Advances to seduce women
Why do I get the impression that the technological advances that have permeated society and percolated socioeconomic strata this decade have made it easier for men to get more sex, better sex? Or maybe it's just me. Why technological advances? Because most scientists are men. Why the proliferation of particular technologial innovations? Because most CEOs are men.
I will seek to substantiate my claim with examples (not comprehensive by any means). Try not to laugh out loud. Arguably the most significant advances in the past decade have been accomplished in the realm of communications. What is communication but a means of seducing women? A hypothesis postulates that the speech areas in the human brain evolved under the pressures of sexual selection. To put it simply, men talk to lure women into bed, while women talk to put their babies and husbands to sleep. I won't reveal whether or not I agree, but Jean-Paul Sartre would've been proud of this argument.
As such, the ease and ubiquity of electronic communications have simply facilitated the entire seduction process. It's almost come to a point whereby the number of females in one's MSN Friends List positively correlates with the probability of snaring a partner. Well, one might argue that the same idiographic characteristics underlie both measures. But one cannot underestimate the convenience electronic communications bestows; Mr Don Juan can now simultaneously flirt with three or four girls online. Most importantly, the Internet makes it easier for shy guys to talk to women. I suspect that's how the whole thing took off in the first place, pioneered by geeky guys seeking female company.
The first web businesses to register profits were porn sites. Back when Amazon was haemorrhaging millions, porn sites had successfully negotiated the problem of online transaction security. Two things of notes here; first, porn sites were the precursor of tech coms, providing the latter with a template to follow. Second, the huge underground economy of web-based pornography fueled public confidence in online business. OK, porn doesn't enable men to get more sex, not at least directly or with women. But I think online porn has educated a entire generation of kids sexually, at a time when sex education in schools in schools is still primarily concerned with abstinence and zygotes. I mean, kids nowadays are precocious. For good or for bad.
Can you imagine the person behind the camera phone not being male? Here is a device that allows both men and women to take pictures of beautiful women (in various settings and states of undress) and share them around. That's one up on Neoprints. Funny thing is that somehow somebody has managed to convince females that they should take to these technologies like Ecstasy users to water. Of course our ladies are under collective false consciousness (pardon the Marxist language, my background you see) that (most recent) societal change somehow emancipates them. The smartest ones are often the most deluded. But there's another post for another day.
Three words from the booming biomedical field. Viagra, Levitra and Cialis. There are two things men are privately concerned with; penis size and erection quality. Despite claims from herbal remedy manufacturers, there's little one can do about the former without aversely affecting the latter. So the latter is a preferable bet to hedge on. My guess would be that scientists are currently working on two things: aphrodisiacs for men and substances that make sex more palatable for women. It's not in our interests that some women find sex painful and unpleasurable. The pill that will potentiallly surpass Viagra in sales is the one that almost guarantees female orgasm (under optimal conditions of course, we can't create miracles can we?). The catch is that it will be mostly men flocking to purchase the drug. I know the female orgasm is largely genetically determined, so if the drug fails we can safely blame the woman. At that juncture, we will get her Prozac.
Americans are antsy over CNOOC's (China National Offshore Oil Corporation) US$18.5 billion all-cash bid for Unocal. I was watching CNN when the newscaster (Jim Clancy's partner, whatever her name is) questioned an analyst about the potential repercussions of the takeover. The analyst was insisting, while trying to convince his interviewer at the same time, that the takeover bid isn't as insidious as many Americans make it out to be, and neither will there be a significant impact on the economic sphere. Oil is afterall a commodity easily available on the open market anyway. But the effect of having China control American oil resources on geopolitical concerns and public opinion may be quite a different story.
Unocal had accepted Chevron's US$16.4 billion cash-plus-stock bid earlier this year, and this offer (I would think) remains the most appealing for stockholders and politicians alike. Actually, I'd prefer CNOOC to offer US$17.5 billion instead and spend the remaining billion on a hostile takeover of Malcolm Glazer's Manchester United. And I wouldn't mind the new adminstrators renaming certain stands in Chinese or emphasizing the 'Red' in Red Devils. 'Then we shall see which is more powerful: Chinese or Russian oil money.
