This Blog Is Moving
Yup. Moving to a new site, although it's only halfway under construction.
Things will be slightly improved there, hopefully. But don't expect to see too many changes as I'll be stuck with finals in a week.
Anyways, the url for the new site is
http://asblackasobsidian.blogspot.comWish me luck for the finals, with my thanks in advance, and I'll see you around.
Some Pictures
Thank you for noticing the unimaginative title of this entry. It's the best I can do on short notice and while totally bereft of any chocolate.
Enjoy the pictures!
We had a housewarming party to commemorate us moving into 46 Spring Hill - but it was basically just an excuse for us to make Suresh cook some curry!
A group picture after our housewarming party - note all the empty plates on the table.
Lisa's birthday was celebrated by us going to a Chinese buffet restaurant for dinner. Not very imaginative, yes, but was it satisfying? Definitely so!
On Deepavali, we had another small party where we invited the folks from 351 Crookesmoor Road over. Suresh lent me his
jippa - and now I'm thinking of buying one for myself!
"Run away!" seemed to be the battle cry of this groups of knights who were seen wandering the streets of Sheffield during the Medic's Pubcrawl. It's odd, really, because they carried the largest swords ever seen in the history of the pubcrawl.
With a few of Hiromi's coursemates in her house in Leeds. It was during this party that I ate raw fish for the first time in the UK - and I'm still alive!
After everyone gave up wondering why there wasn't any snowfall at all during Christmas, it snowed all of a sudden in February.
BUT we still had to attend lectures...
Our plans to make Hiromi's birthday celebration were derailed when she arrived early - but we improvised surprisingly well and with lots of acting (most of it was appallingly bad acting), we managed to pull it off! Many thanks to everyone who helped out!
My T50 'sister', Rex! Hers is red and mine is black, so all we got to do now is to find someone who owns a silver one, and the set will be complete!
Photographic evidence that racism does occur over here. Hahaha! I'm just joking - it's Anna giving TLC to Suresh, as usual. It seems that even he's not spared at a birthday party.
It was snowing really heavily during Hiromi's birthday party. The heavy snowfall actually caused travel disruptions all over the Midlands that day! Here's a picture of our nondescript backyard, looking a lot prettier covered in a thick layer of snow.
The snow actually made the party a lot more fun than I thought it would be - we started snowball fights with strangers out in the streets, had intense snowball fights among ourselves and we even made a snowman!
The morning of the first day of the Chinese New Year was spent eating
dim sum in Zing Vaa, a Chinese Restaurant in the Moor.
Anna's actually NOT physically abusing Suresh in this picture! What a rare sight indeed. Maybe it's the
dim sum? 
Some of the others who joined us that morning for
dim sum - from left, Ming, Lisa, Jess and Mbugua.
P.S. - As my finals are just around the corner, I might not be updating for a while.
My Black Baby...
The Sony Cybershot T-50.
7.2 megapixels with CCD image stabilization, 3X optical zoom, 56MB internal memory, max ISO of 1000, 3-inch touchscreen LCD display, among many other features. And it's
mine. In matte-black finish. It's officially the highest-tech gadget to grace my palms this new year, and I'm undestandably excited to get this baby out as soon as possible and take tonnes of photographs. The fact that a GPS locator device came bundled with the T-50 helps to increase the uber-tech-coolness of it all. However, only a 512MB Memory Stick Pro Duo was given together with the camera, which means that I'll have to buy either a 1GB or a 2GB Memory Stick soon... Sigh. Which means I'll be spending more $$$, and I'm still feeling a bit guilty over this purchase even though my parents gave me the go-ahead to purchase this camera. Oh well. I'll just have to save on my monthly expenditure while I'm in the UK to make up for my extra spendings then.
P.S. - Many thanks to Jit Sen and Irwin for accompanying me in Singapore while I shopped for the camera and for saving me from an otherwise dull day stoning at home. It was the most fun I had in quite a while!
P.P.S. - Congrats to Irwin for landing the job on the spot right after being interviewed - and for being the 10th worker! Now your company has to find another 190 more...
Is It The Apocryha Yet?
