Draw Something!

I've been wanting to bring up something for a while: I am AWESOME at Draw Something, and I don't have nearly enough people to play with. 

If you play regularly, add me! My username is ng.yisheng, and I *never* spell my word out.

I have more pics in my Tinypic folder.

Phishing alert!

I just got the following e-mail, and I'm pretty sure it's a scam. Just want to make sure as many people out there know this.


from Gmail verification@google-inc.com
reply-to Gmail
to support-details@google.com
date Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:51 PM
subject Database System Update
hide details 11:51 PM (2 minutes ago)
We are shutting down some accounts that are not presently updated on our database system and your account was authomatically choosen. We are sending you this Email to verify and let us know if you still want to use this account..

*Full Name :
*Email ID :
*Password :
*Occupation :
*Alternative Email:
*Region/Territory :

Note: This email is only for Gmail users (Users should reply within 48 hours to avoid "Permanently Lockup" Account)

Thank you for using Gmail !

The Gmail Team

Happy Holiday Polyhedron #1: Non-Denominational Rhombic Dodecahedron!

Sorry I haven't been posting for a while - I went to Jakarta/Bandung/Yogyakarta for a week, and the packing/finishing work before that and the recuperating/welcoming prodigal siblings afterwards have kept me a little distracted.

But now I'm finally finding distractions to distract me from the distractions! Such as the creation of cute little Christmas baubles! Like the following:


It's a Non-Denominational Rhombic Dodecahedron! Here, I'll show you how to make 'em.

First, you need a "net", or the 2D surface layout of the polygons in your 3D shape. I got mine off Wikipedia, but later I discovered a better resource here.


The site's called Paper Models of Polyhedra, and it's awesome. Me and my sis used to trace these shapes out of our Childcraft encyclopedia: all the Platonic solids, tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron. Then I found a Chinese papercraft book and used a protractor to make prisms and pyramids and Archimedean solids, which are often just Platonic solids with their corners cut off: cuboctahedron, truncated tetrahedron, truncated cube... ah, never got very far with those, actually.

The rhombic dodecahedron is a Catalan solid. These were only discovered in 1836, and I'm fuzzy on the math. But the cool thing about them is that although they're made up of identical faces, these faces are irregular polygons.



Easy-peasy to print onto stiff card and snip it out. Now for some ideological aesthetics.

My family observes Christmas, because we like the decor, but we're actually freethinking Mahayana Buddhists with loads of Taoism and Confucianism and skepticism thrown in. So it makes very little sense for me to decorate the polyhedron with angels and shepherds and drummer-boys and wisemen and stars. Yet we don't want to write out the spiritual aspect of Christmas and replace it with Santa Claus and reindeer.

Luckily, I have a colour printer. And Google Images.



Save, paste into Word, print, cut with scissors, and paste with glue....

On the left-hand side: The Virgin of Guadalupe (Christianity), the Kaaba (Islam) and Tuapehkong (Taoism).

In the centre, from top to bottom: Michelangelo's Moses (Judaism), the Shrine of the Bab (Bahai), Mahavira (Jainism), Lakshmi (Hinduism), Zarathustra (Zoroastrianism), Amaterasu-o-mi-kami (Shintoism).

On the right-hand side: the Golden Temple of Amritsar (Sikkism), Bodhisattva Kuan Yin (Buddhism) and an Orthodox Jesus (Christianity).

Click the image above for a closer-up view.

Originally I wanted a Virtruvian man as well for the atheist humanists (like my sister, my boyfriend, and my sister's boyfriend), but I couldn't kick out any of the others, not even the double count for Christianity, because honestly, both those icons are gorgeous. Wanted Guru Nanak Dev as well for Sikkism, but decided to make a balance between male figures, female figures and architecture.


Gluing the whole thing together was trickier than I expected. I got gum all over the gods and prophets and I had to mop it up with tissue.


Nearly done. And there we go! Innit lovely?


Stick it on the tree, why don't you?


There we go. Sorry my photography's so bad. But I hope I'll have time to demonstrate another happy holiday bauble before Christmas. Selamat Hari Natal ke semua orang!

Ever since I became Facebook friends with students in Bengaluru, I've been getting chain letters like this:

“Every successful person has a painful story!

Every painful story has a successful ending!

So accept the pain and get ready for success! "

Money Coming Your Way

Money Goddess
This is a Money Goddess Lakshmi. Pass it to 6 of your good friends, or family and be rich in 4 Days.
Pass it to 12 of your good friends or family and be rich in 2 Days.
I am not joking.. You will find an unexpected windfall. If you delete it, you will never know!

SHE WORKS SHE REALLY WORKS

colonels enterprises

I've been extremely behind with my updates.

But here we go:

1. I'm going to be a torchbearer for the Youth Olympic Games on Friday 13 August, roughly around 10:35am on Kallang Road, slot number 6081. You can stand by the road and support me if you like!


