PEP, EP or PR. IKYN.

His Personalised Employment Pass lasted for 5 years. It gave E@L, well, 5 years of hassle-free residence in The Little Red Dot (TLRD {aka: DWTDP}). It was not Permanent Residence (PR) but, hey, no need to pay 15% of his salary into a lame-arse, opaque investment, Gov't superannuation scheme, viz: the Community Provident Fund (CPF). But he does pay about $50 more for a game of golf (GOG) than a PR would.

No, with this PEP E@L could stay in TLRD for an extra six months after any termination of employment (as if they'd let him go!) in order to seek an equivalent fat package from one of the other big players in the field (not including Philips, burned his bridges there). Otherwise it would be only a month before a visa run would be required, and an apartment in Surat Thani secured.

OK, it's cool, E@L is in a BigCompany(tm) these days, his preferred employer swallowed yet again Jonah-like into the belly of some fresh corporate beast. And that size company means an efficient human resources (HR) department that will sort it all out, right? *wobbles hand*~~~ish...

Ah, no-no-no! An eight storey building, all one company, right? Right? Wrong. Each division is a separate entity with its own HR. Only 45 people in our sub-company. One lady doing it all. Sigh. Corporations these days, what can you do?

Yet E@L's PEP was on the cusp of expiring. He had until Friday.

Our lone HR lady had faxed the paperwork to the Ministry of Manpower (MOM) three weeks ago. We all figured it was going through the internal machinery; chuffa-luffeling through those pipes behind the walls; turning under the power of springs and cogs; sucked up by singing vacuums; whirring dizzily through the typewriters; faxes and teletext machines, concentrated on by bespectacled men in suits in Dickensian offices; with cowering amanuenses scribbling down the wisdom of great men's opinions on the suitability of foreign talent (FT) these days; photocopied here and there; stamped by officials with their square Chinese name stamps and their round Chinese company stamps; initialed by execs; digitalisised [sic] and whisked as fast as electrons into databases and random access memories (RAM) (And then, one day, I got in!); glowing on tri-colored crystal displays; duly filed and uploaded; dutifully backed-up; emailed and copied to all; archived; printed; stored; checked and sorted; all done and approved.

Just waiting for the call.

~~~~~~~

However.

On Wednesday, still no news. E@L was at the ANZAC dawn service (no, shamefully, he was fast asleep) and hence late for work. The HR lady and E@L's office manager (OM) had been checking online for his application's progress through the MOM and thought it rather ... strange ... disconcerting ... that there was no record of E@L's application at the MOM's on-line, check your status, don't bother us we're busy, information site.

"We can't get in, to check the progress. There is no record of your application having been filed," they (HR lady and OM) told him as he placed his kopi (upsize, still warm, carried all the way from Tampines Central Mall) on his office desk. He stood erect, his fists on the desk in front of him, looking sternly over his still-slightly fogged (aircon -> 100% humidity -> air-con) sunglasses. He tried to look like a bigwig who was going to say something serious. HR lady was fidgety. She was apologetic and looking awkward. Perhaps she was worried than E@L would be upset. Mmmm, thought E@L, and HR lady waited, turning her head slightly side to side, (she's not from the sub-continent), dancing from foot to foot...

"Mmmm", said E@L. "Without that employment pass (EP) I'm grounded, work-wise, right?" She nodded. Thinks: OK, that's it, down tools, work finished, no visa, no more slaving over a hot tablet playing Words With Friends in the office. He'd have to do that all that tuff stuff by the pool at E@LGHQ instead.

"Whatever," shrugged E@L. It sounded a good deal to him, as he repacked his man-bag with Samsung 7.7 Tab (new toy, not really happy, font-size too small), his Kindle, reading glasses and a fifth of bourbon. "Let me know."

"Ah, no, you can still work, at least until Friday. I am sure we can get a 30 day extension. But you will have to go online to cancel your current PEP." That might, she said, sort out the some issues, like with overstaying his visa. But he needed a SingPass.

A what?

He needed to register and obtain a password (forgotten it already) that will allow him to access the government's many sites that are interactive, where official things can be, um, interacted with. Like cancelling PEPs for example. He took an hour off and wandered to the CPF building where he could check in with a little old lady (LOL) at the SingPass desk to obtain this on-line avatar. FIN (no idea) number of his PEP, passport sighted and a new password (he has so many different passwords - not, he has two and no idea which this one is) was on its way. She looked up, smiled, and said he could now log-in and bring down the structure of the entire electronic edifice of Singapore should he so desire. Or just cancel his PEP.

Back to the office and puts fresh kopi, upsize, on the desk. Log-ins. Follow instructions, as printed out by HR lady.

"There is no record of an application for a replacement EP. Please enter a valid reason for PEP cancellation," said the computer screen. Valid reasons? E@L has not finished his contract of employment and leaving the country. He has not lost his PEP. He is not pregnant. WTF?

Mmm. Back to paragraph one.

What to do? If nothing came through by Friday, E@L would become an "overstayer" and essentially a criminal in the eyes of Singapore's notoriously forgiving uncompromising judiciary. The fine? The cane? The noose? Even worse, his BigCompany(tm) could get fined, and they don't want that says HR lady. And E@L would have a black mark on his passport for sure. Overstaying is not an option. Must get an extension or do that visa run on Friday.

Travel-wise, (for work) even with an extension, temporarily, he is screwed. He'd have to hand over the current (expired) PEP at outmigration and come back in on the white entry form for a maximum of 3 months of doing nothing - on a tourist visa - as no work is allowed (unless you are run by a snake-head in orchard Towers or Geylang). Work-wise, maybe some gardening coming up.

PR lady and OM were on the phone all day (well, three or four calls) and kept getting no help at all from the MOM Help Center. Eventually someone twigged that the PEP work visa renewals are done manually - there was none of the above-spoofed electronic complexity. Further investigations showed that the file was sitting in someone's in-tray. Had been for weeks. And today was that person's day off. IKYN.

Sigh.

E@L was on the web almost instantly seeking a solution to this devastating dilemma. It was a terrible situation, the world was falling down around his ears, and all other senses and body-parts related to his head. OMG! E@L was in a frantic panic!

He had to make an urgent decision! Book a flight for Phuket or Hua Hin? Maybe Koh Samui. Bali? Cebu? How could he decide at short notice? Either that or skip to the Malaysian border at the causeway, hand in his PEP card, as mentioned, play a GOG (so much cheaper than as a non-PR in Singapore), fill in a white tourist form, as mentioned, and all would cool. Except work.

~~~~~~~~

Eventually, early Thursday, HR lady got through to the hyper-efficient doofus at the MOM (in this country which is a paragon and bench-mark of efficiency world-wide) who had overlooked the urgency of E@L's PEP application. He, for only a man could fuck things up as grandly and as casually as this, banged a few contact points on his keyboard and the required information was officially in progress.

This meant E@L could go in to MOM (in person) on Friday and pick up the Temporary 30 Day Extension for both his work visa and something for the immigration people.

(Sigh. E@L had been planning to work from "home" on Friday. He had organized with some friends to head to Marina Bay Gold Club (MBGC) for an expensive GOG first thing in the morning! Cancelled now!)

OM went with him. Appointment was in the afternoon. He could have played the GOG after all!

Look at all fancy chairs for the staff, said OM. E@L thought they looked like Aerons, certainly something Hermann Millerish. OM tells E@L that the enormous amount of money (from PR and citzens' CPF no doubt) spent last year on seats for bums was quite controversial at the time. They are Hermann Millers. E@L paid more for a non-Miller. Damn.

Temporary visa notes handed over quite quickly by another LOL, no smile this time, but E@L wondered if those comfy chairs were not part of the problem. He knows that lazing back on them is immensely, emotionally soothing (he had lazed, emotionally soothed, amazed, on Aeron chairs in the Philips office in Hong Kong all those years ago). Had Mr Paperwork-In-In-tray been asleep? Maybe, like E@L, he was internally retired.

~~~~~~~~

Notification of approval of his work pass came through this Thursday, 6 days after the PEP period ended, a month after the application was submitted. The PEP was, as E@L mentioned in para one, a 5 year pass. It turns out that this can only be given once. It has to be replaced (if the application is accepted) by a conventional EP.

This time E@L was only granted a 1 year EP? WTF? He will have to go through this again in 12 months. It's almost like Singapore doesn't want E@L to stay!

