Living in Serangoon Gardens, you'd think there is no lack of good food.
You can practically reach the Chomp Chomp rolling out from my house.

Yeah, try eating the same good food for 19 years straight. Something like dining in at NTU for eternity. No matter how good your char kway teow may be - one day yer gonna suffer from formula constipation.

So imagine my surprise when I tried this "relatively" new stall near the Ming garden called Dessert Origins.The decor is as bland as crap, looking like an air-conditioned Canteen A with garish orange seats ~ but the stuff there is good. Like really good.


Blah decor - with good food. Chopped my sister's face off. But you don't really have to look at her anyway.


Sister eating crispy delicious spring rolls. What an atrocious hair cut. Damn!


Succulent and tasty chicken and mushroom rice. For a dessert place - they serve some scrumptious savory stuff.


Black Sesame soup. Ji Ma Wu. Not as good as the Chinatown's one
But a hell lot better than a ton of other Ji Ma Wus.



A cat licking it's genitals. For no other reason than because it's a cat and thus entitled to do that in public.

I have a thing for music with that specific organic twang.

The squeak of the guitar when you change chords.
The tuning of the instruments just before you play it.
The scraping sounds the musicians make sometimes in their seats.
The whisky and cigarette vocals that could shatter into a million rusty fragments.

Timeless.

B e i r u t.

This band is seriously good stuff.

There are points in your life where you meet with an event or a situation so radically inexplicable and wholly confounding you find yourself wanting to die laughing at it then kill yourself for the audacity of doing so.I don't have a noun for it so I'm gonna make one up now.

Reed•wan•i•sm : The total inexplicable-ness of life & the fact that you can do nothing about it.

A very captivating picture.


Now you can see from the close up that the Santa Claus (relatively human) has no eyebrows while the skeleton (a composite of calcium and carbon polyatoms) has.

It is an important distinction to make because the lack of eyebrows on the Santa emphasizes the white fur trimmings on his cap. Imagine a dark stroke of eyebrows there. No, it won't work because now Santa's face is too cramped - destroying the delicate aesthetic balance of the oval face.
The eyebrows on the skeleton, however, highlights the white of its eyes. Bringing a heavy accent into the otherwise dull and ochre shade of the bones, creating a balance between the fur and the beard of Santa.

Also note the arrow seems to glide pass the body of the Santa rather than through it. Creating a wispy, almost ethereal lightness to the sombre tone of that patch of green just behind Santa.


I must add - a wholly utterly fully inexplicable piece of art that will have you staring at it forever. Held in the thralls of the soul-wrenching gaze of Santa. You will never see Santa Claus the same again.


There is a sublimal sense of surprise in the expression of the skeleton. As though the skeleton itself is both shocked and eager in the murder of Santa. It brings to mind the tensions of the modern society - how the aging population is slowly yet unwillingly sucking the new generation dry. It is an allegory and an ironic tragedy that is both inescapable and complete.

-
-
-

Of sleepless nights and messy desks... ...

We look skywards and pray.

That this will be over soon... ...


My messy desk.

Over on other news ... ...

My all time favourite fantasy author: Sir Steven Brust: has finally finally released Iorich!


Oh you evil Mr Brust! Why must you write at such lugubrious pace?
Do you know how agonizing it is waiting for the next Vlad Taltos book to come out while global warming is heating our ice-caps up? That's so cruel of you!

So please don't disappoint me again by putting out something like Jhegaala.
Vlad belongs to the realm of swashbuckling assassinations and magic Great Weapons so please let Iorich (& future Taltos novels) have bucket-loads of it!

I can't wait to get my hands on this book!

You know, this is the kind of book that makes me tear through the pages so fast my hands start smoking. Then I try trrr~~rry to read it slower at the end just to prolong the wonderful sensation of that world. Try trrrrry hard to read it slooowly, cos i know that once I finish the last page, I'll have to wait another eon for the next book to come out.

But it's so so rare to find it in Singapore. Argh!!!! Amazon gave me a bad experience by having me wait 6 months and over charging me.

So please Mr Brust. Go green. Hurry up and write those books!

Little darling, it's been a long cold lonely winter
Little darling, it feels like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right

Little darling, the smiles returning to the faces
Little darling, it seems like years since it's been here
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun
and I say it's all right


* For all the things we thought we had - and lost in the end *