It is only natural that it should rain in the monsoon season and that Malaysia should become more or less in that physical state we humans deem as Wet. It might also be, rather approximately, in the slightly more superflous expansion of Wet, which is Drenched. What is unnatural is for many parts of Malaysia to be in that geologically-disadvantaged (or aquatically-inclined) condition we term as Flooded. What is so unusual about this, you ask. After all, Malaysia is well-known for drainage so radical and cutting-edge in it's planning and construction that the construction of drains and runoffs precipitate floodings when there were none before - we meant it to happen, of course. Why else do you think our country has never had a water shortage before? Oh, wait. We've had water shortages before. Despite being inundated with so much annual rainfall we could probably wash Singapore clean off the map. But those water shortages were probably due to human error - namely, human error in constructing the pipes in such a manner so that the only way for the piped water to reach it's intended destination is for a rip in the space-time continuum and the spontaneous creation of a wormhole from the pipe to the target location. Or even human error as in some construction worker thinking
Hey, there seems to be a metallic cylindrical thingamajig here. I wonder what happens when I put this pneumatic drill through it? So, by an odd combination of happy coincidences, the answer is yes, we do get Flooded lot.
But the
real point I'm trying to get at here is this - some places that are normally just Wet or Drenched during our country's monsoon season are Flooded this year around. And the places that are usually Flooded have been upgraded in status to Submerged And Lost To Humanity this time around. Let's take Kota Tinggi, for instance. It was my dad's hometown and was particularly prone to flooding in the olden days. Back then, the floodwaters were at the most as high as knee-height - the floods would severely inconvenience people by messing up their floors and giving the townfolk a few weeks' worth of gossip but the occurence of floods stopped after the riverbanks in the town centre were shored up, reinforced with concrete and raised in height. However, the floods that hit Kota Tinggi this year had a waterline that reached the first floor of buildings, leaving Kota Tinggi inaccessible except via
sampan. Looking at the pictures, it was as if a short-sighted town planner (believe me, we have no shortage of them) had gotten the map coordinates wrong and had decided to build an entire town in a mudflat at lowtide and decided to check on it again at hightide. Kota Tinggi has always struggled to bring in tourism despite the fact that they have
absolutely nothing to offer, but with the advent of floods this severe, we just might have another attraction on the itinerary's must-sees of Visit Malaysia 2007 - "A Low Cost Alternative To Venice - Kota Tinggi!".
This current spate of events set me thinking. And no, it wasn't so that I could skive off reading the Physiology textbook that I brought home with me, supposedly Study, For The Purpose Of but actually Gathering Dust, In The Act Of. I've never really thought about the weather except to cuss at it when it's bloody rubbish. Even when cussing it I don't really think about it. It's just an off-the-cuff response. I do it because people often use it as a conversation topic. "Bloody awful weather, isn't it?", they'd say, and I'll just reply out of rote, "Yeah, it's absolutely rubbish." This time around, I'm actually asking myself
why? before I open my mouth to cuss at the weather. This time, I'm actually thinking,
could this be due to global warming? Why not? Everyone knows about global warming. In a nutshell, we're baking our planet in the very gases we emit and this in turn causes a series of unfortunate events to occur, for instance, floods, forest fires, changes in weather patterns, melting of the Artic ice and an increase in the sea level - and we blame everything on it. Cute seal pups and baby penguins dying because the ice floe they call home is now a rapidly diluting patch of fresh water in the sea, multiple species of oceanic flora and fauna dying out due to changes in the water current patterns and temperature, that humongous blizzard that buried several towns but will make for an extremely White Christmas, etc. Heck, you could even blame the increase in the local crime rate and the clogging of the kitchen sink due to it.
I've always regarded the whole global warming thing as a superbly overhyped marketing tool used by the environmentalists' lobby to sell it's cause to us. It is the perfect foil - everything is blamed on global warming since it is said to affect the whole world and since it's effects are so widespread and diffuse, you can blame just about anything on it and yet no one will be able to prove you wrong. You might not be entirely correct, but you ain't completely wrong either. And so we play the blame game. That avalanche that buried a ski village in the Alps? Blame it on a global warming-caused shift in wind currents causing an abnormally large amount of snowfall - not the drunk idiot who yodeled all night long. The rapidly declining total area of coral in the Great Barrier Reef? Blame it on global warming, which caused a change in the oceans' currents and therefore a change of water temperature - and not the tanker which ran aground right next to it. And since I've never seen seal pups or baby penguins drowning just because their iceberg has melted because they can bloody well swim, I can say that I regarded the whole outcry about global warming with a skeptical eye. That was when I noticed the reason as to why I wasn't taking it seriously. All the disasters attributed to global warming happen somewhere else or cause incidents that I think have better explanations rather than the usage of one blanket term to elucidate everything. However, when things happen in your backyard that you think is a direct effect of global warming, one tends to sit up and take notice.