~~~~~~~~

Perhaps he should apply for PR to avoid this threatened annual thing?

While one of E@L's buddies, who is essentially a pauper, was denied, several of E@L's better paid buddies have been granted PR easily. A few years ago this was. They walked into PR-hood as if MOM was giving away quasi-citizenship with MacDonald's Happy Meals at that time.



But he it is getting harder and harder to obtain PR these days, despite the Gahmen's own recommendations that more and more FT and PR are required up for a declining population (or to make more kids?). And not unsurprisingly there continues to be quite a controversy (nicely understated by mrbrown) about dilution of the Singaporean population and its (Chinese?) identity.

(This is not a Singapore-only debate. World-wide, easing of immigration laws thanks to the need of corporations [those who truly run the world, not governments] in globalization campaigns for easy flow of workers, has led to increasing conflicts, calls for isolationism and a sometimes vicious backlash against those who support immigration. These attitudes are prevalent in Australia too [a nation of genocidal immigrants], where refugees on leaky boats are hassled and turned back, and where Pauline Hanson gets elected to State Parliament?)

Anyway, EP or PR, it gets complicated.

E@L

Carry That Weight

The Singaporean Chinese owner/manager (which? both?) of a certain riverside bar in Singapore was sitting with The BiTP* at one of the aluminium (or are they wood?) outdoor tables, sporting a blue baseball cap that he kept adjusting on his head, and wearing a pale tee-shirt with a small Manchester City FC logo just above the left breast. The BiTP (Bruce and E@L in this instance) were closing the place, as they say, at just after 3am.

E@L didn't take in all the initial conversation, not completely (it was 3am after all), but he believes insert name, (also forgotten) splits his time between here and, was it Toronto? [Jesus, did E@L get anything?] The manager, let's call him Terry, didn't seemed fazed by the time, so Bruce and E@L were able to cadge yet another last G&T before the bar-staff pulled the shutters completely down and all left. (Bruce was on the verge of getting one bar girl's phone number, but another had him well pinned for the cad he can be [is].) The bar manager, a narrow thing who always wears a bikini top under her dark singlet, was languidly perched on the back of a chair she had reversed on the fourth side of the table. She was listening in and laughing at Bruce's lines and rejoinders to Terry's, and, with that bright grin and attentive nod and conspiratorial eyebrow raise, E@L was in no doubt she was wishing that we would all just shut the fuck and go home. But as Terry was with us, she had no option but to join and wait it out.

They kept chatting about things E@L has no knowledge of, nor opinion on, such as English football (soccer!) and, with Bruce being a mad Manchester United fanatic, and with ManU and City fighting it out over top spot in EFL... When he says 'they were chatting', E@L really means Bruce and Terry were good-heartedly (but teeth-clenchedly) jousting with each other about the season's up and down, highlighting the other's Downs and promoting their own Ups.

Maybe, at one point, the topic had turned to the FnB business, because something roused E@L enough for him to interject a line on how he is poised to become a squidillionare, if his private shares in Wooloomooloo (opening soon in Singapore, folks) keep capitalizing up. This turned Terry's attention to him for the first time. Terry paused.

(Fat chance of E@L becoming disgustingly rich. Some may consider him halfway there already - he's got the disgusting part down nicely.)

"Look at that belly, man!" says Terry, reaching from where he was perched - fit, alert (maybe a little bit pissed) and erect - on his aluminium (or are they wood?) chair to where E@L could barely maintain any plane approaching the vertical on his, and he patted the protuberant magnificence of the legendary E@L paunch, thrice. "You gotta do something about that belly.

"You gotta lose some weight. You are carrying too much weight. It's bad for you. Man! You gotta lose a lot!"

E@L knows what you are all thinking, that this is going to be a blog post about the difficulties of disposing of the bucket of crunchy pulp that was all that remained of Terry after E@L responded to his comments, but rest assured. E@L is used to this stuff. It's water of a fat duck's back now.**

(T'was not always thus. E@L is not going to rehash the arguments and elaborations and the multiple diversions in that post. OK maybe a bit...)

So E@L just nodded and smiled and said, "Yes, don't I know it!"

Yeah, of course E@L knows. As if E@L wasn't told a hundred fucking times a fucking day in a fucking hundred different fucking ways. Get over it, E@L thinks. I'm fat, I know, I know I'm fat and I know you know I'm fat. Just shut the fuck up about it. You have terrible teeth. You have a tic whereby you can't stop touching your baseball cap. Shut the fuck up.

~~~~~~~

Do you know why E@L mentioned this incident, and the one linked to above, among the many others like them in his eight (8, count 'em) years here? Before he be accused of being specifically anti-Singaporean let it be known that the only place no-one comments on his weight and/or shape in is America, and not because Americans are inherently more polite. But because they are FUCKING FAT SLOBS, like E@L.

Why mention it? Because it contrasts quite well with the comments he has been hearing from his friends in the last few weeks.

"You're looking good E@L, You lost weight, yeah?"

"Girlfriend says you are looking well, and wants to know if you have lost weight."

Three or four times, with slight variations, on that theme. Yes, E@L has lost weight. Quite a substantial amount. Well, 'substantial' is a relative term.

~~~~~~~

Jan 2 2011. That's kgs folks, not lbs.

Always a peak period, post Xmas, etc... but scarey enough to set E@L on a something of a mission. He has spoken to you guys about negative incentives before. Not disincentives, which necessarily demotivate you, but incentives which are stimulated by a tangible, painful, negative outcome.

"Lose weight or you'll die", might be considered to be one? Right? No.

"Yeah, sure Doc, fatty liver, yada yada, heard that one before." But it is too vague and generalised a threat. The empirical cause-effect link, while undeniably there, is just not specific enough.

Lose weight or you will die, but of what? Of old age? Of necrotising fasciitis? Of your car getting stuck in the middle of a level crossing as a train approaches and a flaming plane plummets from the sky right at you carrying Al Queda terrorists, one of whom unbeknownst to his terrorist allies, not to mention the crew and passengers, accidentally contracted Ebola virus while training the Congolese Rebel Army only last week... Yeah, OK, I'll watch out for that, says E@L. Thinks: and so those people all had to die because E@L didn't lose weight? Oh the humanity!

Stay the same weight, get heavier, lose weight, watch Final Destination III, and guess what? You're still going to die. Everyone dies in the long jog, no news there.

However, "Lose 15kgs by the end of April or I'll kill you with this formidably large weapon", that is more what E@L is talking about. It sets a specific goal and ties it to a specific, um, reward - brains splattered everywhere.

In his present case, the less violent negative incentive is some cash, currently held by Bruce, and if E@L fails to loose those 15kgs, that cash, S$5,000, will go to a Traditional Chinese Medicine hospital or university of Bruce's choice.

AAaaaarrrgggghhhhhh!

The prospect of such a heinous anti-Enlightenment forfeit has sent E@L running moving quickly to his cupboards and fridge in order to discard everything vaguely carbohydrate-based into the recyclable waste disposal bins, conveniently located for E@L to increase his activity quotient in the car-park down two flights of steps - good exercise. No rice, no spuds, no white bread (he never eats white bread anyway, soft and mushy - yuck!) and, shudder, no alcohol.

No white rice, and E@L lives in Asia? Tough, yes, it is tough. Some places do serve brown rice as an alternative to, well, to none.

