In Continuum.

Today, In News

Sex In This City
By: Neil Humphreys




The following is an excerpt from today's TODAY, a hilarious part about the sex culture in Singapore. This is why I love Neil Humphreys.

"...There is a television commercial in Australia that is not too subtle. It tackles the subject of erectile dysfunction.

Now, readers under 16, erectile dysfunction was one of the spaceships in Star Wars. For those of you above 16, erectile dysfunction is that subject we dare not mention. A subject so distressing that we refuse to discuss it for fear of making it worse. Rather like West Ham United's relegation battle.

Now, the TV commercial's aim was to promote a service that tackles erectile dysfunction. That's no easy feat. It's not as if the producers can hold up a limp photograph and get the voiceover actor to say: "Do you have this?"

Nor can they ape dieting commercials and show "before" and "after" shots of the affected area. You wouldn't order boiled chicken rice for the rest of the week.

So, the commercial's producers used a rather obvious visual device: Rocking vehicles. An attractive couple drive to an isolated spot at the top of a grassy hillock and park beside several other rocking vehicles. Unfortunately, the male actor - we'll call him Michael - can't get the car to shake, so he takes up the service offered and, yes, by the end of the commercial Michael learns to rock.

The closing shot depicts Michael's car rocking until sunrise. Imagine explaining this commercial to your inquisitive children. "They're playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, son. The guy on the right is, er, Leonardo and the woman on the left is, er, Doner Kebab..."


Blast From the Past Ladder
By: Me

As the tallest person in the family, when it comes to the changing of light bulbs, the task would naturally fall upon my shoulders. So when the light tube started to blink in my mother's room, she dashed down the corridor as if the hair dryer just started a raging inferno, and asked me to change the light bulb for her because she is barely 1.6m tall. As the only male in the family - and also because my sister is afraid of heights - I carried the ladder with one hand while the box of brand new light tube in the other to her room. Positioning myself under the blinking light on the ceiling, I asked my mother to turn off the light switch while I worked.

Now, just a couple of hours ago while we had a dinner out at Seletar, I was just talking about how accidental prone the females in our family are. My mother recently suffered from a bruising in the toe because a bar of soap fell on it while she was showering. My sister ran her toe into the gap underneath the door three times in the past two days, and not to mention the ballet dance she did after she bought her new luggage case. She did a little dance in her room, and before she was able to finish the sentence "I got myself a new luggage!", she rammed her shin into the side of her bed and collapsed into the crumpled blankets, screaming in pain and laughing at the same time. Me on the other hand - as I shared my observation - I suffered none of these accidents at home or anywhere else.

Anyway, so there I was on the second highest step of the ladder and changing the light tube when my mother left the dark room to get a torch. When she returned, she switched on the light switch for some reason. Apparently, human nature tells us that whenever you see a dark room, turn on the lights. But nobody's human nature tells them to leave the switch alone when you see a man on top of a ladder, changing the light tube. So there I was minding my own business when the tip of my left thumb touched a metallic part of the light. The electricity surged through my arm and I was blasted off my balance and off the ladder I went.

Thankfully, there was a bed just next to the ladder, and I landed screaming with pain. What started as a jolt of electricity turned into a numbing pain, and as my mother examined the sore thumb of mine, I asked why she turned on the light switch. "I didn't!" she said, and then we both looked around the empty room for about five seconds. "OK, it was probably me."

Lesson learned: When changing light bulbs, please turn off the light switch. And if you see a man on the ladder changing the damn bulb, stay five meters away from the switch because you might just kill your beloved. Thank you.


Miss Singapore Universe 2007
By: Me



When it comes to the Miss Universe Pageant, it is all about beauty and brains. You cannot appear on the stage if you are deformed, flawed, or even have that tiny little bump on your nose. The truth is, if you want to be part of the beauty pageant, you'd have to first beat ALL the beautiful women from your country, before trying to conquer the rest of the world - or rather, the universe. Which is strange, because the last time I checked, the Miss Universe pageant only allows humans from planet Earth to participate. So why are they calling it Miss UNIVERSE? I think there is a bit of a racism to our alien neighbors a few hundred lightyears away. Naturally, we would assume them to have green skin, eyes bigger than an average plate and equipped with the ability to make bicycles fly. So much for the name of the pageant.

Every year, Singapore sends her representative overseas to participate in the beauty pageant, and every single year we watch as the Singapore representative get eliminated in the very first round. Same thing happened year after year until finally, the repetition got so boring it isn't even funny anymore.

Nothing against the ladies who joined the competition, but perhaps the whole point of having a Miss Universe Singapore is gone. It has now become a bloody stepping stone to stardom more than a chance to be on the world's stage, and to put Singapore's name on the map. So who cares if this is eventually going to be the grand finals of the competition or not? The 'meaning' - if they ever had one - is gone.

The truth is, Singapore is as stubborn as an ox. They will never give up sending a representative overseas for a shot at things. But of course, before doing so I don't think they had the winners of countries like Colombia or Venezuela in mind. Besides, the contestants they sent in the past years were dwarfed by the others, both figuratively and literally. It is a wonderful spirit that you guys are not giving up on the women at home, but please do choose the right woman to go overseas for competition, even if all she wants is to have fame and wealth. Because standing next to the contestants from other countries with an average height of 1.76m, Singapore will seem even smaller than it already is.


The New Notebook
By: Me



I finally got myself a proper notebook today. The one I am currently using has been stained by coffee, sweat, water, ink, dirty finger prints and probably other left over matters on a coffee table. I'm not proud of the condition of this notebook, but at least it gives me a good reason not to improve on my handwriting. This is what happens when you buy a brand new notebook: You start to take care of your handwriting, afraid that it would ruin the front and back covers of the notebook. So you try your best to write within the provided lines and as slow as possible despite the words and thoughts rushing down the railway track at 300 miles an hour.

But the harder you try, the worse it gets. And after you finish a whole page of text, you look upon the page with utter disgust and frustration. I admit, that I do not have a beautiful handwriting. In fact, there is a particular page in my current notebook that has four distinctively different handwritings, all written by me. From now on, I am going to dictate the only brand and model of pen used for this new notebook, and nothing else.

I bought this new notebook from Kinokuniya after a failed search at a more expensive store just one floor below the library. They had nice colored notebooks, but none of them had lines. And trust me, if I ever get my hands on a notebook without lines, one would confuse the entries to be the scribbles of a five year old. Ahmad said it'd be stylish to write in that manner, but I'd rather not have a fifteen dollar notebook ruined by my handwriting. Thus, a ten dollar notebook would be just nice. Besides, the front cover is awesomely wicked. Look long enough and you might find Waldo too!

*

Tracking Down Hazel
By: Me

I shall allow the videos to speak for themselves. But basically, after a shopping trip with Ahmad to town today, we headed to Toa Payoh central to search for RuiQi's cat. We walked around for nearly an hour or so, and search all the way from the town park and through the bustling crowd of the HDB hub. There were a lot of cats, but none of them looked like Hazel, save for the camera-shy one that took refuge under the car. It was a tiring job, and it is quite an accomplishment how RuiQi actually spent so much time to look for a single cat. Suddenly, Singapore isn't as small as we thought any longer. Even the Texas Ranger skills weren't enough for the both of us to find one single cat. Better luck next time!


Ignore Ahmad's comment about the birds eating the cat.


No, we did not go to COURTS to find Hazel.


Cat on top of a car in a random car park.


This cat looked a hell lot like Hazel. But it was a little too big, and it didn't have enough white on it. Bummer.


Investigation and interrogation.