Teacher: What is jazz?
Student: I don't know, a style of playing?
Teacher: No, never call jazz a style of playing. Jazz is a concept. A composition of one minute, composed in a minute.
Student: Uh okay. (Not sure he gets that) Then what are the blues?
Teacher: The blues are a style of playing. And they will form the foundation of your training. Now play me something.
Student: Shit, where do I start. Feel so embarrassed just being here.
Teacher: Alright, then we will begin with the 12-bar blues. Now, I'll give you a walking bass line, and you will improvise a melody for me.
Student: Guess that after all these years, I am finally learning music.
Saturday, November 06, 2010
Squibble, squabble
The Lamborghini Murcielago. My dream car, but virtually the price of a house on wheels here. The scissor doors are too freaking awesome though. Damn you Italians, why are you all so damn stylish.One of the greatest problems with being an adult sometimes is, your parents haven't figured out yet how to let go, but you know that you need that independence if you are to grow into your own person.
I mean, its nice and all that Mom and Dad are always there to provide support and stuff in familiar ways like cooking dinner and giving me lifts and such, and when I tell my friends that I have dinner at home for me after classes sometimes people tell me how lucky I am.
Then I also tell them that my mom made muffins for my breakfast tomorrow, totally untrue, but I do that just to see the expression on their faces. One of the best things about life is partaking in glee at the expense of others. It feels so damn good you could almost break out in song.
But it really sucks when I've had my driving license for four whole years and my mom still won't let me drive the car unsupervised. The one thing worse than having a license and not driving it is having a license and having your mom or dad next to you in the passenger seat telling you how to drive. I swear it causes road accidents, because you are so distracted and bothered from the incessant nagging that you feel like crashing the car into the sidewalk just so that it ends.
I don't mean to sound like an upstart but I do know how to drive. I know that for sure, because I have driven unsupervised, many times. The first time I did it I actually had to "abduct" the car key and drive the car out myself without permission, and make it back half an hour later unscathed just to show my parents that "HEY, your son CAN drive. He can also park, change lanes, and do that drifting thing." Okay, the last is an exaggeration, but I can drift in Need for Speed on my Playstation. The point is, it is an auto car. Driving it as about as easy as operating a bumper car, only that you don't want to bump anybody.
I find it incredible that my parents let me board on campus for a year in secondary school, go through two years of NS, through another six months of exchange, and now they won't let me drive a freaking car although in the eyes of the law, I am perfectly qualified to do it.
I have the magic bluish green plastic card that states that I can operate heavy machinery, and I'm not on cough syrup. You don't get to say "I told you so, until I give you a reason to. There is no such thing as pre-empting I told you so and hence not letting me do something just so that you don't have to say I told you so."
Damn, that is one hell of a rant. I'm on fire.
I happen to belong to the school of people who believe that you learn best from your mistakes. I mean, I am fully aware that if I crash my car I might die, but I am very unlikely to be driving the car at 150km/h around a sharp turn, and most times I don't drive faster than 70km/h anyway. And if I don't get the chance to drive, I can't get better.
And if you don't drive for too long, you start to get scared of the roads, and that makes your license worthless. I also happen to believe that if you're destined to die, nothing you do, including driving your car safely, will stop that from happening. Yeah, I'm a fan of the Final Destination movies. Damn, what gave that away?
My parents then "show hand" by saying - "next time when you are a parent you will understand."
My retort: If you don't let me learn how to drive a car properly, I'm never going to be one. Not knowing how to drive is car is like how loser.
The last thing I want is to be like Wolowitz from Big Bang Theory, who is almost 30, lives with his mom and has an ersatz homosexual relationship with his best friend Raj. If that ever happens to me, please put me in a car and drive me round a bend at 150km/h.
Thursday, November 04, 2010
The Straits Times, the government mouthpiece
The older I get, the less I find that I'm able to read the Straits Times without being turned off at its flagrantly nationalistic agenda. I really wonder sometimes if we should be told what to think so much, when it is quite obvious that we have our own minds.
Let me cite an example. A few days ago, we had a ministerial forum in NTU. A 23-year-old final year aerospace student, Lim Zi Rui, came up and asked SM Goh a question.
He said “When I was younger, I was very proud of being a Singaporean, but that was about five, ten years ago. Five years later, with all the changes in policies and the influx of foreign talent, I really don’t know what I’m defending any more.” “I feel that there is a dilution of the Singapore spirit in youth… We don’t really feel comfortable in our country any more,” he said. This exchange between him and SM Goh then made it to the Straits Times.
Unsurprisingly, a few days later, the results of a poll were released on the front page of ST.
Young S’poreans proud of their country: poll
I mean, who are they trying to kid. The poll wasn't even objectively conducted, or made to appear like it was. This came from the article - The Straits Times reports that the polls, conducted once in 2008 and again this year, revealed that most students from primary school to junior college believe Singapore would be able to overcome any difficulties to survive as a country.
The ability to overcome adversity does not represent one's pride in a country. It simply means that most people think that the government is so ruthlessly efficient it will get the job done somehow, which is more or less true.