No alcohol, and E@L is an Expat? Tough in-fucking-deed!

~~~~~~

The date for this 15kg loss has pushed back to his birthday, late June, on the not unreasonable grounds that too rapid a weight-loss might reflect an unsustainable period of deprivation and starvation that would quickly end and the weight would yo-yo back up, and even higher.

Whereas a six-month plan could promote a more moderate and sustainable change of life-style.

E@L spend most of February on a zero-alcohol binge. March, a few wines here and there, April, not so much on the wagon and running behind it, but hand on the rail, ready to jump back on at any time. It was in this period that E@L realised a strong association with alcohol and some gastrointestinal problems which, unlike his normal oversharing attitude, he is unwilling to explain - not time for the gory details. He was pleasantly surprised to find these chronic issues disappear for the period in question. Okay, E@L is allergic to alcohol. His intestines don't like it. Lesson there. Can E@L learn it?

The knowledge that he will suffer more than just a hangover has had a considerable impact on his ability to keep the frequency of boozing with the BiTP down. It has helped immensely that many of the other BiTP were on a quiet February as well. E@L generally doesn't drink spirits, beyond the "I'm too distended for more beer, I'll have a G&T" stage (such as 3am. Hey, we've all been there) so even though he has a duty-free store full of spirits in his Antique(tm) Chinese (tm) shelves, these offered no great temptation. Wine? Well, he's just come back from a Barossa wine splurge, so this was tough, wine fridge full to bursting with amazing old vine Shiraz's and GSMs, and you name it. Let them age a bit more, let's pick one every now and then, for a special occasion.

And he has stood his ground. Running behind the wagon while standing his ground, note, and not running to the loo.

So was E@L taking commercial so-called diet-drinks for his social fluids instead? When his former flatmate Izzy send him a link about the counter-intuitive dangers of his favorite low-calorie, non-alcoholic imbibement, Coke Zero (and its ilk), he has gone off that sort of stuff as well. More tea, (green, ginger, English Breakfast), coffee no change, and at the pub it was lemon, lime and bitters with soda water. To drink at night, lime and bitters in soda water.

~~~~~~~

And Mademoiselle, the envelope please...

April 21 2011

Yeah, the other scales died in the interim (did not break apart, smart-arse!) so one can't be too exact about the delta here, but the irrefutable fact is that E@L is down close enough to 12kgs. That's 26lbs for the two readers E@L has in the States. Another way of looking at it is that he is down by 10% on his previous weight. This is lowest he has been since a drastic reduction (to 114.5kgs) for his 30 year school reunion in 2005. He was still told he was fucking fat though, by someone who was a fatty at school, now thin - rudeness is not exclusively Singapore thing after all.)

Probably that loss is bit faster than the revised plan, but he has plateaued for a while, so it remains encouraging that, come "all the fives", E@L might be able to purchase some clothes off the rack.

E@L won't bore you with any more details of what he is eating more of and less of, but one of the big surprises for E@L in all of this, is that he does have the will-power after all to do something... something at all.

He just has to make the decision, finally, then believe that he made the decision. So often it is a pretend decision, one he knows he will break (write that novel) like a traditional New Years Resolution.

But anything he wants to do, he can, if he does, as they say, set his mind to it. And now he knows he can follow through on it. This is not Tony Robbins bullshit here, this is E@L learning the hard (and cheaper) way of what great achievements he is capable if he could just shut the fuck up and do them.

Two months to go.

~~~~~~~~~



E@L


* BiTP = Boys in The Pub. One of Indy's. Remember Indy?

** His favorite incident was back in 1998. E@L was probably the largest man in Vietnam at the time. As he got out of the taxi at the gate of his designated hospital, he saw that an old man, who had been sitting down doing nothing (maybe playing checkers with bottle tops) like the twenty thousand other people along the streets they had driven, was looking back at him in the car window. The man arose from his stunted, square, blue-plastic stool (you know the ones, right?) and, still in a slight arthritic stoop, opened E@L's door for him. He was smiling toothlessly. E@L thanked thanked the man as best he could: "Cah-mon, cah-mon, thank you." But that is not the incident...

A woman and her children were negotiating the path of chairs and old men and irregular paving as E@L alighted, when one of the children stopped. In awe, his face a picture of wonder and disbelief, he instinctively moved towards E@L as if in a trance, with his right hand forward... he rubbed E@L's belly in a circle two times before his mother dragged him away by his other arm. He must have thought E@L was the Buddha made incarnate. 5555!

Cash Cow Shit

Those of you with your fingers on the pulse, your noses to the grindstone, your feet on the ground, your heads in the clouds, your eyes on the the prize, your tongues kept civil in your heads and yours heads not halfway up your arse will be aware that E@L has a controlling small interest in a steakhouse restaurant group in Hong Kong called Wooloomooloo. This is not a party political broadcast, whoof, me?, but please go to the restaurants and bars there and spend your entire life savings at your earliest convenience. Take a loan, spend more. Speak to our financial consultant.

Anyway, point of story. (Anyway, any sentence that begins with "anyway" shows sloppy, sloppy, sloppy thinking. AKA: too much red wine.) Point of story.

E@L was in Hong Kong last week (working hard, hush your mouth) and enjoyed himself immensely. Please don't start E@L on his preferences between Hongkers and Singapore. (Ten blogposts started and abandoned in frustration already this week.) On any given hour of any given day, the answer might be 180deg from what it was last time you asked. So what did he do?

He had a quiet night in Wanchai with Bruce(!)...

He took a stroll up the gweilo, ahem, friendly region Queens Rd West in of Sai Wan (did anyone even notice there was Westerner there? No. - c.f. The Glamour, Christopher Priest, 1984) and took in some the hectic, hectic, no-time-to-think ambiance of that part of town.

Awesome.

~~~~~~

Anyway (oops), he visited several (3/4) of the Woolies (as we affectionately call the money-spinning cash cow) over the course of his five day stay on the barren little rock (as we affectionately call Hong Kong) and has some more photos to share...

View from the rooftop at Woolies at Wanchai, on Hennessy.

View across to Hong Kong from Woolies Prime in The One, Nathan Rd - E@L and an old HK friend, MJ. View is bit misty, you can't see the top of IFC2, but still, pretty frackin' awesome, what? Fireworks and light-show every night at 8pm. The bar area, with it's jaw-dropping balcony view seems very popular for some reason, and we couldn't get a seat there after our meal. Great! Spend more money!

~~~~~~~

Anyway (FUCK!), we they are opening a Singapore Woolies in June, our their first international venture. Tell your friends. E@L went today to the third floor at the Swissotel (The Stamford), at Raffles City (not Raffles hotel, not Raffles Shopping Arcade, not Raffles Hospital, not Raffles Place) to observe the current state of affairs. At the moment, it's an area of concrete and brick and steel pipes and open windows. (Thankfully it doesn't rain much in Singapore... Yeah, right.) But mid-June or so... look out!

Here are some shots out of the window. Mmm, not bad.

That road you can see next to the sports ground transforms into part of the racing circuit for the Singapore F1 GP every September. (Damn. Was hoping for a nice quiet venue. Bummer. And no, we are not taking booking yet, even for the ownersshareholders.)

That crazy what's-that-on-top-of-those-three-buildings thing is part of the Marina Bay Sands Hotel, next to the casino integrated resort on, well, Marina Bay. Fireworks and light-show every now and then. Theatre complex, convention centre, 2,000 plus hotel rooms, etc... all right there or just a small walk away. Very good spot in other words.

OK, good view but it's not as spectacularly brilliant as the view from TST to Hong Kong Island, even so it's not that bad. For Singapore.

~~~~~~~

So anyway, after all this, E@L heads out for dinner at another restaurant to meet up with some friends, Jennifer and David (real names, to indict the innocent). We went to Balzac, new place in The Rendezvous. French place. Absinthe cocktails sort of place. Beef cheeks in red wine jus sort of place. Incomprehensible French word for soufflé (already a French word!) sort of place.

We knock back our cheap Côtes du Rhône vin ordinaire (still quite nice, Grenache/Syrah) and chat with each other and with the staff (quiet night). Jennifer is in Singapore for the Food and Hotel Association expo at Changi and she notices that the chef (walking past) has a halyard around his neck from that very same FHA exhibition. She calls him over for une petite conversaysheon and things start rolling from there. A little bit of extra service, some more bread, please try the absinthe cocktail, have the unpronounceable chocolate soufflé...

Then David gets a phone call - "Yeah, sure, bring them over..." A friend of his, who doesn't drink, has been at a French wine thingummie. He drops by a few minutes later with three bottles of already opened but barely tasted French wine - St Julien, etc... Not crap at all. Well into three figures, each bottle.

The sommelier, after seeing this impressive delivery, and noting that we hadn't fallen over unconscious after several of those absinthe (they were 99% cognac, it turned out, pfft!) cocktails, opts to bring over three clean glasses for us. But wait, there's more. With the first bottle done, the St Julein, the sommelier tempts us with a taste of some of his biodynamic French wine as a comparison.

