BLOGGER



Youngest kid of six with an inferiority and black sheep complex, but determined that God saves not just his soul to heaven but the remainder of his manic-depressive life, so others won't say he became a Christian and remained a jerk.


MAIN THEMES

On identity
i won't be transparent before i'm opaque. and you'll get to know me starting from the small things: who my favourite bands are. what kind of movies i like. who are my heroes.

On Christianity
I’m convinced that when confronted with sincere, real love, the Jesus factor will become obvious. But let’s not plant the cross before we carry it. I’m not trying to con you.

On dreams
Some dreams are meant to be achieved. I know that. But maybe other dreams are meant to drive us, privately. Never known to anyone but ourselves.


OTHER THEMES

On melancholy
It is a sadness that, when choosing between crying and sighing, will choose sighing. I'd almost say that melancholy is being sad about sadness itself.

On memory and nostalgia
It saddens me when life moves forward and people decide that certain things are worth forgetting.

On language
I've learnt that the word irregardless is filed as a non-standard word in the English language. That's a lexicographer's way of saying it's not a real word.

On politics
Crowds are fickle things. So when we stand in the thousands and cry against the present government, do we know who we're actually crying for?

On society
People always want the best for themselves. But I want to sometimes take second or third or fourth best, just so that the loser down the road doesn't always have to come in last. It must feel like shit to always come in last.

On growing old
Leasehold property make me feel sad. It doesn't matter how old the family photos are that you put on your wall. It's your family but it's not really your wall.

On philosophy
I ask you, if God loves everyone, and if God is also incapable of loving evil, how can there be such a thing as an evil man?

On a daily basis
One line quips, like this.


CHAT





Tuesday, March 31, 2009



There's an air asia flight attendant who doesn't look like she's up for it. bad haircut, over-the-top make up and a scowl right out of a sergio leone film tells her story. flight attendants don't do their pre-flight safety demos with conviction these days. where's the love? i know they're just telling me about inflatable life jackets, but i swear i've seen that done with a lot more verve. what happened? maybe video versions of it happened. there ... one more star that video killed. 

as i disappear into the sky between kl and krabi, i'm simultaneously frustrated by the ventures' rendition of apache. what have they done to it? it should be so much more driving. where's the bite? where's that mysteriously alluring thing about apache that has always made it my favourite surf guitar number? they too seem to have forgotten how sexy their tune has always been. here's to krabi having more mojo than this.

air asia flight ak 862, 1.45pm krabi time

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Genusfrog [ 1:45 pm ] | 0 comments




You can tell a nation's concept of beauty by the girls they use to model their ads for their national carrier. my first impression was that of a thai air girl on a cardboard cutout. i knew it. thailand having better looking people is a myth. 

myth or not, the great medium that is the television in our hotel room threw up an entirely contrasting response.

travelbuddy 1: why do they have prettier girls here?
fergus: it's the population, dude. they got 60 million people. that's a lot more beauty in the gene pool.
travelbuddy 1: aaaahh.... the gene pool!

krabi river hotel, hot afternoon

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Genusfrog [ 3:48 am ] | 2 comments

Monday, March 30, 2009
TRANSCRIBE

Will transcribe travelling journal here, in backposts.

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Genusfrog [ 5:34 pm ] | 0 comments

Sunday, March 22, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: REPEAL

In chapter 1, pharoah decrees that "every boy that is born" must be thrown into the nile. we know that moses escaped this watery death, but why is it then that he had male contemporaries? were they all older than him? aaron, his brother? the beat up hebrew in chapter 2? the two hebrews who were fighting later on? all the migrating israelites at the crossing of the red sea? just how many "every boys" slipped through pharoah's net? and how long before that decree was repealed? ancient egyptian enforcement musn't have been much better than malaysia's. 

(Exo 1-2)

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Genusfrog [ 5:19 pm ] | 0 comments

Saturday, March 21, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: LONG

At the risk of sounding as whiny as king david, here's a piece of psalm that adequately speaks about my dread at reaching this part of my bible-in-a-year schedule.

