Different worlds

me: violin exam's at 2pm on thurs, so i hav to practise getting up
early!

LSB: ... u n i, we hav different concepts of time

Someday I'll be part of your world.... *cries*

ASEAN Charter in the news

BBC: Asean agrees on landmark charter

Ministers from South-East Asian countries have reached agreement on a landmark draft charter.

The document gives the Association of South-East Asian Nations (Asean) a set of binding rules for the first time in the bloc's 40-year
existence.

The agreement comes after nearly two years of deliberations among members.

It includes a contentious provision to set up a commission monitoring human rights in the region - despite strong misgivings from some Asean
countries.

...

Diplomatic sources said Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam also had misgivings - fearing human rights probes could result in violations of the group's strict policy of non-interference in each others' affairs.

However the charter is seen as crucial for giving Asean - previously regarded as a mere talk shop - credibility and bargaining power on the world stage.

CNA: ASEAN ministers agree to set up human rights commission

Mr Yeo says: "If there was any disagreement, it's over the actual
language that we use in the Charter. In the end we decided that it's not really the establishment of the human rights body which should be the issue. It's what the body ought to do. That really involves drawing up the terms of reference which all of us can agree to and actually, planning it properly and giving it a life of its own."

Still, Mr Yeo points out that the ministers have also decided that certain things would be left to the leaders to decide.

He says: "The question arises as to how the leaders among themselves will settle disagreements at the highest level, and we as ministers could not be prescribing rules to the leaders because they are a Committee of
Peers. They must decide amongst themselves how to resolve the differences and according to rules they themselves must establish.

"We don't quite know what crisis we will go through in the future, what difficult problems we will face. It is for the leaders, in their own wisdom and depending on their own personal relationship, to work out methods to resolve the differences."

Hmmm. I wouldn't be quite so optimistic yet.

Should we tell Africa about the global economy?

In The Know: Is Our Wealth Hurting Africaâ??s Feelings?

The finest military in the world

US military pondered love not war The US military investigated building a "gay bomb", which would make enemy soldiers "sexually irresistible" to each other, government papers say. Other weapons that never saw the light of day include one to make soldiers obvious by their bad breath.

Tolkien and fingernail moon

Ok, I have resolutely put my copy of LOTR aside, so there won't be any long meandering quotes in this entry. Rest easy.

For years now I have spoken of the 'fingernail moon', the tiny bit of moon so named because it looks exactly like a sliver of white fingernail that's just been cut from the rest of said-nail. For some reason that description freaks my friends out. But I stick to it cos I think it's better than the other image such a moon calls to mind - the sly grin of some astral Cheschire cat. Now that's freaky.

And recently, in my nth reading of the LOTR, I discovered a line that would shake my being to its very foundations. So Tolkien wrote, "a New Moon as thin as a nail-paring."

Tolkien saw the same fingernail moon! He saw the same thing! He's totally my soul-mate, and at about 330am, I SMS-ed my incredibly wondrous discovery to my friend.

How could I not have seen that line before?

I worship Tolkien, I really do. Or rather, I worship his voice. It is often sad, often gentle. It tells a tale that's often cruel, sometimes violent, but it is never itself bitter or harsh. Sometimes it is majestic and splendid and heroic, as memorably, in The Silmarillion, but it is always beautiful. It is not a historian's voice, but a bard's voice, telling tales of faraway with both poetry and loving detail.

I am so in love with Tolkien. And my fingernail moon. Though who knows, perhaps there're hordes of people who've thought the same thought. I read somewhere (I forget where) that one of the principal joys in reading is discovering in someone else's mind what one has oft' thought but ne'er so well expressed. (Ok, I'm mixing up the forgotten quote with Pope's quote on wit if my memory serves me well. Which, presumably, it doesn't.)

Nevertheless, if any of you have looked at a moon and thought it looked like a sliver of fingernail, I welcome you to join ma' man, Tolkien and myself in a somewhat strange community, whose diverse and dispersed members have shared at least one thought.

What the...

I pick up my cell. A lady asks for Elaine in an accent I identify as my friend's fake secretary voice. She's pulled that fake accent on me before, so I gloat and think to myself 'Not this time, you evil friend!'