In fact, fuck it, he leaves the remaining 3/4 of the bottle with us. This wine is from the biodynamic Rhone vineyard of the dynamic M. Chapoutier. Last time E@L tasted one of these was at a degustation at the way expensive but impressive Andre restaurant with the Asia manager of M.Chapoutier, Stephane, sitting at the table next to us. (One of the drops we had that night was $750 a bottle, E@L found out later!)

~~~~~~

Biodynamic.

E@L thought, like you, that this is some fancy way of saying organic. Right? Sure, I'll drink, thought E@L. They finished the free bottle, David was leaving with the other two (also Bordeaux or that ilk) bottles to take home as some of us (not E@L obviously) have to work on the morrow, so we settled the bill and left.

~~~~~

Biodynamic: 9 points...

1: Bury cowshit in a cow's horn in the soil over winter. Add to compost.
2: Bury ground quartz in a cow's horn over summer. Add to compost.
3: Hang yarrow flowers in a stag's bladder though summer and bury them over winter.
4: Chamomille, ditto in cow intestine.
5: Stinging nettles, bury in summer.
6: Bury oak bark the skull of a farm animal over winter.
7: Hang dandelion flowers in cow mesentry over summer, bury over winter, dig up in spring.
8: Spray valerian flower juice into the compost.
9: Give vines a nice cup of tea. Put fermented common horsetail (equisetum arvense) directly on to the vines or use a manure.

IKYN.

~~~~~

Heard enough?

E@L's opinion of this bioinsanity and its biodymaniacs? Have a guess. Why not have the vines do yoga? Why not give them coffee high-colonics? Why not allow them to discover themselves in an ashram in Goa?

Take E@L back to the plain old vinodiversity of the Barossa, please, please, please.

Fucking bionutters. Wine was OK, but fuck, do you really need this bullshit to wash down the cowshit?

E@L

p.s. eat at Wooloomooloo any chance you get. E@L wants to be a money-spun cash-cowshitillionaire!

Hongkers Time

E@L feels comfortably at home with the jarring discomfort as his rattling red taxi bounces from tram-track to barely-repaired pothole down Queens Road West towards his hotel in Sai Wan. (Sai Wan? you scream, WTF are doing out there?).

He is trying to get a 3G signal is what. What is with this place and roaming?

~~~~~~

E@L may have time to relate somethings about this breif sojourn to his old stomping grounds tonight (it is lunch-time now, nearly the hour upon which he has to turn up at work - a seminar in one of the big hospitals just up the hill.)

~~~~~~

Time. How to measure it? Why to measure it? E@L was on the walking machine thingie at the gym for the last 4000 drops of water, half an incense stick and several cms fall in a iron ball attached to an escapement mechanism listening to this...

IOT with Melvyn Bragg

Measurement of Time 29 Mar 12
Thu, 29 Mar 12
Duration:
42 mins
Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the measurement of time. Early civilisations used the movements of heavenly bodies to tell the time, then mechanical clocks emerged in Europe in the medieval period. For hundreds of years clocks were inaccurate but now atomic clocks are capable of keeping time to a second in 15 million years. Melvyn Bragg is joined by Kristen Lippincott, Former Director of the Royal Observatory, Greenwich; Jim Bennett, Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Jonathan Betts, Senior Curator of Horology at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

Podcast - 20MB)

~~~~~~~

Horology. There's a term to conjure with.

OK talk to you a leap-second later, your favorite horologist,

E@L

The Bruce Bits, etc...

I am currently trawling through my old blog (again), as well is this one, looking for bits and pieces I can cobble together - not necessarily into anything coherent or internally consistent - something about Bruce, and/or taxis, and/or the Mouse, and/or Kopi, and/or hotel breakfasts and toast...

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There are maybe 700 posts and perhaps 250,000 words over there place (approaching 2 milllion hits btw) and with the 740 post here, god knows how many words.

There must be something I can do with it all (as people have been saying for years) rather burn my few remaining hours over something new that is not taking the shape I want it to.

I will need to redo a great deal of the earlier risqué E@L stuff retrospectively as Bruce stories, to give a semblance of character continuity.

Plot? Don't make me laugh.

Watch this space. (If I don't run out of steam...)

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Do you think I should I should charge you guys for the effort I am taking to do this, as Dick Headley does, or let it run free amongst the wolves on the internet marketplace, as Mercer Machine does?

E@L

Dedication

My occasional flatmate C, a lady-friend from HK, [settle down troops, nothing going on] keeps a cartoon journal. Everyday she draws hilarious little doodles in a notepad given to her by her daughter for Christmas. Nothing much, just fifteen minutes of cute cartoons inpired by her day. A funny pic of C with an appropriate emoticon face, a talk bubble with an explanation or an exclamation, and the day has been analysed, sorted.

Nothing necessarily big. Just something, every day.

Neato.

She has not missed a day since the beginning of the year.

Wish I had that dedication.

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And as my attempts to play that $180million app Draw Something have shown, I can't draw cartoons either.

Doomed.

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No examples of either, sorry.

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In other news, my favorite opening few lines of a novel have changed. No longer are these classic vying for top spot: "It was a starkers night in the dorm;" "riverrun, past Eve and Adams from swerve of shore to bend of bay brings us by a commodius vicus of circumnavigation back to Howth Castle and environs" (or something like that); "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time;" "One morning Grigor Samsor woke from a night of restless dreams to find he been transformed into a giant cockroach;" etc...

All are usurped by Robert Walser's opening two sentences of his 1925 novel, The Robber.


"Edith loves him. More on this later."


How awesomely fuck-you-literary-conventions-creative-writing-101 is that?

According to the blurb, Walser wrote this in almost indecipherable microscript. A first draft presumably; but Walser never bothered to transcribe it into a fair copy because he did not plan on publishing it. It was not "deciphered" and published in German until 1972 and finally translated to English in 2000 (review linked above).

Neato.

He was confined in a mental institution for the last 30 years or so of his life, at first of his own volition, as they say (which he says a lot), but latterly by Doctor's orders - although perhaps undeservedly. He went for a walk, and wrote something, every day. One day, on his walk, he fell dead in the snow. He didn't write much that day I guess.

You might recall that I had this beautiful Walser quote on my old blog: "We don't need to see anything out of the ordinary. We already see so much."

E@L

(I have blogged about him once before (back when I was funny) when I was in Zurich on the way to a ski holiday.)

The Anthropology Of Cliché

OK, I know I suck at chess. I can never get above a 1400 rating on Gameknot, and they have the friendliest rating system ever. (1200 is absolute beginner.)

But what I excel at is buying books, and buying chess books has been not been exempt from the weird behavioural quirk that, I find out today, might be termed my illusio. ("It's the investment people make in the activities that give meaning to their lives, their committment to them." Something beyond receiving blowjobs I guess.) I think my interest and skills in chess may have more of the dellusio to them than any illusio, ho ho, however.

Part of my 4,000 point plan in reducing my dependency upon the physical, hard-cover, soft-cover, awkward to hold, printed word (I just can't fire up the passion for my Kindle, it's so fucking impersonal. Handy. But fucking impersonal.) is to... Stop. Buying. Books. Point 354 is to buy fewer books.

It's like when you're on a diet (I am on a diet) and you see a cookie. You know that that cookie is jammed packed with 1200 calories of evil deliciousness, right? So if you eat it, wham bam, straight through your overly-efficient starvation-keyed metabolism and it's on your waistline (if you still have any part of your body that can be reasonably identified as a waist.) There should be a calorie trading scheme. Or a some spooky mystic weird universe in which not eating that cookie that you have in front of you, not just results in zero calories added but also is calorie-traded in such a way that you lose the fat version of 1200 calories just by not eating it.

So you eat it one time; you don't eat it the next time. Balances out, right?

With books the same. You see a book you absolutely must have (the complete poems of Sappho, for example) even though there is zero chance of you ever opening it again after those few seconds of browsing in the Paragon Kinokuniya, and thinking how cool, but you don't buy it… and some space appears on your ridiculously orverflowing shelves. That makes room for the purchase that you do make - Counterplay, An Anthropologist At The Chessboard, by Robert Desjarlais (and I am presuming that Desjarlais is the anthropologist in question) - OK becasue now there is space. Oops the fucking Sappho anthology got in there as well. Lesbians, can't stop 'em. As in people form Lesbos. According to some of these verses, it was men that got her going! (Ah, no was thinking of the Lesbia lady of Catullus's poems - you know, "the words of women should be writ on running water" guy, and yes I have an anthology of his as well. Know fuck all about poetry. Right up there with chess. Plenty of books though.)

Anthropology. Chess. Cool.