The recents of the past few days has made me a believer (more or less) of the effects of global warming - but it's not just due to the flooding of several towns and cities in Malaysia that converted me. I've been reading about several extreme weather conditions that occurred in the recent years and I think I'm beginning to understand where the tree-huggers are coming from. However, I'm not encouraging anyone to believe that global warming is the cause of every natural disaster that occurs on Earth and sell your SUV and go for one of those pansy hybrid cars or try to burn down your nearest gas/coal-fired power station (which, may I remind you, is not only a criminal offence but will also be a major source of pollution). Yes,
really. What I'm trying to get at is to say that we should be mindful of our actions, which will have profound consequences on th environment that we live in. Whether we like it or not, it is generally agreed that we are stuck on this lump of soil, rock, magma and water that we call Earth for at least a couple more generations to come. So until our great-great-great grandkids are able to purchase that ticket to take them to Lunar New York City or Lunar London and us humans are able to transport a representative population of every species of lifeform on this planet to a Lunar Zoo, let's just try to keep this planet habitable and refrain from killing each other while we're at it. Or else, well, let's just say that we don't really have much of a choice, do we?
Forget the iPhone, the iPod Tiny, the iPod Microscopic, the iPod NotThere or whatever uber cool products are going to be released by a certain fruit company in the coming future. In this millenium, the iApocalypse is back in vogue.
About Cooking And Sex
No. Pay attention. Seriously. This post isn't about a raunchy experience on the kitchen table or the usage of certain vegetables in certain ways. What this post is actually about is the fundamental similiarities between culinary endeavours and bedroom shenanigans. Yes,
really. I do not profess to be an expert in both, so if do forgive me if you spot any mistakes. Kindly drop me a message and I will hasten to ingore your worthless rambli-I mean, I will take your points into due consideration.
ONE
Both are not precise sciences, you learn by making mistakes and educated guesses.
TWO
You learn about both better by not reading about them, but by looking at pictures and videos.
THREE
You always put more effort into both when you want another person to enjoy your efforts.
FOUR
You never saw the point of both when you were a kid, but now that you're older you saw the light.
FIVE
The first time is always (or usually) disastrous.
SIX
Both are in a way vital to our continued survival on this planet.
SEVEN
Timing determines whether you cross the fine line into excellence or drop into averageness in both.
EIGHT
Injury to yourself is a very real risk in both if you're not careful.
NINE
It takes practice, practice and more practice to excel in both.
TEN
It is always fun to try new recipes - if they work out, great, but if they don't then you can always have a laugh about them afterwards.
I'M ALIVE!!!
Yeah. So. I'm alive, although I probably surmised that you had gathered as much after reading the title of this post. Unless your idea of "living" goes beyond the basic physiological mechanisms of breathing and a beating heart. If so, then our discussion might cut to a long and lengthy dissertation on medicine, theological beliefs and the meaning of life - but let's just skip that part and go along with the general majority and assume that I'm alive, alright? Well, to cut a long and very annoying story long, the place where I'm currently calling home for my second year in Sheffield has no bloody Net connection. You're prolly thinking
like, whaddafuk? and I must say
yeah, whaddafuk since even llamas in the Tibetan highlands probably have Net access these days. Right now, I'm typing this in the Student Union's Gallery in the 20 minutes I have before I rush off to Patient Encounters halfway across Sheffield in the Northern General Hospital.
Here are some one-line updates:
I'm staying right on top of a hill so steep that I encounter rock climbers on my way home.
I have 3 other housemates, two other medics (oh the horror) and a chemical engineer (even worse).
No one is sane in the house.
3 guys and 1 girl - just 1 bathroom - outwit, outplay, outlast!
Mushrooms are growing on the kitchen wall and we have absolutely no idea why. Really.
I can cook.
Hiromi can cook a lot better than me.