'Yes, what is this?' I try my best to convey that I am so sick of this, and haven't you anything better to do?

'I am XX from XX bank.'

Oh oh...

'Do you have a moment now?'

I start to waver. 'Er, not really.' Still trying to sound gruff, just in case it's really my friend.

'Ok, I'll call back in the evening. Thanks.'

Oh shit.

Repeat to self a hundred times: My friends are too old to prank call me. My friends are waaaaay too old to prank call me. Dammit we're on the threshold of middle age already! Argh.

$100 laptops

'$100 laptop' production begins
Five years after the concept was first proposed, the so-called $100 laptop is poised to go into mass production. Hardware suppliers have been given the green light to ramp-up production of all of the components needed to build millions of the low-cost machines.

When cats attack

5sf - The American Beauty Experiment, Pts. 1-3

This is totally true. Totally.

Jeszcze Polska nie zginela! (Poland has not yet perished!)

Polish spirit

The Poles have got money and markets out of the EU. But they haven't got an apology. Some Germans feel that without their friendship and aid Poland wouldn't have been allowed in the club so soon. Maybe. But a long-lost brother has returned to the family home, still simmering about a past upset, when the rest of the family has made up and forgotten long ago.

A Star's Tale

As we know, many stars live far far away in the sky. If you look out your window, you will find the star whose story we are about to tell. It is the one twinkling in the top left-hand corner of your window-sky.

This star is a very old, lonely star, and has gazed down upon this earth for longer than any of us can imagine. The star remembers a time when there were no humans; it also remembers when it started to see the two-legged humans. The star recalls an age - a long one - in which darkness meant sleep and rest for humans. It recalls the recent birth of many human stars that shine as brightly as the stars in the sky, and remembers that as the human stars grew in numbers, the humans also started to wake in the night, and no longer slept as long or as often. Instead, in the light of the human stars, the humans laughed and wept and worked and danced with wild abandon. Sometimes the humans also gazed back at the star. The longer the star looked upon the distant and strange humans, the more it grew to love them, for love often grows out of memory, and the star had a long memory indeed.

However, when the sun rises each morning, its bright rays blind the star and the star can see no more, save for a brief instant in the grey light of the dawn, when it gazes its last upon the humans till night arrives again. Each dawn the star glimpses a little of the sort of life humans lead in the day - a girl packing her bag for school, a night watchman glancing at his watch, eager to be home, a bakery alive with delicious smells, roads increasingly crowded with vehicles bringing humans to places that remain unknown to the star.

As the star's love for the humans grew, so did its desire to understand the humans. What did humans do in the day, the star wondered. Why does the schoolgirl bring home sheets of paper that make her so unhappy? What family does the night watchman have? Why does the freshly baked bread disappear everyday? Where do humans go to in the day? The star loved the humans, but it never really knew them, and this made the star sad. It envied the sun, and hated it, and wished that somehow, day could come without the sun's rays, so that it could finally see its beloved humans in the day.

But the laws of nature are not like the laws of humans, which can be broken and paid for in prison-years, or even human lives. Nor are the laws of nature like the laws of children's fairy-tales. In children's fairy-tales love always triumphs, and while unfortunate events do occur, sadness is never eternal. The laws of nature cannot be broken and they care not for love or sad stars, so everyday the sun rises, and everyday the star is blinded. Hence, everyday, the star sheds tears of stardust that streak across the sky like fireworks, and the star lives in an eternity of loneliness, always loving but never knowing.

If some evening, while looking out your window, you spot that star in the top left-hand corner, stand on your toes and stretch your arm as far out of your window as you can, and wiggle your fingers. For while stars live far far away in the sky, every little bit closes the distance between stars and humans. And who knows? If you stretch far enough, you might just touch a lonely star.

Oh justice!

My layman understanding of matters of justice and law. Most of the extracts below (italicised) taken from NYT "In Steps Big and Small, Supreme Court Moved Right":

Fully a third of the court’s decisions, more than in any recent term, were decided by 5-to-4 margins. Most of those, 19 of 24, were decided along ideological lines...

Once again proving that Justice is not blind, but it certainly wears blinkers.

