If it had said "whip" that could have been rather chewy

[20:49] Terra: i texted you to tell you that S baked a cake yesterday for me - his first. it was my birthday surprise :D
[20:49] Terra: it was hilarious - the instructions were "add golden syrup and cream", 'cream' as a VERB
[20:49] me: awww!!! so sweet.
how was it?
[20:50] Terra: he thought it was a noun. in went 300mls of it
[20:50] me: oh NOOO
[20:50] Terra: it was tasty, and turned out to be brownie rather than cake
[20:50] me: rotflol

V-Day

Was back at Lawrence for the weekend, brought EK along. Went to see Vagina Monologues yesterday because EK had never seen it...it was okay, but not as good as last year's - too many underclassmen overacting. I missed the girl who had the cast on her arm doing the old lady and the Bosnian refugee and Audrey doing the six-year-old girl. The girl who played the old lady last year really had a sort of retiring spinster vibe, whereas this year's just acted like a college student being snippy. To anyone who'd watched last year's, the show most especially lacked Paris doing the various types of orgasmic moans. The kid who was playing that part was really doing variations on the same moan. Paris being a vocal performance major had a better voice to start with, and did much more credible acting various ethnic or class stereotypes. Although Cara's backflip off the chair while doing the "surprise triple orgasm moan" was pretty impressive, Paris' performance was temporarily legendary.

The recent alumni discount: when the student in the box office recognizes you and doesn't realize you don't study there any more so doesn't charge you for a public ticket.

EK shot me a funny look when the girl did the "born-again Christian moan". "I haven't heard that yet," he muttered.

more Philippines-related art

This is a crappy jpeg file of a 11 x 14.25 inch poster I made. Have discovered that working with layered images eats memory like Cookie Monster eats Chips Ahoy. ARRRRRRRRRRgh. But figuring out how the Gradient editing dialog works made me happy.

The SF poster was based on some of the insects we caught in the field - the "space bug" in the lower right corner and the "weird spider" (referred to as that for lack of a better name =PPPP ). More on their stories later. The images were drawn in pencil in the field and inked later, scanned, coloured with Paint Shop Pro and added to a watercolour background (I'm gradually overcoming my fear of working with colour) and lettering to look like an old corny movie poster.

With some digging and an email to a Polish entomologist I got the space bug identified as Aspidimorpha bilobata (transparent shell becomes opaque post-mortem because of tissue fluids drying up); and Laura found a picture of a similar spider which was in the genus Gasteracantha (with what I know of Latin, I think it's something like "spiky belly"?).

These creatures are so unimaginably fantastic to the urbanite, in that we'd never conceived of their actual existence, so that we labeled them in terms of science-fictional figments. This is what I wrote in an essay that Jodi was going to send to Haribon:

For an urbanite, a trek into the jungle is like an astronaut’s journey to the far side of the moon – so close, yet one never sees it. Too often we act as if our cities are spaceships, closed off from external change. It was staggering to realize that all the cities I had lived in (in Malaysia) once were very much like the forest around us: dense with life, growing, eating and being eaten, nothing inorganic but the rocks.

Dung beetle

I actually did this one in the field. Painted a page of my sketchbook black, copied the image from a previous pen drawing of the beetle, and cut it out with a paper knife (who needs those fancy X-actos...although they make you feel more cheem).

Darwin at the high net (yes, that's really his name)

18.5 by 21.2 cm. This is a papercut; some of the lines are on the order of half a millimeter across, a rete mirabile even if I say so myself.

NEEE...nooorr...NEEE...nooorr...

Story from my sis FlowerMoonFish. This happened some time ago but it's still funny:

"Alissa got an SMS saying 'quick! call an ambulance! mum's lying on the floor and she can't get up.' "

"How'd she know it wasn't really her mum?"

"It was a Singapore number. She was going to message them back and tell them they had the wrong number, but then she got another message saying, 'it's ok, she's gotten up now.' "

"Haha, that's kind of funny. But since the person obviously had a handphone, why didn't they just call the ambulance themselves?"

"That's what we were all wondering."

---

My mum has gotten a handphone. I see the seven angels in the sky. Hell has frozen over, the Apocalypse is nigh.

Hey, that rhymes!

---

No work today because it's snowing like mad. You know how people complain government servants are lazy? Well, they don't have sembahyang Jumaat here, so they take snow days instead.

Actually, I REALLY need the time to work on art stuff. Philippines show opening next Friday liao. Arrrrrgh.

Phases is back (ole, ole ole ole...)

YEAH BEBEH!

