Friends

I run into some people and
they ask me how you are
I'll tell them that you're doing well
and hope that they step in front of a car

And tell me some day if we talk
what I said or did that made you leave
And I know it's sometime I've done something
but somehow I've got no memory

That was when I cut my arms with a razor blade as a means of creative expression. I only did it lightly, just grazing the skin, to see the way the blood would bleed out, to make myself look tougher. Not like some of those kids who keep going deeper and deeper, wondering what they look like down to the bone, because it's a world that's so close and yet so far and so dangerous and so much their own. The only world that is their own.

Summertime and the bees were buzzing
A freind of mine claimed you were out of my league
It was clear to me it was you I was meant to be loving
It was clear to me it was you honey, you that I need
The streets were filled with drunken singing
You lit and cigarette and blew a kiss
When I'm with you all seems forgiven
When we're apart it's you i miss

I remember every look upon your face,
The way you roll your eyes, the way you taste
You make it hard for breathing
Coz when I close my eyes and drift away
I think of you and everythings okay
I'm finally now believing

I remember what you wore on the first day
You came into my life
And I thought hey
You know this could be something
Coz everything you do and words you say
You know that it all takes my breath away
And now Im left with nothing
<3

its a quarter after one im a little drunk and i
need you now
said i wouldnt call
but i lost all control and i need you now.
and i dont know how i can do without
i just need you now

'Cause you've been hiding for days
Wasted and wasting away
But I got a little hope today you'll face your fears

Happy Thanksgiving. A toast:

Let us toast to animal pleasures, to escapism, to rain on the roof and instant coffee, to unemployment insurance and library cards, to absinthe and good-hearted landlords, to music and warm bodies and contraceptives... and to the "good life", whatever it is and wherever it happens to be.

-Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway

well, that was fast, wasn't it?

On a website offering discounted rates for hotels that aren't usually discounted and hence some hotels hide their identities like Superman behind clark kent glasses, I discovered 3 hotels' identities, and emailed nezzie.

inez to me
OMG xt OMG seriously you are a ninja! im super dupppper impressed. how on earth you are so amazing. //speechless//

yes i am shamelessly proud of myself.

*****

Philosophical question of the day: Would Alice Cullen be able to predict my future?

Amnesty International frequently issues urgent action appeals for condemned prisoners at imminent risk of execution.  While these mostly refer to prisoners in countries like the US, China, Japan, or Iran, this time I saw that the country in question was Singapore.

Yong Vui Kong was arrested in June 2007, when he was 19, by officers from the Central Narcotics Bureau.  He was charged with trafficking 42.27 grams of heroin, and then sentenced to death in January 2009.

He had been working as a messenger for a man in Malaysia who often asked him to collect money from debtors or deliver packages as "gifts" to people in Singapore and Malaysia.  At his trial, Yong Vui Kong said he had not known what was in the packages, and when he asked, he had simply been told not to open them.  The judge, however, ruled that Yong must have been aware of their contents, saying in his written summation, "I found that the accused had failed to rebut the presumption against him.  I am of the view that the prosecution had proved its case against the accused beyond reasonable doubt, and I therefore found the accused guilty as charged and sentenced him to suffer death."

Did you notice the use of the term 'presumption'?  That is because Singapore law states that when it comes to drugs, you are guilty until proven innocent.  The burden is on you to prove that you did not know that there were drugs in the package you were carrying or in the vehicle you were driving.  All the prosecution needs to do (if anything at all) is to show that you should have known that there were drugs in the sealed package or hidden under your car.

Regardless of whether Yong was indeed trying to traffick drugs or not, even if he really was guilty, what is more serious than the death penalty itself is this presumption.  If you remember a couple of years ago, there was a young Nigerian named Iwuchukwu Amara Tochi, who was also hanged because he "should have known"—even though the judge noted that there was no direct evidence that he did know or that he had found out on his own.  Indeed, his actions were consistent with someone who didn't know what he was carrying.  I have no idea whether anyone at all has ever managed to prove that he did not know and should not have known that there were drugs on him or in his vehicle, but certainly I have never heard of any case where the accused succeeded.  Furthermore, there is also another presumption which states that unless you prove otherwise, they can presume that you are carrying it for trafficking, not consumption, which can lead to a mandatory death sentence with no alternative and is almost an absolute certainty.¹

Those are two pretty amoral presumptions to make, aren't they?

---

¹ After the single appeal is rejected, the final recourse is to appeal to the President for clemency based on the mitigating circumstances of the case.  Since 1965, the President has granted clemency only six times; the last clemency was in May 1998 when President Ong Teng Cheong commuted the sentence of an 18-year-old convicted of murder to life imprisonment.  Between 1994–1999, Singapore had the highest per-capita execution rate in the world, estimated to be 13.57 executions per one million population.

To my horror I just saw the Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games Mascots, and I think that because this is going to be plonked everywhere and lord forbid, the mascots "will travel to five cities around the world as part of the global torch relay for the Games", naming and shaming should commence.

If I withhold my vitrol for the names Lyo and Merly respectively based off a lion and the merlion [apparently these names were derived from a contest, of which I hadn't heard of and again, Lord save us all], and for the fact that Lyo looks suspiciously ripped off a Care Bear, I reserve it all for the poor girl named Merly.