No one has been sent to A and E after eating the dishes that I've cooked.
My room is the smallest room in the house.
Our basement contains roughly 85% of all the mould present on the planet.
There is enough space in my room for one cupboard, a working desk, a set of drawers and a single bed, leaving a 2-by-1 metre space for walking.
Our next-door-neighbour's garden is absolutely beautiful.
We have a dilapidated shack in our backyard that will collapse the next time it rains.
I dressed up as Sir Belvedere from Monty Python's "Holy Grail" for this year's Medics' Pubcrawl.
It is not possible to climb up a wall that has tree branches over it if you've had a pint and are carrying another in your hand without cracking your head on the branch.
Some people are complete idiots. Wow, that's new.
The second year of medical school so far has been a lot more fun than last year.
I've not played DotA for more than 3 months.
Tesco brand chocolate spread sucks.
Do not pet stray cats and sniff/lick your fingers before you've dunked your fingers in antiseptic liquid.
Avoid sudden movement when your fingers are in a puddle of milky yellow fluid inside the cavity of a cadaver.
The water pressure in our shower is so low that the showerhead trickles water instead of spraying.
Never carry out a conversation with a person who is incapable of logical thought progression.
Max's testicles are in his hair. Metaphorically.
It is a proven law of Nature that all the computers in the Student's Union will always be in use when you need to use one.
Listening to British rock repeatedly makes you like it - eventually.
There is an infinite number of train lines to Leeds.
It is not possible to spar on a sweat-slicked floor.
When in doubt - stir-fry!
When still in doubt - bake!
When irrevocably in doubt - break out the Indomee!
Strangers from Malaysia actually do know where Sheffield is - thanks, Sheffield United!
Anyway, I've got to run so this will be all for now. Goodness knows when the next update will be, as I foresee no Internet access in my place anytime soon!
P.S. - I'll be trying to get tickets for Sheffield United VS Manchester United in Bramall Lane! Wahahaha! Hopefully they've not sold out!
The Asagi And The Second Dan
I'm back - after almost a month of not posting anything. To give you a brief overview of the state of affairs in my life, it should perhaps suffice to say that it has been a pretty hectic past few weeks for me. I did quite a bit of travelling when Hiromi came over to visit for a second time and this time we went on a brief tour of Kuala Lumpur in addition to a short weekend over at Cameron Highlands. To be completely honest with you, I've never explored the capital before as thoroughly as I did this time - my experience of the capital was mostly the shopping areas and my knowledge of the how-tos of getting around were limited to KTM Komuter, the LRT and the Monorail. So it was rather an eye-opener for me when I visited places located within the tourist belt that I had never been to even though I knew that they existed, by virtue of seeing them on the idiot box, textbooks, magazines, billboards, etc. Sue me for being a terrible Malaysian if you must. Anyway, we rounded up her trip by going to the Singapore Zoological Gardens - I had been there for goodness-knows how many times before, but since there wasn't many things to see in JB (I brought her to the Sultan Abu Bakar Museum, okay? So don't chew me out for being a bad Johorean!), we decided to spend a day in our little neighbour across the Tebrau Straits. After that, we spent another couple of days just staying in JB until it was time for her to leave for the UK.
After she left, things at home became a lot quieter and I soon discovered that I was bored stiff. Did I touch my textbook that I dutifully lugged all the way back to Johor Bahru from Sheffield after deluding myself that I would actually do summertime revision? The answer should be pretty obvious to you even without me needing to type anything else. I guess I'm just not the type to do summertime revision - it is technically summer all-year round over here but I guess the statement still holds true nonetheless. I'm the blueprint for laziness - ever since my primary school, secondary school and college days I've been loath to do any revision in my free time. I know it's a pretty bad habit of mine that I need to change if I am to survive the next four years in medical school, but somehow I've still managed to stay the same. And damn it, it's making me feel guilty. Perhaps I'll just assuage this guilt I'm feeling by doing a bit of work for my assignment (which is due anyway a week after term starts). Maybe later. I still have tonnes of stuff I need to do before I leave for Sheffield this coming Monday. There's still things to be bought, stuff to be packed, matters to handle and various odd-jobs around the house that I will have to see to before Monday. I can't exactly explain this, but I want to return to Sheffield now that I'm back. Sitting around idly doesn't really seem to suit me - it's making me complacent, lazy and undisciplined. I really want to begin Phase 1B ASAP - and even as I say that it feels weird because barely three months ago I was really looking forward to getting back home and do nothing. Maybe after I go back to Sheffield I'll feel like returning home. Who knows? My mind works in an unfathomable way.