The malaise of nuah-ness hanging over me has now settled into my marrow. I don't feel like doing anything except eat (a lot) and sleep (a lot). But I'll have to cleave my ass from the sofa and bed, and start doing work pretty soon. Uh, our holidays are too short, only three months. How can any decent human being find three months sufficient to nuah? I think I need a year-long hiatus like certain members of the royal family or children of prominent businessmen.
Was about to get prepared for a swim, which I haven't done so for sometime, when my mother walked into the room and said matter-of-factly that someone had drowned. I looked out of the balcony window. From my vantage point, right smack in the middle of the pool:
A teenage boy lying serenely on his side beneath two metres of still, blue water.
The Civil Defence people had arrived. They stood round, talking among themselves, while the onlookers admired the body encased in his crystal-clear aquatic mausoleum. Regarding the means of retrieving the boy, they briefly entertained the idea of draining the water. But they didn't, instead two men went into the pool and fished the body out. Since there was no explicit 'arrowing', I suspect these guys take turns to do this sort of thing. They might as well have drained the water; like anyone's gonna use the pool in the near future.
The boy was obviously a trespasser. Since our estate is small, we instinctively know who the regular pool users are anyway. According to eyewitnesses, he had cycled to my estate for a dip. My sister remarked that had I gone down half an hour earlier, I could have saved his life. But really, if I had been swimming when the victim arrived, he wouldn't have dared to swim. Too bad; when your time's up, it's up.
By the way, he's still lying there by the poolside two hours after his unfortunate accident. The relevant authorities have taken his fingerprints and photos of him from every conceivable angle. But they seem to be waiting for something or someone. My advice: Don't die in public, unless you'd like to have your corpse lie somewhere far from your comfort zone for a couple of hours, while strangers scrutinize every inch of it. And for heaven's sake, please don't die at my place unless I know you. Even then, it's considered impolite. The last time, an old woman came running all the way to my flat to jump to her death. We had to live with her blood splattered on one of the void deck pillars.
It's dark, and the poor fellow is still there, covered with plastic. I'm gonna have my dinner now.
This post is ostensibly about a mythical beast, the Chinese unicorn. Maybe I'll write about an even rarer animal, the domesticated Singaporean woman, some other time. It turns out that the Chinese unicorn has been erroneously named, probably conflated with her Western counterpart, since these creatures are characteristically depicted as having two horns. To be sure, while we might think of the Chinese unicorn as being the qilin, there are in fact various versions of the creature, each with its unique features. But the qilin is far and away the best known. I only realized not so long ago that the term qilin, much like fenghuang, is generic, a combination of names of the respective male and female beasts. So you see either a qi or a lin; real qilins are found along the seedier back-alleys of Geylang, and some say, certain parks in northern Singapore.
If I'm not mistaken, Jorge Luis Borges wrote about the Chinese unicorn in his
Book of Imaginary Beings. I have not read the book. But there is a reference to the creature in his essay "Kafka and His Precursors". He reproduces a translation of Han Yu, which I shall in turn reproduce in part here:
".... Even children and village women know the unicorn constitutes a favorable
presage. But this animal does not figure among the domestic beasts, it is not
always easy to find, it does not lend itself to classification. It is not like
the horse or the bull, the wolf or the deer. In such conditions, we could be
face to face with a unicorn and not know for certain what it was...."
At first, I thought the original reference might have been the qianli ma (thousand-li a day horse), as students of Chinese literature would know. But then again, probably not. At least the qianli ma has a Bo Yue to identify it, chances are the peaceful qilin among humans would suffer an ignominious fate, to be bullied by dogs or something. Such a creature does not, and should not, belong to this world.
I don't understand why after taken the trouble to chop up a corpse into pieces, one would be so careless as to dump the body parts into the sea or river. One might have gotten away with it twenty years ago when our waters were oh so polluted, but much less likely now. Why can't they emulate Americans and bury the body parts in desolated areas all over the country? I recommend the SAF Live Firing Area. Or if a watery disposal is somehow irresistably appealing, at least make the effort to ensure that the body parts sink. Crime I can accept, but not sloppiness.
Discovered that some schools in Singapore have their own entries in Wikipedia. And of course Wikipedia being what it is, one is perfectly entitled to chip in contributions. So if you realize that your school is (gasp), horror of horrors, not in Wikipedia, or that the articles are inadequate in some way, feel free to redress the grievance by writing in.
