Poor widdle hamsies

Yesterday was not a good day to be a hamster, because we were drawing post-vaccination blood samples from them. Actually, SS (one of the microbiologists I work with) and I are getting quite the cekap with our phlebotomy skills. It only took us two hours to bleed twelve hamsters this time. Let me tell you, people who work with humans ought to be grateful, you just stick the needle into a vein and there's a veritable gush of blood...

Actually, yesterday wasn't a good day to be me either, since SS first stuck me in the right index finger with a needle - which had been in a hamster a few seconds previously - and then Hamsie #25 bit me on the left. What baffles me is that he managed to draw blood without breaking my glove, so I guess that's fine, the only things in the wound are my own native germs...

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My dad's friends whom I'm staying with for Thanksgiving have a copy of Anwar's The Asian Renaissance, so I read/skimmed it. Pretty okaylah, nothing that's particularly profound. Nothing that struck me as terribly hypocritical except this:

While ensuring that they are also well-entrenched in the traditional works, children must not continue to be force-fed a diet of trivia.

Students must not be fed solely on a diet of textbooks, but guided to explore ideas from the works of great masters, and to follow the disputes and controversies between rival schools and ultimately, enter yet greater treasure troves of knowledge.

This from the guy who instituted the Pendidikan Moral curriculum for non-Muslim kids when he was Education Minister...bangang sial. That's got to be the prime example of force-feeding a diet of trivia...eighty moral values YOUR HEAD. Someday I'm going to type up Amir Muhammad's NST column about his reading of the Form Five Moral textbook and post it on this blog. It was hilarious.