished that no one had to leave because it was so fun having my friends around the house.

despite all that, part of me is glad to leave and begin a new adventure.

here's to you greja. i'll miss you and remember you, but tomorrow holds a brand new adventure in store for me. and i intend to relish it as i embark on it.

reliving my childhood...

a lot of people point to my transformers collection to say that i'm always reliving my childhood. well, to a certain extent, they're right. transformers do span a long way back for me, but i only seriously remember them from (horrors, horrors for the G1 purists!) the G2 era when i was in primary 3, 4. which was sparked off because of my dinosaur craze from jurassic park and fate conspired to bring the dinobots to my dinosaur-seeking attention.

my earliest brushes with transformers went earlier and were much much more superficial and were only because of one thing: fighter planes.

yeah, i loved planes and 'copters when i was a kid. when most boys were content with cars, i took a higher plane of interest, no pun intended (though the wordplay there is really some really wicked stuff. haha...). i loved my toy soldiers, tanks, trucks and aircraft. while i lost my interest in civillian planes after a while (since most of them look the same anyway and had no guns), i've always had a thing for flying vehicles. if you asked me to pick one as my favourite, i simply couldn't give you a straight answer. from the caricature naval fighter (and now sadly retired) F-14 tomcat to the odd but strangely intriguing looking, tank busting and twin external engine A-10 thunderbolt II (or warthog) to the world war 2 classics like the supermarine spitfire, the P-38 lightning and the F-4U corsair, i could list many more.


i made no secret of my love for the F-14 a while back, but these other planes aren't spared any love either. somehow i've always been fascinated with planes that didn't conform to a traditional style of aeroframe, as evidenced by the lightning and A-10. and now that i'm older and have access to stuff like wikipedia, reading the history and records of these old favourites of mine makes more sense to me now and i can appreciate better the history and design features of the aircraft. not to mention stories that just show how those design features came into play in a real life situation, like how an A-10 survived a tremendous amount of damage in iraq from heavy flak and still made it back to base with one fully functional engine.

looking at these graceful warbirds just makes me feel like a kid again.

how NOT to start your day...

leaving your nasi lemak breakfast in the car, and then spilling hot tea all over the second of the two pop tarts that substituted the nasi lemak AS WELL AS your khaki pants.

considering how the hot tea became cold so quickly, it brings a whole new meaning to the term testicular fortitude.

prelude to an interesting week ahead

i had a great deal of fun last night. we went out to marina south to celebrate ollie's birthday at one of the steamboat bbq joints that litter the area. and the freshies also had an outing there, and while it was cool to not need to walk a great deal to join them, having two sets of friends in close proximity makes it hard to split your time between the two, not to mention pretty awkward when you walk past one group to go grab food. but i guess i managed to split my time pretty well, though i had to pang seh the guys to get a lift back home from maro. sorry guys!

i also discovered that heineken makes one really mean shandy, as opposed to the crap that tiger produces. i mean i do know that heinekens are better than a tiger by miles, but i never did shandify sprite with heineken before. really wick'd.

it's going to be a really, really interesting week. the time has finally come to uproot myself from 76 jalan greja, my home for 23 years and 3 months. come next around next weekend, i'll be a northerner for a while. which isn't really too bad considering town's not too far away and on the way home from work. woot.

though after hearing tua yee's story about her former student shifting back to the east from AMK, i think i'm gonna miss the east a bit.

but like today's recessional hymn, God will make a way. i'm sure of it.

not a very typical saturday...

today was the first time in a long, long time that i got the chance to sleep in. and i took the opportunity with great aplomb, and while i fell asleep initially at the com from about 2 to 6, i got back to sleep at 7 and slept till 12. 'tis a great feeling that.

after some slacking, i helped out with the moving of some of the boxes off to the storage warehouse. not exactly very exciting, especially since i had to pass by ibm. speaking about ibm, my first paycheque's on the way in. tho it'll only be cashed in on monday which means the moolahs come in tuesday. but ah, it's a nice feeling, even though i start with a bit of a deficit since i went crazy buying t-shirts over ebay. i blame mingwei for introducing me to threadless for this. hahaha.