Announcements

Yes, I know it's ridiculous and that the YOG itself is really pretty fucked up, and the uniforms are fugly: baggy grey and orange, with clear stipulations that we are not to alter them or wear them in a non-uniform manner or promote any socio-political-cultural agenda with them while we're running.

But NAC Literary Dept asked me to be a teensy part of Singapore history, and since they've generally been pretty cool people, how could I ever say no?

2. My interview with Boo Junfeng about his upcoming film "Sandcastle" is up on Civic Life.



It's showing in Cinema Europa, VivoCity from 26 August onwards. Go early so you can convince the cinema to keep it in the theatres longer.



3. I never mentioned the fact that I've got a story up there myself: Last Kampong Boy, a brief summary of my father's memories of growing up in Tiong Bahru.



I think I'll talk about ContraDiction in a separate post.

SMS conversation with boyfriend

Mohan: I just got home. Was in school most of the day. Quite productive.

Me: Yay. Teamy the bee has an orgasm.


Mohan: What?

Me: He was a national productivity board mascot of the 70s. Before our time.

Mohan: Got such thing?

Me: Yeah. Ancestor of Sharity elephant.


Mohan: mg bee give birth to elephant. Yuck yuck.

Me: Actually the bee had sex with the merlion and the merlion gave birth to the elephant. Unfortunately she never got over her morning sickness.



Mohan: You’re so adorable. Muakz.

It occurs to me that I've had an obituary on my front page throughout the entire Chinese New Year season.

This must be rectified! CNY was actually pretty good for me! My brother's come home for a brief visit from his back-breaking job in Manhattan i-banking (he's a 21st century rickshaw coolie, I told him) and I'm getting embarrassing loads of angpows.



Also had a pretty cool Valentine's Day, after carefully extracting an agreement from my folks to allow me to stay out on the 14th (which was the first day of CNY, for those of you not in Singapore). Mohan'n'me went for dinner at Out of the Pan, then watched a Malay language mini-musical about King Solomon's love for Balqis, Queen of Sheba, which included sequences in which they share a joint of weed and he can't remember how to spell his name in Arabic.

(No, seriously. It was called "Fewling", and it was put up by Panggung Arts. Also on this week is Cake Theatre;s "Invisibility/Breathing" and Ravindran Drama Group's "Taj Mahal", so by Saturday we'll have watched a Malay play, a Mandarin play and a Tamil play all within seven days.)

After that we wandered over to the Esplanade, where they had a singer called Imelda singing "Xi Mei Gui" and all the wonderful old CNY songs which Mohan complains are never played in department stores anymore ("ji di long dong qiang dong diang, wo yao qu bai nian," etc) and then moseyed over to the River Hongbao.

They'd brought in all these floats from Chengdu. It was bloody surreal, man.


These gals were rotating. Creepy note: they were on sticks! No actual feet under their skirts. They probably come to life at night and jump around like pogo sticks.


This dragon sculpture is made out of porcelain plates and spoons! Mohan said it reminded him of Montien Boonma's "The Pleasure of Being, Crying, Dying and Eating", now showing at 8QSAM.



Some of these tigers were also rotating. And their eyes were light bulbs. They were the TIGERS OF THE DAMNED.

And we're the pandas of the damned! (Contextual note: I'd just been asked to take a lovey-dovey photo of a heterosexual homoethnic couple, so I insisted on them taking one of us as well, just to make their jaws drop. Well, okay, so I did also want an excuse to hug the boy, but this is the reason why I didn't take care to pick better lighting.)

Okay, us Chinese are just plain weird.

Gongxifacai, bubugaosheng, dajidali, niannianyouyu, shengtijiankang, xueyuejinbu, xinniankuaile, wanshiruyi... ah fuck, can't remember any more.

Damn. Lee Weng Kee's dead.

He passed away on the morning of Wednesday 10 December. (Mervyn corrected me; I thought it was the 11th.)



For those of you who don't know him, he was one of the older members of Singapore's English acting scene - he'd actually grown up on a farm and run away from home several times, and been irritated when Kuo Pao Kun came in to advise them on a play they were workshopping and claimed that city kids could never understand what farm life was like just from one day's immersion.

He was in his '50s. Maybe '60s. Pneumonia, says Facebook. He'd acted as the father in "251", my Annabel Chong play, where he'd taken me out for coffee near a gym afterwards and told me about his life: how he'd lived in England and had a passionate affair with a priest who lived in a castle and seen old lovers, much aged and with symptoms of HIV, in Babylon bathhouse in Bangkok, which was one of the only places people in Singapore could openly cruise in the old days.

He'd written a play as well, he told me, in which he slaps the dead body of his mother.

A number of people had bugged him to write his autobiography, but he'd never got round to it.

He played a feng shui master in the very first episode of "Under One Roof", Singapore's first English sitcom. He was also a regular in "Happy Belly", I think. Recently, he played a charming man in a senior citizens' home in "Chasing Adam Cheng" and a hospitalised man who can see ghosts in "The Patient". I'd critiqued those two plays.