Let's have a look here:
The Singapore 2010 Youth Olympic Games Mascots.
Now, Merly with her Cheena-girl hair and her name, I suppose, is obviously supposed to be female.
A female merlion.
A female merlion.
There is nothing wrong with a female merlion.
There is something wrong with a merlion who is not a merlion because she does not have a FISH TAIL. Just in case, Singapore, merlion = half lion, half fish. At this point of time I'm not sure whether her lion hindpaws are decorated with scales or ripples of water, but either case it does not make her a half fish. I don't know how we got three monuments of the absolutely fictional merlion scattered about the island, plastered on every tourist brochure right if we somehow managed to get a derivative merlion mascot wrong. I think we even had a whole line of books on the merlion and he's managed to have a tail in them. It's 2010 and suddenly our merlion is walking and no longer a merlion.
Now that I've addressed the second part, let's address the first part - the 'female' bit. By the way, a female lion [called a lioness] has no mane.
A lioness has no mane.
That is to say that a lioness anthro wouldn't have long hair, by the way, if you were wondering, Singapore.

I suppose other than people who draw anthropomorphs and are bombarded with requests of decorative female peacocks wouldn't give a damn about her mane but man,
you can't ignore
that THERE IS NO FISH TAIL ON THAT MERLION.

So I hope that someday, somehow, somewhere, some Singaporean in charge of this thing who had a hand in the mascot process, the process of making The Singapore Youth Olympics Mascots Lyo and Merly, will see this post and think:

"WAH KAO I CAN'T BELIEVE I WAS BLUR ENOUGH TO LET THEM RELEASE A MASCOT WHICH IS REALLY A MALE LION CROSS-DRESSING AS A FEMALE 'MERLION' WHICH IS NOT A MERLION BECAUSE IT DOESN'T HAVE A TAIL"

The Singapore Youth Olympic Games Mascots Lyo and Merly [I'm putting this here for better search relevance] are a crying, NATIONAL, shame.

EDIT: We have realised that our best case scenario is that Merly is a post-op who didn't just change her bits but also her tail.

The set includes some Voyage of the Dawn Treader icons, but they shouldn't contain any spoilers. :D
Teasers:

Snip.

To mark the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the city of Mumbai.

Land

Swear by the olive in the God-kissed land—
There is no sugar in the promised land.

Why must the bars turn neon now when, Love,
I’m already drunk in your capitalist land?

If home is found on both sides of the globe,
home is of course here—and always a missed land.

The hour’s come to redeem the pledge (not wholly?)
in Fate’s "Long years ago we made a tryst" land.

Clearly, these men were here only to destroy,
a mosque now the dust of a prejudiced land.

Will the Doomsayers die, bitten with envy,
when springtime returns to our dismissed land?

The prisons fill with the cries of children.
Then how do you subsist, how do you persist, Land?

“Is my love nothing for I’ve borne no children?”
I’m with you, Sappho, in that anarchist land.

A hurricane is born when the wings flutter ...
Where will the butterfly, on my wrist, land?

You made me wait for one who wasn’t even there
though summer had finished in that tourist land.

Do the blind hold temples close to their eyes
when we steal their gods for our atheist land?

Abandoned bride, Night throws down her jewels
so Rome—on our descent—is an amethyst land.

At the moment the heart turns terrorist,
are Shahid’s arms broken, O Promised Land?

click on the picture to see more

I tried to live small.
I took a narrow bed.
I held my elbows to my sides.
I tried to step carefully And to think softly
And to breathe shallowly
In my portion of air
And to disturb no one.

Yet see how I spread out and
I cannot help it.
I take to myself more and more,
and I take nothing
That I do not need, but
my needs grow like weeds.
All over and invading,
I clutter this place
With all the apparatus
of living.
You stumble over it daily.

And then my lungs
take their fill.
And then you gasp for air.
Excuse me for living.
But, since I am living,
Given inches, I take yards,
Taking yards, dream of miles
And a landscape, unbound
And vast in abandon.

And, you dreaming the same.

They Call It Attempted Suicide
by Jack Gilbert

My brother's girlfriend was not prepared for how much blood
splashed out. He got home in time, but was angry
about the mess she had made of his room. I stood behind,
watching them turn into something manageable. Thinking
how frightening it must have been before things had names.
We say peony and make a flower out of that slow writhing.
Deal with the horror of recurrence by calling it
a million years. The death everywhere is no trouble
once you see it as nature, landscape, or botany.

--from Monolithos Poems, 1962 and 1982
( +request )

Title: Flowers In Her Hair
Theme: Strength will endure the deception of the pain
Series: Gundam Seed/Destiny
Character/Pairing: Cagalli Yula Athha
Rating: G

I want you to notice the flowers in my hair.

Do you fear to be my wife, do you fear the prose? Do you not know that I own the magic staff that beats water out of the cliff - that I can take the poetry out of the dirt if need be. I will mill a coffeegrinder and make it sound like music - I will go to the market and buy potatoes and put a flower on top - I will dress up a table as van Huysum would of painted a still life and oh what I will work - and then - then I will have the composure to in my worried restless - re-read all my letters - do you not hear how it trembles for love to you, my queen.
("Han och Hon" - Correspondence between Strindberg och Siri von Essen 1875-76)