Under the 'School Song' section of The Chinese High School, it says "The school song is in classical Chinese and would be hard to understand for people without a understanding of classical Chinese." The actual anthem is not reproduced. Heh, I recall actually referring to my Chinese dictionary on more than one occasion when learning the anthem. Fine by me; esoteric but richly poetic lyrics are better than those that go along the lines of 'we strive for excellence to bring glory to the dear school and nation' any day. The latter of which is, in essence, how most school anthems run.
We used to sing quite a bit in ACS and The Chinese High School. I haven't attended other schools obviously, but my impression would be that we did more singing than most. I never figured out how certain fixtures in our choral reportoire were chosen. For a missionary school like ACS, that hymns of praise dominate the songbook shouldn't come as a surprise. But there were some odd bedfellows as well, which we sang quite often. For example, I remember singing the mournfully elegiac "Nobody's Child" and "500 Miles" fairly often. Thought some of these songs were a little too serious and sad for primary schoolchildren. Then we had "Yellow Bird". Aiyoh, for heaven's sake, the words aren't even in proper English lor!
TCHS is a different kettle of fish altogether, being a secular (but not entirely non-ideological) and traditional Chinese school and all that. I think Chinese High boys celebrate small-scale National Days every week with the number of patriotic songs we sing. I suspect the administration wanted to convert us all to Yue Feis by the time we're through. Then there is the content of the songs. Is it my imagination, or are many of the songs somewhat militant in nature? OK, "Man Jiang Hong" was written over a thousand years ago during a state of turmoil, so fair enough. Besides that, we belt out lustily "Wo Men Si Nian Qing De Wei Guo Jun" (or whatever the title is) and "The Longest Day", and such. Piang eh, macham want to fight war soon like dat. But I think repeated rousing renditions of these songs have gotten to me, since I feel an irrepressible urge to shed blood for my school and nation whenever they are sung. There are those who might argue that we are indeed in a state of war, against slave morality and bourgeois oppression, that world revolution is imminent once the Geist of capitalism has waned. So these songs are meant to keep up our fighting spirit.
Was doing research in the school library when I came across research publications by a certain Dr Chee Soon Juan, formerly an employee in NUS before he was dismissed for misusing research funds amounting to just over a hundred dollars. Hope I got the figure right, it's in that region anyway. He did some work on the effect of D-amphetamine on electrophysiological activity in the superior colliculus in the rat. And yes, it is as cheem as it sounds. There were some other stuff by him as well, but I wasn't interested. I mused about how I might be doing research under him right now had he not rubbed certain people in high places the wrong way. That's how society operates, I suppose, one transforms from a university lecturer into a social pariah just like that.
Finishing up Mikhail Bulgakov's
The Master and Margarita at present. The novel that inspired
Sympathy for the Devil by the Rolling Stones. No, the book's not about Zhang Fei and his Belorussian bombshell. Really, I was hoping that the book would flit about chronology, describing Satan's role in the fall of the Romanovs, the rise of Hitler and so forth. It hasn't transpired thus, but I'm not disappointed by the novel; ostensibly about the Devil and his retinue wrecking mischief in Moscow, but really about a lot more. I was telling my sister a little something about Russian literature. She doesn't understand why I would like a story about a nose which leaves the face of an official, develops a life of its own and obtains a higher rank than the official himself. Can't explain it myself, think it's something in my personality. I also gave a brief mention about Italo Calvino's
The Baron in the Trees, about, well, a baron who decides to lead an arboreal existence. If I were to ever write, I would pen fantastical, farcical stories with their own internal logic such as these. If people don't like them, too bad.
I have a germ of a story about a man who confuses hunger with drowsiness, sorrow with thirst, and so on. The result of a fantastical Pavlovian experiment ; for example when the hero is hungry, his captor insists he's in fact sleepy and sedates him into slumber. When asleep, he is intravenously fed with certain substances that satisfy his hunger. Part of the aim is to demonstrate that biological drives and urges can be interfered with and physiologically superceded by conditioned responses. Much like a heroin addict substitutes neurochemically the love for his family with the love of the needle. But the conditioning, as expected, is never wholly successful, since we cannot undermine what it means to be a genetically pre-programmed organism. So he is stuck in a rut of physiological confusion. Finally he is made to confuse romantic desire with murderous rage by the use of psychoactive drugs and such. His ultimate test: to be made to murder the woman he loves most by his own volition (yes, a contradiction). I know it sounds like
The Manchurian Candidate meets
1984 (though I left out some details), but it might just work.