Psalm 6:3
"my bones are in agony ... My soul is in anguish. How long, O Lord, how long?"

to which i hear the creator of the heavens and earth reply "pretty long. you're only on psalm 6 - we managed to put together 150".

to which i say that this is positively the last time i'll whine about the psalms. 

(Ps 6)

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Genusfrog [ 5:06 pm ] | 0 comments

Friday, March 20, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: WHINING

I don't know if you've ever heard anyone say this before, but i'm not a big fan of the psalms. i can't get into it, not more than one psalm at a time and even then, the tone of the psalms always irritate me. king david comes across as a big whiny spoilt brat who, no matter how many times it happens, never gets used to the fact that if he has enemies, he needs to stand up to them. nothing wrong with getting the Almighty involved, but it doesn't make his whining any more readable. okay, so it's made its way into holy scripture and so i'm supposed to like it. but i'm struggling. lord, he knows i'm struggling. maybe one day i'll write a whiny psalm whining about the psalms. 

(Ps 1-8)

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Genusfrog [ 4:12 pm ] | 1 comments

Thursday, March 19, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: GUILT

It's only just occurred to me how matthew ends with two hangings. one is, of course, the hanging of Jesus on the cross. the other is the hanging of judas on a tree in a field. the bible says that he was struck with remorse. He had already tried returning the silver coins to absolve himself of some of the guilt, and when the chief priests with whom he'd been dealing refused to accept it cleanly, he tossed it at them and went off to hang himself. i don't know. this is a very sad picture for me. it's a picture of someone who cannot get over his remorse, and is literally defeated by it. i know cos i know what guilt feels like. but i still don't know guilt that feels worse than death. i guess judas knew that kind of guilt.

(Matt 27)

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Genusfrog [ 10:36 am ] | 0 comments

Saturday, March 14, 2009



You've all seen this one before haven't you? yeah. it wouldn't be so bad if there was a real reason why. like, let's run through the three definitive reasons why your generic volume may not be stopped.

(1) you're playing an mp3 off it
(2) you're halfway copying a bunch of files onto it
(3) it shoots a double barrel like a young clint eastwood.

other than that, no, there's no reason why you shouldn't be able to eject your usbs when you're no longer using them. but that's not always the case, is it? take this screencap, for instance. it was taken when all the windows had been closed and all the programs had been exited. the drive was, as far as the user was concerned, no longer active. still, it couldn't eject.

happens to you? well, let me be a used-car salesman for a moment and brag about apple. 

on the mac, if your thumdrive browser window is open, and you send your thumbdrive to eject, your window slides away and your thumdrive ejects. 

so, my friends, they always say that what makes good marriages work are the small things. well, this one small thing unnecesarily drove my relationship with the pc deeper into the jungles of uganda. 

i love my mac. if you have one, you'll love it too.

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Genusfrog [ 12:01 am ] | 1 comments

Friday, March 13, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: COMFY

Why didn't jacob's family just pack up and go back to canaan after the famine was over? didn't they see it coming, that one day a new pharoah would preside and not value their contribution? by the time their family got to egypt, it was already two years into the famine. surely they could have returned to canaan before they got enslaved for the generations till moses. why didn't they just get up and go home? was goshen too comfy? 

(Exo 1)

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Genusfrog [ 12:00 pm ] | 0 comments

Thursday, March 12, 2009



Fergus: shyte
i just discovered stg
about itunes

Chrischew: ooo what

Fergus: you can add tags to songs
it's called Grouping

Chrischew: eh meaning?

Fergus: you can add words in the attributes, separated by commas
then if you do searches, theyw ill search for those keywords too
for example
i can tag all my smiths songs with keywords "morrissey" and "marr"

Chrischew: ooooooo

Fergus: so if i run a search for morrissey, i get his solo stuff and smiths
if i tag my modest mouse with "marr" as well
a "marr" search will throw up both bands

Chrischew: ooooo

Fergus: think about it
you can tag "yap" on all of furniture, ferns, this body broken and azmyl yunor tracks

Chrischew: ahahahhah

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Genusfrog [ 1:32 pm ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 11, 2009



I'm not kidding. i really prayed about this. wai nyan, if you're reading this, i'm serious. 

