World Cup for Dummies

If you have been watching the FIFA World Cup as regularly and sincerely and avidly as I have, you are probably as uninterested, clueless and ignorant as I am. And like me, you are probably realising that there is no escape.

I mean, even if you nuked a satellite to stop the airing of matches worldwide and then you synchronised hacker robots to stall Facebook updates, even then - a vuvuzela would shout out somewhere and end any chance you may have for peace.

So you may as well update yourself with this research that Google and I put together after anticipating what your questions will be.

Q] I've already paid off mafias to blow-up satellites and paid off hackers to overpower facebook. Now who is this Vuvuzela and why is he determined to disturb my peace?

A] I'm afraid Vuvuzela is not a person you can intimidate because it is not a person. Dave Barry describes it best when he calls it an "ancient traditional plastic manufactured in China". If you've caught a single match of the World Cup so far and fallen asleep during it and had a nightmare about killer bees, then you already recognise the buzzing-cum-blaring sound it makes which frankly is not preferable even to J-Lo's singing.

Q] Are you hinting that it is possible to not be lynched if I fall asleep during World Cup matches?

A] Actually it is totally acceptable, now that all the good looking players are either playing really badly or have been eliminated altogether.

Q] Good looking guys? Why didn't my boyfriend mention them when he asked me out for the match screening (right before I threw a rock on his face)?

A] Since a lot of the good looking guys are gone from the World Cup, perhaps never to be seen again, you may want to have a look at the cursed Nike Ad below. Long story short, almost everyone featured in it seems to have lost their magic touch. For instance, poster boy Ronaldo of Portugal is out after he and his team played dismally, as is Rooney of England.

Q] How can I induce Nike to sponsor the Indian cricket team so that they lose and get too scared to ever take part in a commercial again and thus start playing cricket seriously?

A] Your strategy won't work as I'm afraid Indian cricketers are not afraid to lose.

Crime and tragedy

By and large, I don't think much of Singapore papers and the tepid talk that passes for news in their pages. But this weekend they had me blurry-eyed with a headline they carried. It was the first thing I read that morning.

Five sets of clothes.
His curry pot. A rice cooker.
An album of family photos

That was all he owned and they were put in a plastic bag and sent to Chennai with his body...

A lifetime packed off neatly in five sentences and a coffin box, ready to turn to dust over a funeral pyre and across some landfills.

With grim contrast it reminded me of those corny one-pagers that magazines carry on celebrities nowadays. You know, where you can almost hear a nasal voice sycophantically asking - Oh! And if you were stranded in a desert island, what are the three things you simply must have with you there? And then you can imagine the celebrity sighing with boredom in the depth of his/her soul, (if it hasn't been sold yet), before giving a coiffured reply that exclaims itself to death- Of course! My Gucci bag!! I must have that !!! And my 50++ SPF for all that sun I'll face !!!! blah !!!blah!!!!

Of course, people who actually have to make the choice of living with the bare minimum, sometimes in a cloth bundle under their head when they sleep on footpaths, or under their bunk beds in factory dorms - these migrant labourers - they are never asked that question. And they wouldn't have time to respond to such inanity anyway. They are too busy surviving, doing whatever jobs they can manage to get, for whoever can pay higher for it, slung down ropes from buildings, or climbing up scaffolding, living in spaces barely larger than what they will be buried under someday, with no family around them, instead, just five sets of clothes. A curry pot. A rice cooker. And an album of family photos.

Till someone slashes their limbs off because they grudge them even that.

Who needs Shakespeare to read tragedy? Just pick up the damn paper.

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The first report on the slashings in Kallang, Singapore that left 1 dead and three severely injured.
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Can you help?
Journalist Kimberley Spykerman, who covered the incident for The Straits Times, tells me that HOME [Humanitarian Organisation for Migration Economics] is helping the victims of the Kallang slashing. Those interested can contact Mr Jolovan Wham at jolovan.home@gmail.com

[cross posted at http://politicalrampage.blogspot.com/]

Mum's the word!

You've heard it before: God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers.

But I suspect the devil did the same. Thankfully, the mothers he tapped seem to have a really bad aim...

Guitar Blues

I'm learning to play the guitar and it is going fine.

And by fine I mean better than I expected, and what I expected was that people will ask me to sing for them and I'll end up making a fool of myself, but so far no one, by which I mean No One Except One Friend Who is Neither my Husband Nor my Mother Both of Whom Had the Opportunity to Request has asked me to strum a sample, and by opportunity to request I mean the last six months that I've been learning, and oh, that one request I absolutely refused.

So while I am happy my musical prowess reputation remains intact, I suspect the reputation is not worth intact-keeping.

And I also wonder why Vipul isn't begging me to croon for him, which can only mean one of the following:
(likely) Love is blind, not deaf
(Very Likely) He doesn't love me
(Bullshit) He expects me to swallow the reason he gave me when I confronted him [Apparently he doesn't want me to be uncomfortable and knows I will strum for him when I ready and confident. He really said that. With a straight face and puppy eyes.]

Anyway, I realise I am probably being anal by thinking too much about why he doesn't have greater confidence in my abilities. The reason doesn't matter. He is already getting overcooked food on his dinner plate and additional calories in his breakfast and he has not yet begun to wonder the reason this has been happening.

And once I'm ready and confident about my skills, I'll upload the video for you guys :) !
(And by ready and confident about my skills I mean on video and sound editing software)

Update: So I finally saw Avatar 3D and my favourite part of the movie screening was right at the beginning, when they were showing trailers of Alice in Wonderland. Don't get me wrong, I didn't dislike Avatar, but its one-hundred-sixty-two minutes were no match for Johnny Depp's three...