After the incredibly popular but sadly understaffed print magazine ended its run after a few good years, attempts were made to set up a website that fizzled out after a while. Now the website is being actively worked on once more, and there's a temporary Phases site/blog here. I'm pretty happy - and grateful to all the people back home who've given so much of its time to get the Phases community back on its feet, especially since the mailing list seems to be either dormant or dying off.

(Bit of history: In the mid-90s SU ditched the boring glossy goody-goody youth magazine format for a unique layout - square sepia paper stock with only two colours of ink, black and orange. A lot of the content in the first issue came from the inaugural 1999 Young Writers' Camp - and the camps at least are still going strong - and subsequent issues continued to have a lot more 'real' writing from teens and young adults.)

Wankerrrrsss...

This is the Public Service "I'm Procrastinating On Important Stuff" Bulletin No. 69.

I'm rather annoyed at how NG over the last few years or so seems to have been cutting down on quality writing in favour of having much more graphics-heavy articles, having a lot of unnecessary computer-generated figures, and pandering to popular topics. Compare recent and 1970s Readers' Digest issues if you want to see why I'm worried about that last. Case in point being this month's issue, which includes a VERY badly written and poorly organized essay on the biochemistry and some social aspects of romantic love. Wonder if the timing has anything to do with Valentine's Day. =PPP

Bouncing off something that was in the article, i Googled 'oxytocin orgasm' (oxytocin is one of those interesting neuropeptides that do a bunch of different things) and to my surprise one of the top hits was a Christian website called The Marriage Bed. After reading what they had to say about oxytocin, I browsed through the site a bit and came across a section where the authors discussed masturbation...and came to the conclusion that the Bible has nothing bad to say about it and it's okay.

-_o

You have to see this site to understand why I was surprised. At first blush it's one of those freaking corny ugly redneck fundamentalist sites. It's got cute little fishies next to the titles of essays, and the logo is a corny cross superimposed on a corny pink heart. The authors are from Texas, the land of the evil botanical object, and look like fat rednecks with a fat kid. However, it seems to be surprisingly well-organized and all of the links WORK, which is amazing to find in this genre of website. And the articles...surprise, surprise...make sense.

The authors of this site, as far as i can tell are quite traditional with regard to other stuff like no making out before you're married (drat...), no revealing clothing in public, wife submits to husband, and so forth, but the site also has quite a lot of biology-oriented information, advice on how to give massages, oral sex, using vibrators, etc.

And wanking is a much-under-discussed topic in all those BGR workshops (those of you who have been to either sunday school or SUFES camps in Malaysia will know that that's an acronym for 'boy-girl relationships') we attended as teens. The one time I remember it being brought up - Methodist Family Convention 2000 - was one day when we split into sex-segregated sections so people could ask the winkwinknudgenudge questions. The person in charge of the girls was called Angie, a twenty-eight-year-old who looked sixteen with two toddler sons. She said something vague like "I'd rather my boys not do it when they're older" but not whether it was actually sinful per se or just sort of borderline discouraged.

So I emailed a panel of my parents, a cousin in seminary, another cousin who wants to be a bodhisattva, a friend in seminary, a friend who's a journalist, a friend who's a part-time social worker, anddd...assorted male friends who are probably experts on the subject by virtue of their gender, asking for their opinions on the site.

(Yan is going to kill me for being scandalous, i know...we've already argued over Joshua Harris' "I Kissed Dating Goodbye")

Anyway...here's what the site owners plus one guest columnist who's a pastor had to say about wanking. Note that the pastor seems to be quite the AOG type:
Why Didn't God Call Masturbation Sin?
Masturbation Q and A
Pastor's Thoughts on Masturbation

Sample:

There are passages which clearly label as sin such things as fornication, adultery, lust, incest, rape, homosexuality, and even bestiality. Surely the urge to masturbate is more common than most of these, and much stronger than many of them, and yet the Bible says nothing about it. If God felt it necessary to tell us not to have sex with animals, why didn't He also find it necessary to tell us not to masturbate?I can only come up with three reasons why "thou shalt not masturbate" is not found in the Bible:

1.. It's an oversight.
2.. One must have special knowledge or be spiritual to know this truth.
3.. Masturbation is not an inherently sinful act.

Number one makes the Bible incomplete, while number two is the heresy of Gnosticism. By process of elimination I am left to conclude that number three must be true.

Hm. None of us want to be heresiarchs, do we?

Anyway, this is mostly an exercise in curiosity for me - I won't say scientific curiosity because I can't disclaim that other parts of my mind are also interested. Although I think I may have killed all the nerve endings in my pelvis by commuting to work on a bicycle with a _really_ unyielding saddle, so the masturbation question is personally irrelevant =D

Oh yes, and I think male mammalian anatomy is very funny-looking and terribly exposed to environmental hazards, except for the whales who keep their important bits inside and only whip them out when they need them. Sorry guys. I just think you're weirdly constructed.