It is amazing the kind of rubbish and fallacious logic ST can admit into their articles to try and promote what they hope we will buy because they assume we don't care. It's true, most of us don't, but the ones that do, I think we kind of die a little inside to know that such crap is being splashed across the front pages of our national broadsheet.
It was even funnier in a sad way that they admitted results from NSFs to try and justify their findings. I think it is pretty well known but unspoken that in NS, you have to give the "right" answers, because if you don't, it is all too easy to trace who did not, and they have their own unique methods to make you fall in line.
Check out this choice quote from Minister Ng Eng Hen.
"Our students openly declare their love for Singapore and are proud of Singapore’s achievements. They believe in a society that is self-reliant, intolerant of corruption and meritocratic," he said.
Really? Who are these students who openly declare their love for Singapore? The only ones I know are constantly complaining about everything and anything.
Singaporeans need to realise one thing. Just because a politician from the PAP says something does not mean it is true. There is an inherent conflict of interest there, because politicians will always want to look like they are doing the correct thing, so think about what they say more closely so you can tell if they are selling you horsecrap.
We are not stupid, neither are we THAT ignorant, so please stop feeding us this drivel, because you are misleading those who are too lazy or ignorant to care about what's important to them.
Yesterday, when I was talking to some of my course mates from tennis, who are from a range of faculties including literature, sports science and engineering, I was shocked to realise that they had no grasp of news at all.
One of them even quipped, "I think the younger generation just doesn't care, we're all
apathetic."
I mean, I can understand that not everyone reads the newspaper, but if all you know about what is happening in the world around you is gleaned from Facebook, then that is really being a little too ignorant, because on Facebook, you will only click on things that interest you, and most of the time, the things that really concern you are not the same things that are interesting, until they come back to bite you in the backside. Then everyone goes why didn't we see that coming, but actually, it had been there all along, just that no one cared.
It just kind of makes the government look more and more like they are trumpeting their own achievements in an alternate universe borne out of being isolated too long from the disaffection on the ground, on a medium that less people take seriously, and even less read.
I don't think I can ever work for the Straits Times. But where does that leave me.
Let me cite an example. A few days ago, we had a ministerial forum in NTU. A 23-year-old final year aerospace student, Lim Zi Rui, came up and asked SM Goh a question.
He said “When I was younger, I was very proud of being a Singaporean, but that was about five, ten years ago. Five years later, with all the changes in policies and the influx of foreign talent, I really don’t know what I’m defending any more.” “I feel that there is a dilution of the Singapore spirit in youth… We don’t really feel comfortable in our country any more,” he said. This exchange between him and SM Goh then made it to the Straits Times.
Unsurprisingly, a few days later, the results of a poll were released on the front page of ST.
Young S’poreans proud of their country: poll
I mean, who are they trying to kid. The poll wasn't even objectively conducted, or made to appear like it was. This came from the article - The Straits Times reports that the polls, conducted once in 2008 and again this year, revealed that most students from primary school to junior college believe Singapore would be able to overcome any difficulties to survive as a country.
The ability to overcome adversity does not represent one's pride in a country. It simply means that most people think that the government is so ruthlessly efficient it will get the job done somehow, which is more or less true.
It is amazing the kind of rubbish and fallacious logic ST can admit into their articles to try and promote what they hope we will buy because they assume we don't care. It's true, most of us don't, but the ones that do, I think we kind of die a little inside to know that such crap is being splashed across the front pages of our national broadsheet.
It was even funnier in a sad way that they admitted results from NSFs to try and justify their findings. I think it is pretty well known but unspoken that in NS, you have to give the "right" answers, because if you don't, it is all too easy to trace who did not, and they have their own unique methods to make you fall in line.
Check out this choice quote from Minister Ng Eng Hen.
"Our students openly declare their love for Singapore and are proud of Singapore’s achievements. They believe in a society that is self-reliant, intolerant of corruption and meritocratic," he said.
Really? Who are these students who openly declare their love for Singapore? The only ones I know are constantly complaining about everything and anything.
Singaporeans need to realise one thing. Just because a politician from the PAP says something does not mean it is true. There is an inherent conflict of interest there, because politicians will always want to look like they are doing the correct thing, so think about what they say more closely so you can tell if they are selling you horsecrap.
We are not stupid, neither are we THAT ignorant, so please stop feeding us this drivel, because you are misleading those who are too lazy or ignorant to care about what's important to them.
Yesterday, when I was talking to some of my course mates from tennis, who are from a range of faculties including literature, sports science and engineering, I was shocked to realise that they had no grasp of news at all.
One of them even quipped, "I think the younger generation just doesn't care, we're all
apathetic."
I mean, I can understand that not everyone reads the newspaper, but if all you know about what is happening in the world around you is gleaned from Facebook, then that is really being a little too ignorant, because on Facebook, you will only click on things that interest you, and most of the time, the things that really concern you are not the same things that are interesting, until they come back to bite you in the backside. Then everyone goes why didn't we see that coming, but actually, it had been there all along, just that no one cared.
It just kind of makes the government look more and more like they are trumpeting their own achievements in an alternate universe borne out of being isolated too long from the disaffection on the ground, on a medium that less people take seriously, and even less read.
I don't think I can ever work for the Straits Times. But where does that leave me.
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