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Genusfrog [ 10:57 am ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 10, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: PATRIARCHS

The more i read the patriarchs, the more messed up they seem. it's true. and a part of me is quite pissed off that the heroes of my faith were all so disfunctional. i mean, think about it. abraham went from town to town telling everyone that his wife was his sister. he even got caught out by two kings! he then agrees when his wife sets him up for a one night stand with her maid. great job for a guy whose greatest contribution to the faith was having the balls to kill his own son. and what happens to that son when he grows up? isaac, great patriarch isaac, went and also told other kings that his wife was his sister, and then got caught making out with her in the yard. what's wrong with these people?? i don't geddit!! and we're just getting started, mind you. isaac's greatest contribution to the faith was probably handing out only the most collosally amazing blessing... to the wrong son! and the son who got that blessing? jacob, oh great father jacob. not enough that he conned his brother into selling him his birthright at his moment of weakness, he had to con his brother again by stealing his blessing (complete with fake hairy arms and a costume change) and later in life he would also systematically con his father in law of all his flocks. somewhere between all this shenanigans, great jacob manages to sire twelve sons and one daughter by sleeping with two wives and their respective maids as the two leading ladies jostle for children they can drag and drop into their folders. someone tell me. why are they all so twisted? i've read genesis about a gazillion times now but seriously, i've never felt the full power of three generations of unadulterated disfunction prior to this. the patriarchs are just out of this world. i've got no proper vocabulary to describe them further.

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Genusfrog [ 10:59 am ] | 0 comments

Thursday, March 05, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: SIBLINGS

Genesis is full of sibling rivalries. and it's weird - God seems to tolerate it. ever since he favoured abel's gift over cain's, it's been a nonstop theme that pops up eveywhere. noah's sons (ham v shem & japeth), abraham's sons (ishmael v isaac), isaac's sons (esau v jacob), jacob's sons (joseph v 11 brothers). i'm thinking, what's God trying to say with all these brother wars? 

love? peace? reconciliation? or are we really in the ballpark of "I did not come to bring peace, but a sword"? is God trying to say something about allegiance? blood is thicker than water. but maybe God's trying to establish something thicker than blood. but why does he use fragmented brothers to tell this great big story about allegiance to him? i've been thinking about this for a whole two days but i still don't get it. do you?

(Gen 16)

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Genusfrog [ 2:56 pm ] | 0 comments

Wednesday, March 04, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: CITY

We always think of the tower of babel as just a tower but it wasn't. it was a city with a tower. the folks built a city of bricks and tar and the tower really sounds more like a finishing touch to me. and when the bible talks about the project getting canned, it says "so the lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. that is why it was called babel...". no emphasis on the tower. no reason for us to mythicise it as the main protagonist of this episode.

all these years, i've never really read the bible for myself, or read it for details. so i guess i had it coming getting surprised like this. 

so thank you misleading bible editorial heading. i'm reading the chapter for myself now and striking out your chapter heading. i'm writing in it "city of babel".

(Gen 11)

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Genusfrog [ 2:35 pm ] | 0 comments

Tuesday, March 03, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: VOYEURISM

Halfway through the Bible, you'd be forgiven for thinking that the Semites and the Canaanites were cosmically meant to always be kicking at each other. But last night, I realised that it all started with a really dumb fiasco involving a plastered Noah who got too much gear off and some voyeurism on the part of his son, Ham.

The best part about this is that there are some really bad ham sup jokes in here just waiting to be made.

(Gen 9)

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Genusfrog [ 10:16 am ] | 0 comments

Monday, March 02, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR: WATER

Creation is weird. there's this thing called "the deep" and darkness hovered over it. and there's this thing called "the waters" and God's spirit hovered over it. then what does God do? He sticks this thing in between "the waters" called sky. Now if that's weird, it's really because my mortal brain cannot process what it means to have water, or any matter for that matter, above the sky. as far as my natural build can comprehend, the closest thing that can get above the sky is a very tall bird.

(Gen 1)

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Genusfrog [ 10:48 am ] | 0 comments

Sunday, March 01, 2009
BIBLE IN A YEAR...

...starts today.

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Genusfrog [ 10:27 am ] | 0 comments