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I've been working on a particularly difficult presentation for most of today - I have no idea how the machine works, and I have to explain it to 37 others for most of Monday - when I wasn't buying and not buying books and definitely not eating cookies. Saturday. In Bangkok. Working. Sigh. Again.

At 11pm I drop down to the 24hr restaurant at the front of my hotel, say hello to the old experienced hooker who sits there all day with a large glass of red wine in front of her, poised like Shelob (only Shelob didn't drink wine or fuck people for money), grab a table overlooking the seventh level of Sukhomvit (which Hell can only aspire to) and order a low-carb steak salad and a happy hour, high-carb, beer. Which means two beers. I tear the plastic wrapping from the book, spend three minutes trying to get the statically charged film from my arm hairs (it's like a sticky booger you've rolled up into a ball, just won't flick off your fingertips, just keeps swapping from one to the other) and settle down to enjoy some significant anthropological insights concerning 16 pieces on a 64 square board.

The book seems OK, sure, and after only a few pages I have picked up a few nice quotations and that line about illusio, which I like. We've had Tibetan Buddhist death rites, Philippine head-hunters (from Makati or Anglese City?), Nepalese shamans, GZA from Wu-Tang Clan penning lyrics for his song Queen's Gambit, Marcel Duchamp who "needs a good game of chess like a baby needs a bottle", Simone Weil saying "Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer", Joe the IT engineer who thinks "you've got to be a masochist to want to play competitive chess, T.S Eliot (speaking of poetry), and more... by page 26. Phew.

One slightly sour note hit my (failing) ears back on p9, and that was the phrase: "nexus of people." I felt sure that the idiom was mostly right (I think of nexus as a hub or axis of relationships) it just seemed like an overly twee expression for a guy who had to inform us earlier that illusio is a Latin word. Well, d'uh, so is nexus. Ah, it is probably just me. He also says "cyborgian", so what the hell. Nexus, schme… whatever.

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However - get that gird on your loins people - on p23, this… this… DISASTER of E@L exploding proportions:

"But you don't want to avoid it like the plague, either."

Stunned.

[My emphasis, btw.] Can you believe that this anthropologist was given a book contract? This is 2012, yeah? (I have trouble with dates.) People are smarter now, right? Apart from the logic in the sentence sounding somewhat strange - sort of a double negative* - the fact that he has just used the biggest, worsest, mostest blatantest, fucking cliché EVER is completely stunning (which is why, several sentences ago, I was stunned.)

This is the cliché they warned you about at school, that your mother told you not to accept sweets from. From Strunk and White (I am guessing) to Fowler and Gowers, from Funk and Wagnell's to Beavis and Butthead, the warning is shouted from the tops of various tall places that would act to promote transmission of the voice, this is the cliché to avoid like the, wait for it, plaque on my dentist's wall.

From "nexus" (see, I am a brainy writer) to "avoid it like the plague" (I am the dumbest fuck writer ever and my editor should be sacked.) That is right up there with Dan Brown's classic: "he was beginning to think it was going to be a long night." (Two clichés for the price of several hundred.)

That drunken farang screaming abuse at the sex-workers of the world in a passing tuk-tuk nearly received a free copy of "Counterplay." Not completely free, as I did have to pay for it.

Sigh. Should I stop reading now? Should I quit the book, quaff my beer(s) and get back to my overdue Powerpoint nexus? Sigh.

Well there have been some gems in there. Maybe I'll give the guy another chance, he is only an anthropologist after all. (Recall that in 'Waiting For Godot" the most offensive term Ponzo (was it?) could come up with was 'architect!')

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Bang. Page 27. "…But step inside the place on any weekend and you'll happen upon [groan] a cramped but vital domain of chess praxis."

Is praxis a Latin word, I wonder. (Yes.) (How do you get to Carnegie Hall? Praxis.)

Nexus, followed closely by Praxis. Praxis I shouldn't complain about, it is a word from the soft sciences, but it's all these X words he spouts. They're so unexpected. Inexplicably so.

But I complain, inexorably, I complain. Complaining is my illusio, my praxio, my nexio.

And I buy books. Sometimes I read them. And I fail at chess. Fail badly. Fail more badderly next time. But I hope like hell that as a writer (stop laughing) intractable blogger I am able to step around or subvert many of the major clichés. When I do spot myself using them at face value (I mean, at the value of a face) that is.

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And it's late, and I do be grumpy and the book is OK, I guess, I'm just in a mood because despite telling my colleagues three weeks ago we needed to get stuck into these PPTs… I hadn't done a nexus thing. I'd been, you know, avoiding it.

E@L


* well yeah, it's meant to be a double negative in context. You don't want to skip playing Blitz Chess forever, but, seriously, do you want to chase it like the plague?

The Shadow And The Shadow

It is almost 1 pm. The sun is shining as bright as is astronomically possible. It is a cloudless day. The pale blue water of the swimming pool looks refreshing, cool, inviting, as clear as chlorine and the reflected sky can turn it. Every now and then I leave the shade of the umbrella over the table where I write this. (The text uploads to the Evernote servers automatically, my unmatched prose duplicated into the - impossible 10-years ago, surely - computing cloud, already transported to whatever computers are running at home or at work. Magic really.) I stand at the pool's edge and prepare to disturb the near perfect stillness. The pumps are bubbling small ripples, their tiny coruscations are mirrored through refractions of sunlight to dance on the bottom.

I throw no shadow. Turning my head up so my that vision is vertical, I confirm that the sun is directly overhead. It is the equinox tomorrow. We are ready for the second half of the year, identical but reversed. Six months with the sun casting shadows to the south, six months casting them north.

I dive in with a large splash and my breath stops for a second. It is cool alright. It is refreshing. I surface and gasp a lung full of air. Calmly I swim to the edge and rest my arms on the tiles, lay my head on my elbows and let my body float. It is a fast pool, the water level breaches the edge and trickles past the first row into the slotted drainage tiles that circle the pool, like another perimeter. After my dive they have some heavy work to do.

I am not up to doing laps today. I just want to cool down. I want to get some sun.

I am prepared to allow my body to be bombarded with radiation, happy to have my melanin suck in a barrage of UV. I want a better suntan, not cancer, so there is another layer of absorptive agent, some low-wattage water-resistant sunscreen that takes away most of the UV-B and UV-C, and it shines off my skin, at least those parts I could reach.

As well as punching the keys here, I have been re-reading The Prestige and am still confounded by Christopher Preist's amazing legerdemain. Can Borden (grand-pere - Christian Bale in the movie - and/or grand-fils) bi-locate or does he have an identical twin? Which is The Prestige? Artifice or sorcery?

The movie was on cable the other night and was better than I remember it. Good in fact. (Christopher Nolan, what do you expect?) But it answers the question clearly, which i found disappointing. The novel, as I remember, leaves it tantalizingly ambiguous. Both answers seem correct. This is Priest, his specialty is split and duplicated realities. (And The Affirmation is also about twins.) But I read the novel a while before the film was made and want to brush up on The Pledge, The Pact and The Prestige. (I think is that what they are called. Memory 0, Making It Up 1.) I want to see if I was right about the movie being wrong. If you've been reading here, you know these things are my peeve at the moment.

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As an aside, both my testicles are being crushed by a combination of the twisted polyester trunks that contain them and the hard cushion-less seat. I think I shall get back into the pool when I finish writing these words and sort them out...

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Sunday. And I am out of my bedroom before noon. Unheard of.

I didn't wake to the church bells at 10am, nor to the couple in the flat above going at it - regular as the bells - for their weekly bout of horizontal folk-dancing. But I am awake nevertheless near eleven. There is a sound outside my door. The flat-mate and his girlfriend. I doff the CPAP, turn down the humidifier and off the air-con. (n.b.: Singlish is creeping into my vocab. Lah.) With these domestic ambient-sound generators quiet, I can hear outside my room more clearly. Not that I am eavesdropping, I getting up for my shower and I can hear, that's all.

The girlfriend says something in her high voice, the slightly echoing accent of a Chinese mainlander who has learned her English at a village school and refined it with American boyfriends in Shanghai and now Singapore. Unmistakable. (We've spoken about it around the dinner table before: she is quite aware of its uniqueness and finds our discussions amusing.) I hear the click of her heels as she puts on her shoes, then a clunk as the door closes and I hear my flatmate's footsteps - he has come back in alone. The door to his room closes.