In its most important patent ruling in years, the court tilted away from patent owners and made it easier to find that a patent had been improperly issued for an invention that was “obvious” and therefore undeserving of patent protection.

Finally. The list of patented 'inventions' in the US is a bit too long methinks.

The court made it easier for prosecutors in death penalty cases to remove potential jurors who express ambivalence about the death penalty. Writing for the 5-to-4 majority, Justice Kennedy said appeals courts must defer to a trial judge’s decision on whether a potential juror would be able to overcome qualms about capital punishment and be open to voting to impose a death sentence. The dissenters, in an opinion by Justice Stevens that Justices Souter, Ginsburg and Breyer also joined, said this set the disqualification bar too low and would skew juries toward those most likely to vote for death.

Hmmm... On one hand a person who is, in principle, opposed to the death penalty has no place in a jury deciding whether a defendant should receive the death penalty. On the other hand, we're talking about ambivalence towards the death penalty. My gut feeling is that any person who is violently opposed to the death penalty would be disqualified without much controversy. So the question is whether this results in a tendency to disqualify those who merely feel hanging someone is distasteful (which is, I must add, the proper and normal human reaction), meaning that you end up with the probability of having a jury of rednecks who're too ready to bay for blood. (Yes yes... stereotypes! I admit!) I tend to lean liberal on the death penalty, and therefore the prospect of a jury of rednecks terrifies me. You see what secondary school Lit does to you? (I'm looking at you, Harper Lee.) I don't really know much about law (have I mentioned this already?), so I guess the answer might be obvious to the brilliant legal minds out there already. Ah well.

A deadline for filing a federal appeal could not be excused by the fact that a federal judge had given an inmate’s lawyer the wrong date, the court held in a 5 to 4 opinion by Justice Thomas.

This sucks. The poor guy is penalised because the federal judge screwed up? Punishing innocents for mistakes/crimes that are not their own sucks big-time.

Unfortunately that happens in Singapore too. I've talked a lot about the case of Amara Tochi elsewhere, so I won't say too much about this again. Suffice to say that he was put to death (killed, murdered) for bringing drugs into Singapore, even though he (almost certainly) didn't know that they were drugs. And it's not a case of a judge ruling overly harshly, or a mistake made in the sentencing (even though that would also suck). It's just the way it works in Singapore. I would encourage you to look at the section on the trial if you follow the link to the Wiki article.

What is justice and what is the law? Sometimes if you think about it, the divergence between the two is chilling.

Randoms

I hate going out in the day because the weather is too darn warm. These days I slap on sunblock on my hand, wear gloves, grab a thermometer, stick it outside my window. Is it less than 28C? Yes? Ok, now my foot can venture tentatively out my door. And EVEN if it's less than 28, if the floor burns my foot, the foot retreats. No suicidal battles to be fought with the weather!

So I tend to get home late-ish. And I don't mind really, because the sun is a Bad Bad Thing, and mid-year nights are so clear, and if you haven't noticed (people never do), the moon has been gorgeous.

BUT the one thing that is bad about getting home late is the wildlife at my place. I'm convinced it's bat mating season because at night, bats - nay, a swarm of bats has been circling crazily mere inches above the ground, and more importantly, blocking my way home! Horror! Horror!

a goblin's tale

I'm in a strange mood today, perhaps partly because I read Robert Anton Wilson's Schrodinger's Cat trilogy in one sitting without really understanding many of the references and becoming practically delirious by the end of the 3 books.

(I'm beginning to think that the sound of words is sufficient enjoyment, even without understanding of the content. Why else was I hooked on the trilogy for the better part of today when I'd already lost track of the multiple characters in the multiple plots in multiple universes smothered in multiple references?)

(Is the pure aesthetic of poetry words without content?)

It could also be because the weather is swear-wordedly warm and the mechanical hum of my laptop is irritating me and threatening to give me a headache.

I also feel an overwhelming urge to speak in italics. Which I might or might not indulge in later in this post. Let's keep you in suspense for now.

And as always, stories surface and then drown in my mind, unconnected and unthoughtof, and then resurface again. One that has been on my mind for a long time is a tale of a goblin.