Film promotion is tricky business. Nobody knows for sure how to entice audiences into cavernous rooms to watch moving pictures for two hours. Impressive special effects or marquee names by themselves are no guarantee of box-office success. Film makers and distributors nowadays spare no expense in launching large-scale marketing campaigns, attempting to reach consumers from all modalities. All in the hope that box-office receipts clear the magical US$100 million hurdle as quickly as possible.
A critical component of the marketing campaign is the movie trailer, the creation of which is an art form in itself. Audiences get a good idea of whether or not they want to watch the movie from its trailer. As such, conventionally the trailer has to encapsulate the attraction of the movie within a two-minute clip. To do so involves placing the movie within a context to which audiences are familiar and can instinctively identify with, i.e. genres and the associated expectations. You know, bullets and explosions juxtaposed with hot babes for action movies and so forth. This isn't very difficult, since most movies by major studios can be neatly categorized. As for art-house flicks, well, who cares about trailers anyway? Which is not to suggest that marketing for low-budget, leftfield films is non-existent, since critical reviews and word-of-mouth may be more important in this case.
I've been watching quite a few DVDs lately, and theatrical trailers are often included among the features. What I noticed was, if all I knew about the given film was gleaned from the trailer, I wouldn't watch it. Even though these shows are widely regarded as cinematic masterpieces. Quite understandably, the 'greatness' of the film cannot be conveyed within the confines of a clip aimed at attracting a wider audience. These trailers focus exclusively on one or things the audience might wanna to see, e.g. big names or action sequences. Of course, these often have little to do with what the film really is about, so something's lost in translation.
Also, there are times when I feel it would've been better if I, or the audience, did not know what the film is about. Take in point the case of Alfred Hitchcock's
Psycho. Lots of people know the plot, almost everyone has seen the shower scene, whether or not they've actually watched the film. I don't know how
Psycho was marketed (watched it some time ago before DVDs became ubiquitous), presumably hanging the whole endeavour on the established name of the director. Potential audiences would have guessed that the film was a psychological thriller. And if the shower scene had been included in the trailer, then people would also know that Janet Leigh is murdered somewhere along the line. Which defeats Hitchcock's McGuffin (a plot device that builds the story and captures the audience's attention, but has no real relevance) altogether.
If
Psycho had an innocent-sounding title, and audiences walked into the cinema not knowing anything else about the film, I suspect they would have enjoyed it even more. For those who don't know, the first thirty minutes about a lady running away with a client's money gives no indication of what's to follow. Audiences wouldn't even have guessed that they were watching a thriler/horror flick. The unexpected plot development would have been delicious. Another example would be M. Night Shyamalan's
Unbreakable. I rather liked the movie, even though it didn't do so well. As I recall, the trailer described little more than the scenario of a man surviving a horrific train disaster without even a scratch. Thought that was pretty well-done, much like
The Sixth Sense, creating a premise and leaving it as it is to whet the audience's appetite. A more substantive trailer wouldn't have been possible for
Unbreakable without divulging too many details. Unfortunately for many people but fortunately for me,
Unbreakable didn't turn out to be a horror movie as expected (since it got me guessing). So in some sense the trailer may have failed Shyamalan commercially, as he didn't deliver what he was expected to deliver (a horror flick). The mantra, according to a documentary on film promotion, is: Always deliver in the show what was promised in the marketing campaign. If not, audiences sense it and stay away (like
The Mexican, starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts, which flopped).
Try this experiment. Ask a young lady if she was a judge in Singapore, what sentence would she give someone who raped his step-daughter repeatedly over two years, presumably guilty as charged? I've heard some creatively bloodthirsty punishments. But what are the chances of hearing something like "26 years and 24 strokes of the cane, or whatever the maximum sentence allowed by the Penal Code"? Don't point out something about 'rule by law' to her, you'll get scolded for not being a woman.
Conversation overheard on bus. Commentary in parentheses.
Little boy (pointing): Is that a Mercedes?
Father (laughs): Yes
B: Is it very expensive?