When I come out from my shower to make breakfast, his door is still closed. I crush up some Weet-bix for fibre, lay on a hefty sprinkle of blueberries for their antioxidants, scoop two spoons of unsweetened yoghurt against the looming immanent diabetes and to feed the bowel parasites, and finally a generous trickle of honey because, as mentioned, the yoghurt is unsweetened. I top the bowl with low-fat milk and mush it all together. I see that it is a lovely day. I decide that, in a minute, I will lie by the pool.

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In the water it is majestically pleasant as I rest half-in half-out and contemplate life. Employment. Leisure. Vast wealth and political influence. I have about three of these. I am alive, have a well-paying job and am lost in relaxing reverie in a beautiful swimming pool on a warm and sunny Sunday afternoon in the tropics. On the equator, on the split between north and side, two halves of a global orange. I am not don't-care-what-I-spend wealthy but 5%, you know what I mean. I am smiling, almost laughing at how good I have it. Health? Not so much, admittedly. Enough of that. Denial.

Urine. Back-up. Urgent. I needed to pee. I am too old to let it go here like a child, so I climb out, take a brief de-chlorinating pool-side shower - the pole which holds the shower rose has no shadow either - dry my legs and trunks to minimize dripping (and the possibility of slipping) on the 'marble' floor of the flat and head to the lobby door.

A fat man with thin legs walks towards me. My heart drops a beat, but metaphorically only. The two of us pause. It is my reflection in the glass walls of the condominium's gym. I always surprise myself with this body. I hardly ever recognize it as my own. This unreal reality is not me, for inside is my perception of me and looking out my eyes, these eyes that I can touch (as does the reflection, mimicking me, parodying me) is a strong lad, nineteen, fit from several years of surfing who boasts a large-breasted girl-friend and locks of long springy blonde hair. The ethereal creature in fornt of me now is a lonely, sad old man, albeit with job, alive, good money and otherwise relaxed.

I am in the process of making a new myself in this gym. I have lost nearly 10kgs. I'll never bring that young man back to existence, I know. I am merely trying to reassemble myself as a person who might live longer than the guy on my side of the reflection, as a person who might outlast the current dangerously unfit version of me.

There are a pair of lady's shoes on the stand at the door when I re-enter the apartment. I am struck by this. Where they there when I left to go, ahem, swimming 45 minutes before? I seem to recollect they were, they might have been, but who can trust my memory? They certainly look like the flatmate's girlfriend's shoes. Slight heel, thin straps and sparkly girlish adornments to support her lithe acrobat's body. She must have left them there. Gone off in flip-flops? Unlikely. She only ever came in one pair of shoes, I am sure. I had never seen her in anything but heels like these. One pair at a time. Either she had brought another pair, a twin set, or someone else had left earlier. Who was it? Someone with her voice? Impossible.

I reason that she might have come back while I was at the pool, (submerged or resting, swimming, absorbed my writing or lost in my reading) but the path by the pool was her only access. I hadn't seen her. I'd seen others: the fortunate and rare maids with a day off, heading to Lucky Plaza or to Golden Mile; hookers doing the walk of shame; mum and dad leading the triplets off to their ballet lesson, the identical girls cute as buttons in tutus and white tights - they all wave; but not her.

No, she could not have come back this way. Then, I reason again, less convincingly this time, that she might still be there and it was someone else who had left. But it was her voice at the door earlier, I could swear it on a dozen copies of The Origin Of The Species.

I go into the en-suite of my room, and take a brief, dribbling, unsatisfying piss. My trunks are already wet, so what. Prostate, sigh.

When I come out of my room the flatmate and his girlfriend, whom you will understand I am surprised to see, are at the kitchen door. They smile and say good morning. The flatmate's smile is exceptionally broad. The girlfriend's is more tentative. Is she embarrassed about something?

I say good morning, hesitating for almost a moment too long, and come back out to the pool all confused.

And I have a slight shadow now.

How could she still have been in the room (as the evidence now says she was) and yet outside it as well, leaving the apartment? Was this a trick? Maybe she could bi-locate like Borden in the novel? Ha! Did she have a twin, a sister also trained in the family circus troupe in China since a toddler? Able to fold herself to fit into an impossibly small tube, able to bend backwards way over to touch her feet on the floor in front of her smiling face with her arse resting on the back of her head?

I think of the flatmate's exaggerated smile, a cat and cream smile, and I curse him. That must be it! The perfect threesome!

I dive firmly into the pool making an enormous splash, and underwater I scream into a stream of bubbles all of my envy and frustration.

(OK it was raining the day I took the photo, this is not today. Though of course it rained today as well.)

E@L



[Hey flatmate. You know the girlfriend I made up for this story is not the girlfriend lying on the couch with you now, right? Or her twin. Not either of them. Don't hit me!]

I <3 Singapore - ish.

This post is not *just* a shameless piece of self-aggrandizement (see prevous post) but after nearly 8 years here, E@L is forced to admit that he agrees with the opinions expressed in the following article.

Ten Reasons Why I Love Singapore.

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Six or seven years ago E@L would have ripped this article to shreds or at least rewritten it, emphasizing the negative aspects of the Singapore attributes that have been given a jocularly positive spin in this article.

Something like:

1. Efficiency
Yes, slave labour, stimulated by the threat of being burned with a hot iron or thrown out a 19th floor window, or merely by the promise from a snakehead people-trafficker of a salary marginally above the starvation levels of poverty you have left your family to wallow in at home (c.f. Slumdog Milionaire), will give you that.

2. Late-night Singapore
Late? LATE? You've never been to Hong Kong then. E@L once heard the expression: "If New York is the city that never sleeps, Hong Kong is the city that doesn't even blink." Singapore, even at its liveliest - when kids in pyjamas are playing in the Clarke Quay fountain at 11pm - can't match it.

3. Anytime, anywhere
Nothing that you want. Everything that you already have. Such as "Singapore is a Fine City" fridge magnets. Grant you the omnipresent hookers though.

4. The small details matter
Like the 20c charge for the wet napkin, whether you use it or not.

5. Cheap parking
OK, parking is cheaper than Sydney, but that's not saying much. The COE ensures that rational people avoid private transport. Only the poor are gullible enough to go into massive debt to buy a status symbol at twice its actual price, whereas the comfortably well off (i.e. E@L) call a taxi.

6. Reliable service
Reliably rude, off-hand and dismissive.

7. Changi Airport
Terminal 3. WTF. Built on a scale that anticipates the days when humans will be 30ft tall and can walk 2km in 7.8secs from a standing start. Ever lost luggage coming into Singapore? The people in the miniscule Lost Luggage Cupboard are usually asleep or absent or both. Never encountered such an inefficient bunch, and E@L has had lost luggage all over the place.

8. Predictable weather
God is laughing. Ha.

10. A multi-cultural city
Bloody whingeing Australians everywhere you look.


E@L

sgBlogs

E@L was wondering recently about where all the Singapore Expat blogs had gone, the few that were extant back when we all (MercerMachine and E@L) attended the Blogger.SG.2005 seem to have evaporated. Just as have many of his favorite political bloggers (MollyMeek and Xenoboy). He was looking for other Singapore blogs for that earlier post and found this site: sgBlogs for what it is worth.

He is not sure if people still troll for new blogs. E@L for one has enough to read already thank very much. But nevertheless Expatalarge is not their list so maybe a few potential abusers and flamers are missing to chance to call him a racist, xenophobic, foreign-talent sponger.

It's true that Singapore is not main focus these days. Nothing is: E@L is both myopic and...the other one...exophthalmic? no!...presbyopic, when it comes to blog topics. Eclectic, that's the word. No, unfocussed is the word. However, as he has noted earlier, his documentation of Orchard Towers with Bruce on the prowl is one of his most popular posts, and that's about Singapore.

Now that SarongPartyGirl=Izzy is no longer his flatmate, has moved to Holland and effectively stopped blogging there's not so much second-hand sexual excitement going down at E@LGHQ either.

