Singaporean Blogger gets hit by a Defamation suit. Why am I not surprised?

Just came from reading a bunch of blogs like Wannabe Lawyer's, mourning the 'death' of AcidFlask who had to take his blog offline after getting hit by a letter threatening legal action.

I have to state frankly that I wasn't surprised. It was just a matter of time before something like that happened. I recall an interview with Alfian Sa'at that I read sometime back. He said that the only reason the government had let him alone so far was because he was small fry. And until recently, so were the Singaporean bloggers.

Until the last couple of years, the group of people who read or created blogs was small. Their audience was a select group of the highly literate and techno savvy. Now, with every ah lian and ah beng(Tom,Dick and Harry not Singaporean enough lah) jumping on the blogging bandwagon and in turn reading blogs, the gahmen as MrBrown calls it, will begin to sit up and take more notice.

I came onto the blogging scene late, being one of the most technologically incompetent persons around. By then the more popular blogs already had a readership numbering in the thousands, that is for Xiaxue at least. The popular bloggers were also starting to get more organized. People like Mr Brown, Mr Miyagi, Xiaxue and Cowboy Caleb were starting to meet up.

This was just bound to happen. Maybe AcidFlask was just the scapegoat needed to set an example and scare the rest. Although I highly doubt that it was necessary. We're Singaporeans man, we know what awaits us if we're naughty and we know that ISA does not stand for Internal Server Alert. I've noticed that people like Mr Brown and even Wannabe Lawyer have always been so careful with their remarks.

Gilbert Koh in my opinion gave the best advice of all. Although unhappily he decided to take his own advice and shut down his blog which is an enormous pity.

What else can I say? Only this, that AcidFlask was the first, but most assuredly not the last. The whole idea of defamation suits scares the willies out of most Singaporeans especially those with alot to lose like MrBrown with his wife and kids. If this method works so well, they're going to use it again.

Green Dress

Fuck, I am going for the Law Ball which I wasn't even that enthusiastic about going for in the first place, in a GREEN dress.

I do not wear the colour green. I just do not. There are certain colours I dislike wearing because I think they're strange and green is one of them. But now I have a GREEN evening gown. That I paid $100 for to boot.....

my excuse? It looked good in the shop and fitted pretty well.

When I got home, it still looked fairly good for some reason. But now I'm starting to panic. It's so..... GREEN.....Why on earth didn't I buy a basic BLACK dress?????Oh yeah, cos the salesgirl said everyone would be in black.

sigh. Anyway, I also bought a back up dress. Yes I am paranoid that way. The back up dress is a very safe, basic black long evening gown.

My favourite colour of the moment is pink. Half my wardrobe is pink. But if I bought a pink evening dress then my bag, shoes, shawl would either have to be pink or white and I didn't have all of those in white. So in order to save money, I bought a green dress. Then bought a black dress in panic as a back up.

*boggles* I must be mad.

As long as no one says I look like broccoli......

Aubade

There are few poets I admire as much as Philip Larkin. His use of language was always so precise and clean. He wasn't one who was overly verbose, his poems never postured in anyway. They flowed smoothly on from one line to the next, without a break in rhythm. He made poetry seem so effortless and as natural as breathing.

And yet there was this grimness about his poems as well. As a man, he was an isolated fellow. A lecturer at school once commented that he was one who detested crowds and people and yet was at the same time intensely lonely.

Sometimes I'm afraid that when I die, most people at my funeral will simply say that they never knew me well enough to be my friend. And sometimes at night when I think about death, I wonder with fear, what it must be like to not have any sensation at all, to not be breathing or feeling. And I think of that line from Hamlet that haunts me sometimes, 'For in this sleep of death what dreams may come'

What dreams indeed...

I'm tired today. And when I re read this poem, I finally understood, like I never did before, the heavy oppressive fear of losing my senses.

Aubade- a song of daybreak, one that signals new life and hope ... how ironic, in the context of this poem

Aubade



I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's really always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse
-- The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused -- nor wretchedly because
An only life can take so long to climb
Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational being
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear -- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
Nothing to love or link with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Have always known, know that we can't escape,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

By Philip Larkin

Love and hate the line ' most things may never happen:this one will'. The finality to it and its rhyming sequence adds to the gravity of the words. They drop like a stone to the heart.

Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy

I finally got around to reading this book today. God, it was so much better than I thought it would be. Funny, irreverent, a girl named trillian.....what more do you want out of a book?

But seriously, it was such fun reading it. I refused to buy it knowing that the prices would be jacked up due to the opening of the movie so I sat in Borders for 2 hours reading it.

