Chriiiistmaaaas....isn't Chriiiiistmaaaaas...

....'til you haaaave it....whiiiile in caaaaaamp......bleah. Well, I managed to land myself with duty on Christmas, and I survived by browsing wikipedia and surfing in general for more or less the whole day (yes, yes, I'm cementing my geek status by admitting that I was reading an encyclopedia just for kicks, but then again I've done the same with a dictionary before, waaaaay back when I had lots of free time ^_^") Oh well.....Think I'll leave my hand-crafted SMS greeting up for posterity:



From the fringes of civilisation.......







in a secret military installation......







comes a greeting.......





it says....




Merry X'mas from the suay guy on duty today! Season's greetings, and happy holidays~

maia-HEEEE!! maia-HAAA!! oh maia gott....

So I went with my mum to help carry the groceries today, and what should I hear but Guo Mei Mei's horrendous rendition of O-zone's Dragostea Din Tei -_-" Now, normally I don't mind people (especially local singers) who try and make a career in the pop scene, and it's good that the locals are more willing to support homegrown talent nowadays, but I'm gonna go on the record here and say that Miss Guo should reeeeeaally reconsider her artistic direction. From what I've seen so far, the woman's (I'm gonna refer to her as GMM to save on typing) shtick is basically to take other people's songs, translate them into Chinese, slap a techno beat on them and pass 'em off on the young-kids-who-don't-know-any-better crowd.

Now, I don't know about you, but I actually liked Dragostea back when the fat guy video clip was making the rounds on the net a while back (google it, or go look on newsgrounds if you don't know what I'm talking about), and even when Disney decided to revive it for Chicken Little's publicity campaign. Thing is, GMM chose a key for this song that is obviously waaaaay to high for her to be singing, and she goes HORRIBLY off-key on the high notes in the chorus. The CHORUS!! If you can't friggin' hit the notes in the chorus, CHANGE THE BLOODY KEY, WOMAN! Common sense that even the most green-horned karaoke enthusiast possesses, and they can blithely ignore it for a commercially released song that gets so much airtime on television advertisements and playtime on radio! For me, hearing her sing her (very flat) "maia-HAHA" is the rough equivalent of nails on a chalkboard; it's excruciating! At least she got her pitching right for "Lao Shu Ai Da Mi" (another song that I actually liked and she went ahead and butchered anyway), so it wasn't as bad when her record company drilled it into the collective consciousness of society, but this is.... Mein gott >_<

Missy Guo, if for some reason you happen to be reading this, for the love of the gods PLEASE get your own material, or get someone to write you something original, or at least get your record company to stop trying to brainwash the little kiddies by force-feeding your songs to anyone with a television! Frankly speaking, I don't really care if I'm coming off as a jaded choirboy; this is starting to get ridiculous >_<"

I'm meeeeelttiiiiiiiiiiinggggg........

Meh. In recent news, my eczema has started acting up for no apparent reason, which means that I'm literally flaking away as I walk around. I'm a friggin snowman in freezing weather, and I'm disintegrating like it's a summer heatwave. How cool is that? -_-"


At least it doesn't hurt.....meh. Ah nidda vaekayshun....

Whatever happened to plain old "Please leave your name and number after the beep"?

So I was calling some NSman at work the other day, and the call gets connected:

Me: "Hello?"
Him: "Hello?"
M: "Umm, hello, XXX?"
H: "Hello, hello? Who's this?"
M: "Uh, hi, this is J-"
H: "IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT YO' NAME IS!! *beep*"


...WTF dude!?

*Zzzzz-SNRKKKTTT* AAARGH!!

One of the perks of becoming a clerk in the army is doing Ops duty instead of the regular guard duty. What this means (at least in my case) is that instead of staring blankly into the night sky at 3 am in the morning with a rifle slung over your shoulder, I get to sit in the air-conditioned office, play Xbox games all day and go to bed (and wake up) at hours that vaguely resemble the sleep cycles of civilised humans. Of course, it's a pretty sweet deal.....until you realise that for some strange reason, every single Duty Officer that I've ended up doing duty with SNORES like he's got a built-in Dolby 5.1 setup in his nasal cavity >_<"

Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm a notoriously light sleeper. Unless I'm falling-asleep-on-my-feet tired, I have a hard time falling asleep and staying in dreamland because even moderately loud noises can pull me back into semi-consciousness, which means that I can be kept awake by the sound of the TV downstairs or the way-too-loud music of some idiot sitting on the opposite side of the train blasting his tunes through his earphones as if they were disco speakers (but that one's a rant for another time). It also means that once the DO starts snoring, I'm going to get very, very annoyed as I try to slip into unconsciousness -_-" It seems to me that there's something very wrong with our officer selection criteria and medical benefits when we have these (supposedly) capable men who are in charge of the smooth running of millions of dollars worth of military equipment, and we can't be bothered to get them a cure for sounding like they've got miniature rock concerts in their throats at night T_T"

Oh, and before you put it down to bad luck on my part, I checked with one of my colleaugues who's been a clerk for a lot longer than I have, and he assures me that he's got the same problem too. Which, of course, means that my unit's either awash in snoring officers, or the country's experiencing a nasty first taste of the flaws of having a limited gene pool...

As for me, I've started using the same solution that my colleaugue came up with on his own: upon hearing the first tortured syllables that indicate that the DO's a snorer, we pick up the mattress, move the whole lot (pillow and all) to the far side of the office and sleep on the floor. Of course, in my case I usually end up having to pile the blanket on my head and hope that the ringing of my tinnitus is enough to drown out the background sound effects, but it's a helluva lot better than trying to control my irritation at being kept awake, and since neither of us are willing to wake up the DO to tell him "Sir, please stop snoring so I can sleep", it'll have to do for the next 5 1/2 months until I leave the army for good -_-"