E@L is not sure if he will meet the criteria of being Singapore "focused" anymore. In his employment E@L is responsible for the entire South-East Asian region, with very little Singapore contact these days (not that he ever had much), so he is more likely to find things that shock and horrify him elsewhere in SEA. He has abused Singapore enough for the moment and is quite inured to many of its peccadilloes. These only grate when people are new to town (nearly 8 years thank you very much, send flowers if you will) or, for him, whenever there is an elect...[sneeze - aaahh-ahfascism]...ion looming

So anyway, if the editors are agreeable that the historically Singaporean focus early on in E@L's blog, particularly in its early incarnation, Expat-at-large, back when all things Singaporean irritated him, qualify him, they might, just might, let him onto the list, and ye who search for blogs from this region might find E@L and send his stats way up there... to somewhere just below Xiaxue...

Not that he gives a rat's arse. (Then how come so many of his recent blogs have stats focused?)

Sigh

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E@L is attempting once again to get onto his extended semi-fictional documentation of the last 14 years. BTW.


E@L

[Addendum: all I've got out of this so far is getting Xiaxue on my FB feed.]

Brains Of The Family

-- My brother - you know Charles? - he comes up so many crack-pot ideas, I just don't listen to him anymore. He's...

-- Yes, so you've said.

-- He's always finding some new thing or other, going to change the world, make his fortune. He knows...

-- Indeed.

-- He knows I love him dearly, he's doing his best with limited resources, but I try to not take any notice of his silly talk. Today, guess what he came at me with? He told me had invented a device for cleaning the brain. Can you believe it! Cleaning the brain!

-- Whatever next? Cleaning the brain!

-- When he goes on with this rot, I pretend I can't hear him... Just let it wash over me.... He can talk if he wants, but I'm not listening...

-- Did he tell you how it works?

-- Just goes in one ear and out the other...


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I tried really, really hard not to press "publish", but I yam whose I yam... and that's

E@L

Fuck

Exactly what 54yo E@L didn't need to read after 5 weeks of dieting (down 6 kgs) and massively increased exercise regime. From nothing to 1:30hr in the gym four times a week and 1hr+ walking in the off days and 30mins swimming when the sun is shining and he is working from home. Long term benefits, according to this article - fuck all.

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Cardiac Risk: Late repentance is useless

Whoever cuts their cardiac risk factors often believes that they are then on the safe side. Yet this sense of safety is a deception for the middle-aged: according to U.S. authors, five-or ten-year cardiac risk may then be reduced, but over a lifetime period it isn't.

Excess body weight, lack of exercise, stress, smoking and more – in the prevention of cardiovascular diseases, each risk factor that can be eliminated counts. As long as physical changes and damage are not as yet detectable, nothing has as yet happened – a process of rethinking and behavioral changes made towards a healthy lifestyle are the best guarantee of longevity.

This is wrong: such is the opinion of cardiologists working under Jarret Barry of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, because the current approach in the prevention of heart problems is to identify only the short-term cardiac risk. Only a few studies, such as one investigation done in 2006 with participants in the Framingham study, shed some light on the long term risk. Early life decisions might have a major impact on the rest of one's life and this rule would not apply any differently to the heart. Risk factors for the young and middle aged have an impact on one's total lifetime, says one analysis of studies from the scientists published in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Each risk factor counts

Data based on the analysis of the lifetime risks for the heart has been collected from 18 cohort studies making up the Cardiovascular Lifetime Risk Pooling Project. The data is part of a 50-year-long investigation. Risk factors such as blood pressure, cholesterol, diabetes and smoking were recorded for more than 250,000 people – men and women – at 45, 55, 65 and 75 years of age as well as cardiovascular disease status. For each age category, the risk of cardiovascular events was determined.

An optimal risk profile was defined as having cholesterol at <180 mg/dl, blood pressure lower than120/80 mmHg, non-smoking status, and no diabetes. For this optimal risk profile at the age of 55 years, the lifetime risk (up to age 80 years) of dying due to cardiovascular disease, with figures being 4.7 percent for men and 6.4 percent for women, is low. With two or more risk factors present, the risk of death due to vascular disease increases to 29.6 percent in men and 20.5 percent for women. Coronary heart disease or nonfatal heart attack is suffered by 3.6 percent of men and less than one percent of women, when they have no risk factors. For those with two or more risk factors, those figures are 37.5 percent for men and 18.3 percent for women.

Who has no risk factor?

Even more dramatic is the comparison of the risks for 45-year-olds. A man of that age not having risk factors only carries a risk of 1.4 percent of dying up to the age of 80 years from cardiovascular disease. With two or more risk factors, the risk increased to 50 percent. For women, the difference is 4.1 versus 31 percent.

Taking into consideration – as is done in most studies – only the five-or ten-year risks, where the risks for 50-year-old risk factor-carriers then become rather small, is something the study's authors have criticised. In addition, only a slight increase in risk factors – such as slightly elevated cholesterol levels or blood pressure – can increase the risk significantly. Most study participants presented at least one risk factor.

With regard to the prevention of cardiovascular events, the results show that only the avoidance of risk factors in young and middle age was able to considerably reduce cardiovascular disease. When discovered and treated only in middle age, risks can only be slightly reduced and disease only slowed down in progression. [My emphasis]

Dr. Julia Hofmann
Medical Journalist

Fuck.

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Start slim and healthy, stay slim and healthy, and one day you'll be a slim and healthy person with Altzeimers is the lesson here.

This why you don't see a really old fat people. They've had a brilliant life, spared themselves nothing, and got out before the rot set in. Maybe not so much good sex, unless they flash the Charisma card and stock up on the Viagra (headache!) and Cialis, and hence they are a valid target demographic for up-country Thai girls.

E@L

[Precis of the original article available on-line at NEJM.

Some Old E@L Opinions, Observations and Tales

E@L was contemplating the implications for himself of the previous post so he went hunting for some of his previously stated opinions. Found these from his abandoned blog (it was crashing all the time locking people out, even E@L - moved to Blogger in 2008). Most of these snippets, if not all, are from posts in 2004 and 2005.

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One comment, not about hookers but about the legal system: Expat Nation - Farang Affairs

Ah Thailand. It'd be tragic, if it wasn't so tragic.

Just seemed appropriate.

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A classic. One of E@L's first concerning the scene... The Charisma Card

You see, with any (valid) credit card, E@L and the thousands like him, acquire the neon-halogen glow of true SuperStars, of party animals out to bring it all down! He pulls out the card and *Charisma* comes to him and flows from him, billowing behind like a cloak. Charm wraps itself all over his body - he is Mr Popular, he is Johnny Love. The crowds part, the band stops playing, the most beautiful girls turn to him, wonder who he is, whether they’ll be lucky enough to go home with him tonight. Their voices rise, entranced at the power of his presence, to call out in an irrestible song of the sirens...

"Hello. Welcome! What you like drink? Beer, Carsbuck, Hinick?"

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This post from 2004, Expatriatism! Easier to spell than antidisestablishmentarianismistically, (stupid title) is in response to the review (by Pico Ayer) of a book by an American expat in Japan. Pico, presumably paraphrasing, spoke of the expat who complained that wherever he was, he was not at home. E@L (who can count only to five in about four, no three, Asian languages [the number six just won't stay in the LTM!]) took umbrage at this, somewhat unfairly in retrospect.

Expatriatism! It's our favorite 'ism!

What does it mean for the E@L? It means a chance to experience and explore different attitudes to life, to traffic, to sexual mores, to food, to work, to worry, to family, to pretty much everything. To see things being done differently and for different reasons. To realize that an incomprehensibly varied range of motives drive the people in those countries that are not our home reference point (if we have one!) It's not in order to become like a native, for that's merely exchanging one limited world view for another. As Joyce might say, to exchange a rational and coherent mistake for an irrational and incoherent one. (Not that Australia is rational and coherent, but I had to get that quote in somehow, somewhere in my life!) The idea is to gain experience and glean insight - not necessarily to judge, though one might criticize (just might!) - maybe in order to make some more sense of why things are as they are at everybody's version of home.

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Apropos that, here's E@L complaining that Singapore is not Hong Kong (let alone Australia). Going Troppo - it had to happen!".

The fact that the restaurants and nightspots he wants to go to are shut on the weekend! The fact that it takes 7 mintues between trains and not 2 minutes. The fact that they say "6th Storey", and not "6th Floor". The fact that "Mannings" is "Guardian." The fact that taxis disappear after 10pm. The fact that Singlish is nowhere NEAR English. The fact that those taxis have manual transmission and every drive-chain in Singapore is ruined because the drivers don't understand how to use a clutch! The fact that there is nothing but a sticky, sweaty summer here. The fact that the ground is all horizontal and not vertical (there are no views!) The fact that it has the death penalty and the cane and no-one cares. The fact that the entire place looks like a golf course - step out of bounds and it's a two stroke penalty. The fact that everyone is only concerned with getting E@L's money...