F (still smiling): Wah this one you must earn $5000-6000 then can buy. You earn $2000-3000 only enough to pay instalment.
(Reminds me of myself, I was fascinated by cars as a little boy. According to my mom, I could name most of the leading car brands by four)
B: Must earn a lot of money hah...
F: Ya lah, if you have no money, you can only buy one thing. Later I show you...
B (excited): I know I know, bicycle!
F (laughs): Or maybe motorcycle lah. You ride bicycle want to find girlfriend ah? No money even got girl ask you go out, you also don't dare to go. Like dat how to get married or buy house?
B: (mutters something)
F: That's why I tell you to study hard. You so lazy, next time how to earn money buy car?
B: (giggles)
F: You study hard, work hard, then maybe you can earn Superscale. Ah, then can talk about Mercedes.
(Yes! My aspiration: To reach Superscale!)
(Bus stops in front of Junction 8. Some RI boys board the bus)
F: You study hard, then maybe you can go RI. See them, look like goondu goondu like that. But they are very smart, can earn a lot of money next time.
(No offence to Raffles boys. I quoted verbatim. He would have said the same thing about Chinese High boys, or maybe worse. Wait, I forgot. There isn't a Chinese High anymore; it has been converted into an 'institution')
A lady wrote in to the ST Forum. She had been to China and realized how well-versed Chinese youths were in their own history and culture. All she could offer, when probed about Singapore history, was that Stamford Raffles founded the city in 1819. So lo and behold, not to my surprise, she blames the Government for her paucity of historical knowledge. I blame the forum editor for publishing the letter. Eh xiaojie, I remember learning more than just Stamford Raffles in school lor. Don't anyhow blame Gahmen for your lack of attention during history lessons. Also, if you are really that interested in Singapore history, you can jolly well read up on your own. The same goes for potato-eating bourgeois who blame MOE for not stimulating their interest in Mother Tongue, resulting in them looking like fools in front of mainland Chinese businessmen. The same people who propagated the stereotype of Chinese speakers being uncool and low-class now feel compelled to brush up on the language they found so revolting in school. Divine justice, if such a thing exists.
More on football.
According to the tabloids, Jose Mourinho intends to bid 30 million pounds for Samuel Eto'o. Not sure if it will be money well-spent; afterall Eto'o isn't even the
pichichi (La Liga top scorer). That particular honour goes to a relative unknown from a provincial team named Diego Forlan. This goal-poacher extraordinaire was bought last summer for little more than a million pounds from a club that will soon regard the likes of Giuseppe Rossi, David Jones and Gerard Pique as star players. Not because the aforementioned players are exceptionally talented, rather because existing stars will be sold. Anyway Forlan hammered in 25 league goals without penalties for a team that was awarded more than ten spot-kicks this season. If he had been the regular penalty taker, his fellow Golden Boot winner Thierry Henry would have been left eating dust in his wake. I would therefore argue that Diego Forlan ought to be the prime transfer target for Chelsea. Besides, his very name strikes fear deep in the hearts of the reigning, and to be immediately disposed, European champions.
I have lost count of the number of high-scoring thrillers in Serie A this season. What ever happened to the vaunted Italian defence? Leading the
classifica marcatori as
capocannoniere is Cristiano Lucarelli of Livorno with 25 goals. He's the first and only player I've witnessed score four goals in an away game and end up on the losing team. That was because some fellow from the home side also hammered in four goals, plus two from his colleagues. That fellow's name: Alberto Gilardino. The week after that, Lucarelli scored a hat-trick in an away game but still ended losing cos the home side scored six. Like dat hor, he buy lottery confirm strike one. At least Livorno did well in Serie A. Ten years ago, one guy called Igor Protti, then playing for Bari but now Lucarelli's strike partner, scored wondergoal after wondergoal and was crowned
capocannoniere. But unfortunately his team got relegated. To add insult to injury, he had to share the top scorer title with Giuseppe Signori, who scored half his 24 goals from the spot.
Wah piang, Singapore got spy leh! Don't think Britain got James Bond very sat, we got Ching Cheong. "My name is Cheong, Ching Cheong." Suddenly the Straits Times seems very glamorous. OK, maybe I shouldn't joke since the poor fellow might end up with a bullet in the back of his head.