after that, i rode on the tailgate of the pickup, which dad borrowed to ferry our stuff, out to the bus stop to get a hair cut. now, this is where i started ranting at ollie about some stuff. anyway, these 2 caucasion tourists came on board around the siglap area. they were about in their 50s, and the lady sat in the seat in front of me. however, her really big (i'm trying to be politically correct here... *trying*.) husband decided to remain ON the stairs. at this point i'm opening my eyes in disbelief and i overhear the lady asking another lady about the shophouses in the katong district. the fat oaf says they're on the left, and continues to stand there like chris columbus on the helm of his ship looking for china. seriously wtf-inducing. you'd think he'd had gotten a really big hint when people tried to squeeze pass his "svelte" frame to get to the upper deck, but no. our hero decides to stand there and is content to let people somehow execute some tight manoeuvres in an extremely tight space. pardon my french, but i couldn't help but start calling him a ****ing hippo in my head at this point of time, with him acting like he owned the bloody stairwell. even when the lady told him someone wanted to come up when his fat-clogged ears couldn't pick up an "excuse me" he still shifted his bulky mass to one side and only moved up the stair case to allow an old man to alight - but alas only to move once more to re-assume the position. now seriously. if the bloody shop houses are on the bloody left hand side, why the hell do you need to stand on the friggin' stairs that are on the opposite side of the bus??!! ok, the seat his wife sat in was taken up by the above mentioned old man, but he got off eventually. yet, the fat oaf still stood there. i was incredulous that someone could actually be so *thick* and *dense* (puns DEFINITELY intended) and above all, so BLOODY INCONSIDERATE. while i didn't tell him off as i got off, i couldn't help but let an inaudible cuss escape my lips as i waited for my bus to reach the berth. even ugly singaporeans aren't that stupid. i think.

anyway, second sms to ollie was shot out while i was waiting for my hair cut. while i was waiting for my usual guy to finish up the other fellas in the queue in front of me, i noticed this 30 plus, 40 year old fella SQUATTING next to the pay phone outside the shop. wearing shorts, and scratching away at his leg while his wife was browsing the catalogue outside the store next door. it was somewhat amusing to see something like this in real life. i know PCK isn't exactly young, but to see someone so... beng... at such an age really came about as quite an eyebrow raiser. eventually, the poor wife had to squat next to him and talk to him, while he propped his head up with his arm, elbow resting on his knee, like an overgrown kid. really amusing. he took my seat after i disappeared for a moment to get some food since i didn't eat anything all day.

after my haircut began the next phase of the day: bumping into people. but before that came the 3rd sms to ollie. this one was about nostalgia while i was making my way to parkway to kill some time before heading to olps for mass and commentating. as i passed by the hawker centre opposite parkway, i saw a sight i hadn't seen in ages. tucked away amidst the push cart stalls was this guy surrounded by buyers, in front of him a small table. atop it was a table cloth with dvds. pirated ones. you might feeling a little cheated about such an anti-climatic revelation, but think back and try to recall the last time you saw a pirated dvd stall. the kind where the vendors have an escape plan by grabbing the table cloth to wrap up their wares and bail the minute they sensed police. it kinda brought a smile to my face, and the temptation to pick up transformers to placate myself for the time between now and the imax release as well as the official dvd release. yeah, i'd buy the real one afterward, i kid you not. especially for the extras.

as i crossed the road to parkway, i heard a rumbling voice behind me. i immediately recognised it and turned around to find none other than peter, who hadn't noticed me while talking to smu fides's nick (if memory serves me right). talk about coincidence. chatting about csa among other things like dvd elitism and football while walking around parkway, we eventually parted ways as they headed for holy fam and i to ol. on the bus, as i passed by seow lao shi's (my primary school chinese tuition teacher, who stays next to st pat's.), sam had to board the bus at the same time. when i finally reached the choir loft and the commentator pc, i met edmond, who i had no idea was in the 6.30 choir at all, even after one year of commentating. and before mass began, i spotted goose in her usual mass pew from the little crevice between the wall and video swtiching equipment. after mass, i went to say hi, and also found janet in the back pew. and to top it all off, i met becks, who was at ol for ym, while she was on the way to the adoration room, at the same time i was trying to find the car with sam trying to call me with my phone dead.

and now, after getting a paper cut and this long, long post, i shall go grab dinner, and hopefully witness another 3 points in the bag as keano brings the black cats to old trafford. if not, it's gonna be another very frustrating football match. and a very frustrated me. heh.