Yesterday, I woke up at 11ish, met a friend for lunch at 1ish, came home after and surfed the web desultorily for an hour or so, then passed out for an hour and a half --- before waking up for a carbo-laden birthday dinner that nearly sent me right back to bed again. Thank goodness that the friend whose birthday it was kindly invited us all back to his place for (Irish) coffee afterwards, so sleep was postponed for several hours.



To forestall a repeat of that sort of embarrassing sleep schedule today, and since I was sick of the internet and my laptop, today I betook myself off to a cafe to read for the afternoon.



First stop: the Cedele outlet at Frankel Avenue for decent coffee and lunch to go with the reading. There was chocolate cake too, which is no Lana, but still very good indeed.





Then there was Starbucks at Parkway Parade, because the friend who'd joined me for lun[...]

NTUC is the proxy of the ruling party especially since NTUC Secretary-Generals are also hardly coincidentally PAP Ministers. NTUC, besides cynically seen as the trade union steered by the ruling party, actually also functions to make life and cost of living less painful. NTUC is more than a trade union umbrella organisation. From NTUC Income to NTUC Foodfare to NTUC Fairprice, NTUC's co-op outlets are an everyday facets of Singapore heartland consumerism.

With recent rising food prices, NTUC Fairprice is the NTUC flagship in the co-op's effort in making Singaporeans deal with inflation. While HDB and the CPF Board are more direct nation-building via rootedness agencies, NTUC Fairprice is maybe a soft nation-building supermarket at a consumerism level. Hence, with the increased cost of living and the PAP's open reluctance in distributing handouts as welfare, is NTUC Fairprice [...]

Just watched Akeelah and the Bee, which was really inspirational, and as tense in its finale as the best sports movies - having seen Spellbound, I was prepared to be on the edge of my seat, and I'm glad it lived up to my expectations. Anyway, this story about a mobster using $10 words in letters to his kid (offspring? scion?) reminded me of the film:

Some of his letters from federal prison, which are being intercepted and scrutinized by authorities, are full of such words as "thespian," "flippant" and "sagacious," his lawyer said Thursday.



A new form of gangland slang, or a coded message to fellow wise guys? No, attorney Ephraim Savitt said, just vocabulary Basciano wants the recipient -- his 7-year-old son -- to learn.

The first time he'd invited me over to his apartment it was under the amusingly flimsy, universally clichéd pretext of watching a DVD.



We both knew what it really meant and his lack of originality drew from me a sardonic smile, but acquiesence. (Much later when I brought up his modus operandi he defended himself: "At least that way we both really knew what was being suggested, which is infinitely better than a nasty surprise at the movies when you suddenly realize, "OMG! He's got his hand up my skirt!")



So I went. And we did watch a DVD - to his credit, one that was actually worth watching and not a B-grade horror film he could pretend to be so bored by that he'd fall asleep and "accidentally" have his head lolling over to rest on my tits - and had tea. It was fairly awkward. I remember sitting in his living room - sparsely upholstered with black leather and glass and whit[...]