theCollectiveUs

Here’s my new toy. It’s an ultra wide angle toy camera by Superheadz which presumably comes in limited quantities. It’s even got a name – clover san – which doesn’t make much sense but hey, it’s probably in the name of cuteness. At 75g, it fits comfortably in my palm and from the viewfinder, it seems to have a bit of fisheye effect. I’ve now a roll of film in it so I’ll update when the roll’s expanded.

Happy!

Will probably bring this to Mongolia.

It all began one glorious morning, where it occurred to me that I wanted a hat with a feather. There’s plenty of good to be had with hats with a feather in them and plenty of fun. I mean, if you had a hat, wouldn’t you too want a feather in it? This led me to look around for Brixton hats because Brixton makes such pretty hats that would actually stay on your head if you were riding a horse.

But I ended up getting one without a feather because the ones with feathers look uglier. I have my own bag of feathers at home so all is well.

And then I bought that Nixon belt I mentioned some time back except in bright orange which I thought was red (it looked red online!). The belt’s made of rubber and the buckle is plastic which is very practical and great for jumping into the pool with if I had a swarm of bees chasing after me. No more rusty belts!

Stay tuned for Part 2!

I want this… wonder if I can find it in shops here. It’s turquoise and made of rubber!

I also want a hat because hats are cheaper than haircuts. I found one I like a lot but it’s phenomenally expensive.

I got a Lensbaby Composer for my Sony DSLR yesterday. Here’re some sample pics. They’re absolutely gorgeous.

I was asked to write something but I ran out of ideas. So I took a leaf from the book of many a school teacher and picked a picture from my hard drive to talk about. Today’s picture is…

… a very badly taken photo of Noel Gallagher.

I got to interview him some months before he quit Oasis. There’s obviously a script that he kept to because he’s probably heard the same questions at least once in every continent if not country and there’s rarely a misstep in his replies. He doesn’t strike me as someone who cares a lot about screaming fans but rather someone who takes a lot of pride in his work and cares about being appreciated for that. Despite all the PR-savvy replies though, he did make a lot of snide remarks at his brother’s expense though.

On hindsight, I should have probably got an album or two autographed before they disbanded. I actually quite like a few of their songs. They make for very easy listening and like what he says, are timeless.

Oh well.

I’ve been packing my room and found this. It’s probably about 15 years old and I’ve never seen it in toy shops or eBay before. I won it at some carnival as a kid.

I’m probably going to put this up on eBay and see how it goes unless anyone here wants to offer me a price for it. The cards are all plastic, not even plastic-laminated. It’s a very well-made toy set.

The slogan somehow reminds me of this ‘Teaching as a Career’ advertisement which had a bunch of kids talk about how “I can be anything I want to be!”

It’s a great action movie. It’s very rugged, brutal and cuts-to-the-chase. There’s a lot of coarse language and inappropriate violent scenes so it’s not a superhero movie you’d want to bring your kids to watch (I’d bring mine if I had kids and if they weren’t dumb asses). Controversial sequences aside, I really like how it’s sarcastic and a satire of traditional superhero comics, yet pays tribute in its own subtle way to that same geek culture. Unlike traditional comic stories, it doesn’t attempt to preach a moral and gives reasons, not excuses for the superheroes’ raisons d’etre.

I also like how not all the superheroes are chiselled and dashing – the main hero actually looked kind of dweebish initially although for some reason, when I *did* Google, the actor actually looks like a really cute boyband member. I’m most impressed as well with the girl who played Hit Girl. That’s probably one of the juiciest roles ever for a child actor in a show that’s not serious emo-drama and she pulls it off really well. There are of course plenty of critics who’re quick to point out that the maturity level of the role is too much for her young age but I’d think that they’re underestimating the mental capacity and maturity of kids. It’s easy to be aghast at something that’s socially deviant and which is frowned upon by society but think about it, I’d say that not all of us would have cringed at the violence and language exposed to her when we were that age. And we’d have been perfectly capable of discerning right from wrong too.

You know how the eggs in good Ramen shops are always sort of runny inside? The braised variety which looks hard boiled on the outside but when you bite into one, the yolk oozes out and fills your mouth? If you haven’t had one of those, you’ve been eating at the wrong ramen houses.

I made a batch of those eggs over the weekend. Unfortunately, I screwed up in my selection of eggs so they didn’t turn out as nice on the outside. The flavor though was still pretty decent but I could have boiled the eggs a little less so the yolk remains a bit runnier. I think I’ll try adding a bit of lemongrass to the stock the next time. Could make for an interesting flavor…

It was revelation to say the least. There I was, doing my Japanese homework during lunch while holding a phone conversation with a friend. I commented that it’s pretty cool I can actually multitask and speak (in English) while reading and writing my Japanese assignment.

About 5 questions into my assignment, I realised that I didn’t really know what I was reading or writing and that I was merely recognizing these runes and matching them with this mental picture of what I remember seeing in my textbook (The assignment’s about conjugation). For a brief moment, I felt like a kindergartner scribbling symbols and matching shapes. I know Japanese is mostly phonetically-structured but I really do prefer languages that use Latin alphabets.

I got some homework back today and before I spotted the smiley face, I really didn’t know if that was a giant zero or a giant flower on the page. The words at the bottom say “What food do you like to eat?”

I thought this was funny enough to share. The objective is to introduce your friend, stating what sort of person he/she is. Since we all know I have no friends, I made some up. I’m not sure if we’re supposed to fill up the box with portraits but having hung out with one too many artists these days, I’ve obviously got it in my head that I’m pretty damn talented at drawing too.

I caught The Men Who Stare at Goats over the weekend. It’s got a crazy vein of humor and is a pretty engaging show right up to the last 20 minutes or so when the writers probably decided they ran out of budget and had to finish up the show fast. I really like George Clooney in funny shows because he’s got such a great face.

In the meantime, if you really like goats – because I know some of you really do – here’s a link.