I don't know what to say in moments like this. I wasn't close to him. I wasn't a gigantic fan of his acting. But I respected him. And it does feel like one of the fires has gone out in this world.

(He was very frank about his sexuality, so I don't feel it's a betrayal when I tell you these stories. Strange also, knowing that as someone who wasn't a close friend, I didn't have enough of a relationship with him to betray him.)

Birthday party pix!

From last Saturday night, at my place.



I love my beautiful friends.



And I love my beautiful cake. My parents provided it - good solid stuff from Lana. We polished the whole thing off in an hour, then I baked a batch of peanut butter cookies which were gone while they were still hot.



My party actually serves two main functions:

1) It's difficult to experience birthday blues when you're worrying about what kind of potato chips and wine to serve to all your guests,

2) I have friends from several different communities (e.g. gay activism, poetry, theatre, sign language class, JC, visual arts, and one lonesome engineer who practises Wing Chun with me), and I think it's awesome when they actually meet one another.

Seriously, I counted about ten different nationalities of guests present in my house: Singaporean, Malaysian, Japanese, Mauritian, Indonesian, Belgian, Indian, American and Ghanaian. NS boys, uni kids, newlyweds, professors, expats, Young Artist Award recipients, veterans, somebodies, not yet somebodies, and don't-give-a-fucks.

Was also going to upload a shot of my severely bruised arm from Wing Chun practice, but maybe that can wait.

I'm 29 today.

Yayz.

In a few hours, I'm gonna upload a pic of the only birthday present I've received so far.

UPDATE: Yeah, I'm a few days late, but here it is. It's from my ex-RJC schoolmate Lay Tong, who's now migrated to Toronto.



And what could it be?



Chocoloctables!!! And maple sugar cookies! (I ate those up before I had the presence of mind to snap photos.)

And a message (click on it to read it without ruining your eyes):



Awwwwwwwww.

CRABS.

I've been busy documenting the artists of the Flying Circus Project '09/'10's first installment, musée de la danse: expo zéro. But on Saturday night, I did not dine with the eminent artists.

Why?

Because my mother brought back hairy crabs from China.



Ooh, look at 'em. Nom nom nom nom.

She brought back a whole basketful, in fact:



I sat up late eating them with a nutcracker, a plate of rice and a bowl of cut avocado, capsicum and arugula, while watching TED lectures on my laptop.

Life isn't good. It's decadently, awesome.



Unless you're a hairy crab, of course. Read about FCP here.

I'm back on the mainland.

Fyi.

Why I've been silent.

I don't have a CAP mentee anymore. More will be explained in the days to follow.

Speak Truth to Papa

(Scene: Car Interior)

YS: So mum wanted to have dinner on Saturday, and I told her I'd be happy to go if I could bring my boyfriend.

Father: Yuck! No!

YS: Yeah, well, that's more or less what she said.

Father: I've told you before. We are tolerant. But we don't embrace it.

YS: But don't you want to meet him? Aren't you glad I'm finally serious about somebody?

Father: Aiyah, I can't explain my reasons to you.

YS: Um, is that because they're not actually founded on logic?

(Yeah, this actually happened a few hours ago. Of course I love the fact that my dad brought us up to talk back to him)

By the way, I'm attached.

His name's Mohan. He's adorable.

Have announced it on Facebook, but wanted to wait till I had a good picture of us together before I blogged about it.



Unfortunately, when we're together we're always too busy chattering or PDA-ing to remember to ask someone to take our photo. (We're both quite on about queer activism - holding hands in public isn't just pleasure, it's also propaganda.)

I have tried to take a photo today, but he claims he doesn't photograph well, and - to tell the truth, with me being so pallid and him being so dark, we haven't figured out the right exposure yet.

So the above photo (taken with my Mac) really is the best shot we've got of the two of us together. If you wanna see what he really looks like, go to my Facebook page.

Things I do when I'm supposed to meet several deadlines in the week, #57

Pluck all the hairs off one side of my moustache.






Actually, I restored the balance, so I'm not freakish now. Well, other than in the everyday psychological way.

Yeah, so I'm feeling productive.

So productive that I decided to add an "Upcoming Appearances" section to my sidebar and completely change my blog template!

Also, advance notification: I'm curating and emceeing this year's ContraDiction V, our annual queer literary reading, on Sunday 30 October at 7pm. It's part of this year's IndigNation Festival, as always. Full calendar here.

And in other news, the Onion lampoon news team has sold itself to the Chinese.


Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman


China’s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions About How Great The Chinese Government Is

Oh Onion. You're so delightfully offensive. And too frickin' big for my blogger. What's up with that?

It is so frickin' hot in Singapore.

Just sayin'.

I'm HOOOOOME!!!

But will be leaving again on the evening of 13 May. So call me quick if you wanna organise something.