I don't see the point of writing a story about a goblin since everyone knows that goblins are at best secondary characters, and are never successful in the roles that really matter - Nordic heroes or Byronic heroes or Shakespearen heroes or even vampires. Some authors have maintained that even the smallest of creatures (like hobbits) can matter, but the truth is - and we're not talking about fiction here - the smallest of creatures seldom matter in significant ways.

So I don't see the point of writing a story about a goblin.

Nevertheless.

This goblin was small, even for a goblin, and was born in a goblin village, which was ruled by Authority. Authority came dressed in a pink lace dress. The other goblin inhabitants of the village disliked Authority in principle, and went about discreetly defying Authority as best they could.

One day, Authority left the village, instructing the goblin inhabitants to behave themselves. The Majority of the goblin inhabitants formed a Group, and while the individual goblins disliked Authority, the Group claimed to uphold Authority's rule, and in fact, became Authority itself (except without the pink lace dress).

The Authority-Group decided to enforce all of Authority's rules. The rules that they enforced included those rules that individual members of the Authority-Group used to break when Authority was around. As a result of the Authority-Group, the enforcement of Authority's rules was much stricter and harsher than it used to be, when Authority was around. Many goblins were drowned or burnt at the stake for the smallest of transgressions.

When Authority finally returned to the village, the Authority-Group reported all its enforcement actions to Authority, and Authority was well-pleased. The Authority-Group then disbanded, and previous members of the Authority-Group continued their discreet defiance of Authority, seeing no contradiction in their actions.

The non-hero who is our goblin played no significant part in these happenings (as tends to be the case with the smallest creatures), but was deeply troubled by the inconsistencies he saw. The goblin decided that a Group was a strange and complex entity that was more than the sum of its individual goblins. The goblin decided that he was afraid of Groups because Groups were motivated by chaotic, unpredictable impulses and an unyielding logic of their own. Groups, he thought, were impossible to understand, and dangerous.

The goblin went on to do many other things in his life. However, as I've said before, they are not very significant. Goblins are very insignificant creatures. Goblins, like humans, are never heroes, even though heroes are sometimes disguised as humans or goblins. But that is not very important.

Strawberry marshmallows to you too!

My butt hurts very much because in an uncharacteristic burst of courage, I've been cycling (well, wobbling and squealing and just stopping short of running over people) these 2 days. If you were at ECP yesterday and you heard someone screaming 'my butt hurts' non-stop it was probably me. It's like confetti. You scatter the 'my butt hurts' as you cycle down the road, and some of it inevitably lands on the heads of innocent passers-by. Now and then you punctuate the confetti-scattering with little bits of 'sorry! didn't mean to almost run you over!' or 'help! I'm losing control of my bike!' or 'get out of my way I don't know how to ring this bell!' or 'don't cycle so close to me or I'll die!'

Oooh strawberry marshmallows... I love strawberry marshmallows. They could represent so many things. Strawberry marshmallows represent 'hello' and 'goodbye' and 'how do you do' and 'I never want to see you again'. Strawberry marshmallows are vulnerability, the feminine ideal, violence, soap operas, the earth, the essence of essence (like the mistress of the mistress or the son of the son). In fact, life-which-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates is like strawberry marshmallows. But only like strawberry marshmallows with strawberry jam filling and not the ones with yucky strawberry cream filling. Because marshmallows with strawberry cream filling don't represent anything except hello kitty and lawyers, and everyone knows that hello kitty and lawyers are not really part of life except in hell, and life in hell is nothing like life-which-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates. (Has anyone noticed how difficult it is to type with hyphens? Not that hyphens aren't pleasant creatures. Just difficult. Maybe it's a phase.) Strange isn't it, how chocolate is sinful but not hellish? But we were talking about strawberry marshmallows. Lollipops though - I don't need to say what lollipops represent, because lollipops mean different things to different people. Lollipops are subjective. On the other hand, strawberry marshmallows represent everything to everyone. Especially life-which-is-like-a-box-of-chocolates. Strawberry marshmallows are transcendental. I like strawberry marshmallows. (but not the ones with the strawberry cream filling.)