Plus I loved that concept of an Improbability drive and also a planet that MADE planets....

But the best part of all? I loved the fact that the people secretly running the earth were mice....Thoroughly puts us humans in our place.

I have to try to read the rest of the books in this series, its so good. But I hope it won't be a let down the way the sequels to Ender's Game were. Some authors start out so well and then just blow it in Book 2.

Below is this great extract from the book, I got it off Xiaxue's blog because this was the one of the scenes which amused me so hugely and I'm too lazy to either search for the rest online or to type out my favourite bits.


"The Babel fish," said the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. (......) The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.

"Now it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could have evolved purely by chance that some thinkers have chosen to see it as a final and clinching proof for the nonexistance of God.

"The argument goes something like this: 'I refuse to prove that I exist," says God, 'for proof denies faith, and without faith I am nothing.'

" 'But,' says Man, "the Babel fish is a dead giveaway, isn't it? It would not have evolved by chance. It proves you exist, and so therefore, by your own arguments, you don't. QED.'

" 'Oh dear,' said God, "I haven't thought of that,' and promptly vanishes in a puff of logic."


---- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979)

caffeine and native title do not mix well

Gah, have just overdosed on coffee from brunetti's and have this massive headache. But I still have to forge ahead and try to clear my native title assignment.

Really, the more I read about native title in Australia and the rights of the Aborigines here, the more annoyed I get. I don't really see myself as being the activist type but honestly, those poor people ought to get a better deal than what the current Australian government is handing out.

Maybe I'm growing up, I've always been more than ready to accept the status quo at home, easy to say coz I know I'm one of the luckier ones. I'm a member of a majority race, belonging to a comfortable upper middle class household....the fact that my parents can afford to send me overseas to study is already an indicator of my general good fortune.

So why the sudden surge of pity for the Aboriginal people? I suppose because this is the first time I've studied or read so much about their situation. For example, even when the Aust government has granted them legal rights to land that they had occupied for several thousand years( and by the way, those rights were 200 years in the making cos before they were deemed to not even exist) they're only allowed 'traditional rights'. All this just means that ,ok they're allowed to fish and hunt and maybe do some cultivation, but the minute they discover anything valuable in the land like copper, then they pretty much have to bugger off and let some mining company take care of that.

No none can read about all this and not feel the inherent unfairness of it all. They've been sitting pretty here for ten thousand years and suddenly some white men show up and now they have to ask for rights to their own land???WTF???

Of course its more complicated than this but I'm headachy and hyper from caffeine and in no mood to be reasonable.

Truth? They're a dying culture and people. In another hundred years, most of them would have just adopted white culture just to get on with life. They live on the fringes of society as it is, poor and inebriated. In my own selfish way, I'm glad that it didn't happen to chinese culture and the chinese people. But eventually the lack of cultural diversityas evidenced by the vulnerability of minority groups around the world will work to our detriment anyway.

Funny that I'm studying this right alongside international law and the right to seld determination. Self determination is probably exactly what they want and what they'll never get.

'you think the only people who are people
are people who look and think like you..' Colours of the Wind

This is from the soundtrack of Pocahontas which as a Disney film is ironically part of the whole onslaught of western cultural imperialism.

I just realised I have no idea as to how to move my previous blog posts from xanga onto blogspot...

Was asked this question at cell group that day about the desires of one's heart and I realised I wanted nothing more than a second chance at life. A chance to not have made all the mistakes I made and a chance to start over fresh.

I have to admit though, that I never thought when I decided to take my parents offer to go to Melbourne and study law, that it would be the worst ever decision of my life.

It enclosed me within the mould they had been dying to shut me in for the longest time. All through my NUS years, when I was studying Eng. Lit, I was serenely oblivious to their hints of the inherent uselessness of an arts degree. They weren't willing to fund a masters for me and I wasn't willing or ready to go out into the great big working world yet. (Or become a teacher and mire myself in the horrors of the Singaporean education system like all my friends were doing)

Hence, Melbourne and a law course.

The funniest thing is that people always think that being good at lit meant that law wouldn't be too difficult. Which turned out to be completely untrue.....

Why a poet wannabe? Because I've always loved poetry I suppose. Of all the literary forms I studied, I always felt intuitively that poetry was the quitessential written art form. Unfortunately, everything I put down on paper somehow comes out sounding terribly lame, reminiscent of the Sylvia Plath poem about the
stillbirth of poems.

I still love poetry though and I think I'll post up different poems every now and then that i like or am interested in.