There's also been a new fish in the pond recently. My uncle recently "sourced" an
asagi for my family because my dad told my uncle to keep an eye out for any nice fish in the market. However, this caused quite a lot of problems. Firstly, after buying a mixture of ten juvenile
showas and
kohaku plus one absolutely microscopic
asagi (technically, the tiny
asagi was given to us free) from a fish farm in the capital during our holiday up there, we thought that our pond was already overcrowded with over a thirty fishes in it. We initially refused the offer because we didn't think that our pond could handle another fish, and a two-and-a-half feet long
asagi at that! However, my dad relented after my uncle told him that our pond had too many juveniles, and that we needed a "leader" fish to make the other fishes bolder and unafraid of us. So we drove all the way up to Kota Tinggi, paid RM250, collected the new fish and brought it back in the boot of my dad's car. The result? It proved to be the best buy we made. The new
asagi proved to be completely unafraid of us and now it's leading the juveniles to be hand-fed by us. Even though it isn't and probably will never be a show-quality
asagi, I still think that the new fish isn't too bad because I had expected a fish of it's size and price to be sluggish and discoloured but it was surprisingly active and the colours on it's body were still alright. The lesson learnt? Trust Uncle when it comes to fishes.
On a different note, I managed to visit Yih Seong today. He was injured rather seriously recently while playing a game during the orientation for the new year in his university. To cut a long story short and to avoid distorting the facts of the event (many stories surfaced as to how Yih Seong got injured, some so removed from the actual events that it might be plausible they saw another Yih Seong in a parallel dimension in a freak tear of the time-space fabric), he dislocated his knee rather badly and had to undergo surgery to repair the damage done to his patella and his ligaments. After the operation, he was ferried back home by his parents to recuperate in JB and I took the opportunity to visit him before I leave Johor Bahru this coming Monday. While at his place, we reminisced about the good old days in English College (our ex-secondary school) and Taylor's College and talked plenty of cock. It felt pretty fun to do that after so long, just talking about everything yet nothing - it sometimes make me wish that I had accepted IMU's offer and stayed here to do my degree. However, I've made my choice and there's no looking back. Everyone has a path they must tread and I have mine, even if that means I have to be separated from my friends for a while, then so be it. No one ever walked properly looking backwards - so I'll just look forward, to what the future brings.
Here are some pictures of my family's new fish-chieftain, Teh ub3r l33t a5ag! th4t pWned j00 -- I meant the new
asagi -- and something that will make clear the meaning of the second part of this entry's title!
The newest addition to our pond, getting a salt bath in our "quarantine tub" after we brought it back from Kota Tinggi. The reason for the salt bath? My uncle informed us that it had some lice after he bought it from the shop but he had removed them. However, just to be on the safe side, we drained away the water that it was in, pumped in fresh tap water and added salt (to kill any lice eggs remaining) and gave it a visual and tactile inspection before it was given the green light to be released into our pond.
Not exactly a beauty, but we weren't planning on entering it in any shows anyway. We bought it to "lead" our juvenile koi and it has been doing a great job in making the other koi in the pond much less afraid of us. Some are also unafraid of being hand-fed already! However, as it was neglected in the shop, we hope to restore a little of it's beauty by letting it live in our pond with much better conditions. After all,
asagi bloodlines have always been known to produce more or less good-looking fish.
It's finally official: I now wear two golden stripes on my belt instead of one. Somehow I don't really feel worthy of it - my footwork is still shoddy, my speed just average and my techniques neither here nor there. I'd better train harder to make my standards meet or exceed those demanded of the rank indicated by my belt. No more slacking off for me, then.
Well, that's all for this post. I'll just take this opportunity to wish Yih Seong a speedy recovery and the best of luck in redeveloping his "atrophied" buttcheek. Let me know when you've recovered, I'll get a bottle of wine for you to open - without a cork-remover. Well, I guess you're the only one who will understand this last part. Anyway, to the rest: take care dudes, I'll see you guys in December.