The touts come at him... "Like some more?" says the one at the next restaurant ... " Have an Indian dessert., sir" ... "Chinese, Thai, Chili crab." ...

"Get ... out ... of .. my ... WAY!"

His voice rises...

"FUCK! I HATE THIS FUCKING TOWN!"

He hasn't? He has. He has vocalised that. He said that out loud. Out VERY loud.

He smiles at some tourists, walking towards him, slowing down, staring at him... He frowns.

The touts step back. They've witnessed such breakdowns before.

Tourists think: "Mmm. The local madman. Gone troppo, not doubt. Every town out here has one. Yes, the humid charm of the Quaint Orient takes it toll and here is one of it's victims! It's all that gin, to fight the malaria, destroys the brain too! Say, let's buy some chili crab, as this honest looking waitress is offering a meal at what promises to be a discount rate!"

Woah, stand back from this lunatic. No, it's OK it's safe to near him now, he won't bite. His medication, not Inderal as mentioned in the post, but the mood stabiliser Lamitrogine, which fortunately and off-label kills 95% of his peripheral neuropathy agony, and perhaps seven years of acculturation have tamed this beast down. Mostly. Unfortunately for the popularity of this blog, he has calmed down a lot since then.

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This post, A common HK expat pastime..., is also from 2004 (when E@L was almost articulate). Not so much in Singapore as domestic helpers do not necessarily get a day off (you should read some the tales told by domestics looking for new employment - damn, lost the link) as they do in Hong Kong, the following is more applicable up there. E@L has now heard of it as called The Tea-Party (nothing related to that misguided bunch of billionaire-funded tax-avoiders in USA - Note: E@L is legitimately not required to pay tax in Australia).

A good part of the Sunday afternoon and early evening of many a Hong Kong male expat is taken up with prowling Neptune II, New Makati, Fenwicks, Dusk Till Dawn and the like in Wanchai for prospective replacement maids. ...

This sort of behaviour of the male expat does entail a fair whack of double-think, because he knows he is being used, just as he knows that he is doing a great deal of the traditional colonial-style, white-man's-burden "using". It's not so much repicrocal altruism as mutual exploitation. No money changes hands in the usual scenario, but there is a debt incurred and a debt repaid. The girl gets a day in a decent flat, even if she does have to clean it up, she gets a bit of (let's face it, girls need their lovin') sexual attention and simulated affection - which is a lot more than she gets during the rest of the week (unless "Madam" has a headache and "Sir" is feeling horny) - and she gets the chance to plead her case for rescue. The guy gets his flat cleaned up and his seminiferous tubules purged. Win-win.

And so the world advances. Well it rotates anyway.

Never was successful there, never tried very hard. All that conversation... As the pundits sing: "You couldn't score in Wanchai!"

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Here are E@L and Bruce, um, E@L means Bruce and another Bruce, trudging through Bintan in search of a mythical pub and finding an Indonesian version of the fish-bowl: The Quest,

L-G[aka Bruce], being a more hardened campaigner, checks out the age, looks, and size of the women on offer. He asks the eventual question and is shocked. Here in this grimy, peeling-paint, malodorous sex-slave camp, the broken-smiled, cigarette-reeking, oily-haired boys-in-charge are asking tourists such us E@L [aka Bruce] and L-G to pay for a forced shag on some stained and uncomfortable mattress in a noisome room upstairs a price that could be easily be negotiated in the comfort and sophistication (tongue-in-cheek) of Orchard Towers in Singapore and for much prettier, more intelligent and enthusiastic (the benefit of free-enterprise) companions de nuit at the accommodation of your choice. Even L-G abandons the idea of utilizing this offensive and unethical establishment and comes outside to find E@L seeking further enlightenment as to where the more conventional and somehow less tacky and exploitative local outlets of the Assisted Ejaculation Industry are located.

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E@L is again pinpointed as a sex-tourist. And he's only at the airport! Scenes Of The Crimes:

Walking up to the counter for a Limo-taxi, the girl immediately asked "Taxi, Pattaya?" Yep, even disguised with a long-sleeve shirt, long trousers, socks and shoes, E@L still exudes the aura of a depraved sex-tourist.

Ah, the ineluctable tyranny of stereotyping for the foreign fat-man.

He fired her a rather fierce look and said, "Klong Tooee, Conrad Hotel, karp koon krap."

"Oh, you bin Thailand before? Speak Thai?"

"Nit noi," he mumbled, rapidly approaching the end of the line for his Thai language 'skills'... He paid his 700Bht for instant access to a clean car that shouldn't break down, and took off for town.

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[Addendum] OK. One more. Unscientific Research (slight return)

And so. Here he is. Fat, forty-something, bald, single. In a sexually charged environment. He is a stereotype. A cliche. Someone's vision of all that's wrong with Asia. His own vision from not that many years ago, in fact. He has become his own worst nightmare. At least he is not cheating on a wife somewhere. The X said recently to him that she was amazed that he could even contemplate doing the things he does now. He would never have gone into a brothel, she says, when she knew him. And she was right. There are early E@L stories of transactions declined, and anecdotes of great mirth concerning such exploits. He hates himself for exploiting women; he hates men who exploit women; he hates how men can cheat on their girlfriends and wives so easily so blatantly. He knows that sex is not good enough reason, no matter how one rationalizes it. Deep down he knows this. Is he right? Or is Dr Kinsey? ...

... Anyone can look quickly into a crowd here and only see the old, fat guys with their chicks, because they are the ones that fit your prejudice, that fit your anticipated result... But if you try hard and actually COUNT them...

So, here are the stats for the first six guys that walk past with a slim, semi-dressed local girl :

Age:
20s - 3,
30s - 2,
40s or higher - 1

Weight:
Slim - 5,
Pudgy - 0,
Fat - 1

Appearance:
Normal - 4,
Little Bit Weird - 1,
Out There - 1 (Kris Kristofferson in Blade look-alike)

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Aiya, Jesus wept... E@L is crying here. OK, you get the idea. Giving up at this point, it's lunch-time. How many of these post are there? Too many? Not enough? Put 'em into a book man!

E@L

"My Boyfriend The Sex Tourist."

Something of a stereotype breaker - at least as far as the "trafficking" situation of some of the working girls in places that cater to mostly westerners is concerned.



At least you can see that not every bar-girl in Bangkok has been dragged off the farm by marauding snakeheads and chained to their beds in a cardboard dungeon. Well, yes, no, not every bar-girl...

via

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It would be an interesting exercise to study the expectations, feelings and motivations of these boyfriends in more depth (say, to the bottom of three bottles of Hennessy) and in a less stereotypical way... If that is, um, like, possible. Nah.

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Bruce of course has had some experience of less salubrious working conditions...

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It is depressing and frustrating to wander the streets by yourself in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, Phuket, browsing in the shopping malls or checking out the temples. You are old, fat, bald, generally unattractive. You are wearing cargo shorts, a loose shirt or tee, and sandals. You know that everyone in the world is making the assumption that you a sex tourist.

It is even more depressing and frustrating when you admit to yourself that this is exactly what you are.
Bruce (in a more contemplative mood than we are used to.)

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Gustave Flaubert, the man who was able to look so profoundly and convincingly into a woman's heart, was a completely sleazy sex-tourist on his trips to Egypt, reveling in his debauchery... Not that this is any form of excuse...

E@L

Poverty Porn IV

You think of travelers as bold, but our guilty secret is that travel is one the laziest ways on earth of passing the time. Travel is not merely the business of being bone-idle, but also an elaborate bumming evasion, allowing us to call attention to ourselves with our conspicuous absence while we intrude upon other people's privacy - being actively offensive as fugitive freeloaders.

Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star. [Opening sentences. My emphahsis.]

via

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“Everybody in the slum wants to work, and everybody wants to make themselves better,” he said.

Quote via NYT.

E@L

Noted

Everything that isn't autobiographical is plagiarism.


Paco Umbral* (usually, and mistakenly, attributed to Pedro Almódovar)

That's Pedro on the left for sure, maybe Paco on the right?

E@L

* whoever the fuck he/she is.