Incidentally, The Marriage Bed site had a link to a Christian (!) website that sells sex toys. Hmm...my parents's birthday - yes, they have the same birthday, I didn't leave out an 's' - is coming up 5 days after Valentine's... All their kids are out of the house... hmm....international air mail can reach in about 10 days... hmm...

^_^

Bruce Cockburn

Oh and while we're on the subject of music, I found a great Bruce Cockburn fansite. Has lyrics with quotations from the man's comments on them. Don't go to his official site if you have a slow connection - too much Flash.

Again...I've only the one album (Breakfast in New Orleans, Dinner in Timbuktu) - but this one I love unambiguously. Look How Far is one of my favourite love songs...and Mango is one of my favourite songs about sex - although I probably shouldn't tell EK that if I play this CD for him, since he'll probably take the opportunity to complain about how I'm not giving him any =D

Speaking of that...I've just discovered from the Wikipedia entry that the singer's name is pronounced "coburn". *blush*

She's got a mango in the garden - sweet as can be
She's got a mango in the garden - full of mystery
She's got a mango in the garden - from the original tree
She's got a mango in the garden - shares it with me

I slip through the glistening gate
Tide began to pound
Tears of light poured over me
And ricocheted all around

Cui Jian (崔健)

A few years ago when I was in Beijing on a Freeman-funded college trip, we went to a club to see some famous guy (I forget who) perform. Unfortunately there was some sort of delay and he didn't show up for the couple of hours before we got fed up and left so we only got to hear the band that was opening for them. A Lawrence jazz alum whom we'd arranged to meet there told me a bit about Chinese music, most of which was completely over my head because my knowledge of music in general is abysmal (i.e. worse than my Mandarin). She said Cui Jian was "the godfather of Chinese rock" so when I saw a "greatest hits" collection in a shop a few days later, I picked it up.

I mostly like it, but again, being a total ignoramus about music, I have neither the perception or the vocabulary to say which bits I do or don't prefer. My favourite songs are 不是我不明白 (It's Not That I Don't Understand), 出走 (Stepping Out), and 花房姑娘 (Greenhouse Girl). Unfortunately (before I found his website) my only option for understanding more than scraps of the lyrics was reading the CD insert with a dictionary in hand =P

Aaaaand...then last night EK came over to watch some old Star Trek episodes. I let him in, and was putting away something in the kitchen. Walked into my room and found him standing in front of my computer with a "WTF?" look on his face.
"I don't know who the hell this guy is, but he's totally ripping off Bruce Springsteen."
"What? He's from China. No he's not."
"Yes he is! Even his saxophonist is ripping off Springsteen's saxophonist."
"That's Cui Jian. He's the godfather of Chinese rock. There. That's the CD."
"Great, he's even trying to imitate Springsteen's facial expression."

And what has Bruce Springsteen done to further the cause of democracy in China, ha? The students in Tiananmen Square didn't sing "Born in the USA" as they were facing the tanks, that's for sure...

Although I was made much happier by a group of teenagers, who, out of the murk of crappy cutesy acts at the Chinese Students' Association Spring Festival (too many bloody kindergarten baby dances!), actually did a decent job with Greenhouse Girl, although the back-up vocals guy was unintentionally funny...

Anyway, turns out EK isn't the only one who's made the comparison. Although Cui isn't just like Springsteen, according to this article, he's also like Bob Dylan and Kurt Cobain. And he raps. So there.

More comparisons:
Beijing rocker wants to roll
Cui and other people in the Beijing arts scene:
Birth of a Bejing Music Scene

The Secret Protocols of the Joint Lab Meeting

We all got our smallpox vaccinations checked, and the bandages changed yesterday. Mine's taken nicely, although that was already obvious since the pustule was beginning to ooze through my bandage. So far have been lucky enough to escape any bad reactions - two of the guys at the university were sick for a couple of days. After that we had a joint meeting with the university lab to discuss various projects that we're collaborating on. Here's a couple of amusing excerpts:

While discussing a recombinant vaccine using CMV:
T [to the Center lab]: Just gotta let you guys know, none of us can work on this, since it's probably going to be commercialized and go to the corporation in the future, and there's a conflict of interest with us [she and O] being married.
O [from the uni lab]: Well, we could get a divorce.
J: Put that on your list.

D: ...so the next thing is for me to put the construct into Y. pestis and see if it gets expressed.
O: Do you have an electroporator?
D: Yeah! I have a really cool electroporator. It's new and...
me: Is that the one that J said looks like a sex toy?
D: Totally.
J: You don't even need to be dirty-minded.