Took this shot from my room this evening, and TOTALLY loved it! Look closely at the bright reflected sunset on the windows, and yet just overhead hangs a rack of rolling storm clouds. I don't know why, but the sky was split in half today - one side of nice, serenity and another of utter chaos.
LOL! Made a short movie of my sand dollar moving through the sand today! It's a really rare sight to see sand dollars coming out onto the surface, but they move really slowly so watch closely! Sand dollars are echinoderms, closely-related to starfish, sea urchins and sea cucumbers.
Tank's looking somewhat bleak right now, I'm planning to make a trip down to CoralFarm this Saturday to get a couple of corals. Yes, and maybe a fish or 2!
Favourite pic - Finger coral with polyps extended
Yellow polyps
Clump of very nice whorling coralline algae ... calcium reactor's not running right now, but calcium levels must be really high since there's been a coralline algae explosion over the last month.
A nice blue-tipped sand anemone (this thing cost only $2!) ... it's now the clownfish's abode.
Feather duster worm that grew out of nowhere ..
Clove polyps - CoralFarm does have gems once in a (really) blue moon ...
Panther grouper chasing down a meal of mysis shrimp (the white glob he's looking at) - he chomped on the whole chunk a second after this shot, dragged it into his cave and sat there trying not to choke on it.
New fish? Nope .. really old inhabitant actually, this mandarin goby, just that it's MI:IV just trying to get any decent shots of him. The photo's a little grainy since it was captured using burst mode as he's so flighty.
Woke up this morning, thinking it was already time to start preparing for school. The time was 4.30am, and clearly I was 1 hour too early, but I was all done up and really can't risk falling asleep again only to be impossible to wake later. You know, 4.30 isnt at all a decent time to wake. Neither is 5.30. This, usually people would call "dawn". Dawn ought to be spent strolling and breathing the cool air, watching the stars, hearing the birds - and perhaps, a slow cup of coffee and the papers. But for us the dregs of the service industry, it's the start of a new day.
I spent the last 4 years determined to remain working in an institution, convinced that while life like that is truly a little more hard work, a litle more discipline and bereaucracy, a little more tiring, I'll at least save on the blandness of a general practice. I see I have been mistaken. Not when our system encourages people who aren't really that ill to skip on down to the emergency department, not when we are so overworked and the few who do have the power to change things have either left their past behind them, or are too bogged down by selfish dreams to see instead of look. And I laugh out loud - no, I ROFLMAO - when I see terms like "Team" thrown around carelessly, especially during this period. A team, my dear highly-educated barbers, is so much more than *pretending* to be around together. A team, is also more than putting up this pretence of let's all stay during the night because we are a team. A team is when you do your part - and more - so that others' work in this team is better.
I do believe certain individuals need to realise this at some point in their self-absorbed lives, and if they don't - high chance of that, actually - my sympathy goes out to them. They have lived decades of their lives not recognising what life really is about.
A little grainy since this was taken at night, but hey! I'm not gonna complain! =) Hope you enjoyed the backlighting effect, it was quite a pleasant surprise.
Don't blame me yet! Everyone is doing the lovely apologise for the delay thingy nowadays, even the upcoming Vista. =p At least I didn't take 5 years to develop the mega-burger.
So, the news - my burger has been delayed. I promise I'll get down to it tomorrow! But in case I'm causing some neck-straining and eye-squinting, here's a hint on what the ingredients are: mashed up pork livers, home-smoked bread, hepatocytes of force-fed geese.
LOL, just when you least expect it. News report on Class 95 today regarding the Parliamentary debate went to great lengths to describe what some of the MPs brought up, and dedicated - yes, dedicated - a mere few seconds of coverage for NCMP Sylvia Lim. On the other end of the spectrum, one of the other MPs even had his speech broadcast as-is. Yes, even when he couldn't pronounce "government" properly. Good evening, Mr. Garmen. LMFAO.
Ah, and did I mention that Ms Sylvia brought up the issue of free speech?
Now, that is quite some paradox. Further strengthens her case, doesn't it? The local media should be ashamed of itself, what a terrible boo-boo.
Burger #1 - the preview of tomorrow's mega-burger! This one's a smoked salmon and lemon-honey omelette burger. Recipe for this baby soon to follow on Gastronomia, I'm really pleased with the results. Aesthetically .. well ... needs some touching up. In particular, I need a proper bread knife.
Just some shameless plugging, lol. I managed to obtain a web host and domain at a steal, so my old CP page has been taken down, totally revamped and is now up and running on the new domain! Only thing is, I have a total of 1GB of webpage - so far, even after uploading as many images as I can, I've only hit 37 MB or so. =\ Hmm ... what old CP page, you say? So far this is my 4th CP webpage, actually. My first one, back in 1996, was hosted by an old friend on a demon.co.uk subdomain - this was followed by V 2.0 in 2000 or so on geocities, and V 3.0 a couple of years back on a batcave.net subdomain. Just in case you were wondering, I think there are still a few more of my horrible webpages floating in limbo ... one on bettas (HypoC and Melvin would be interested, haha ... I had an entire page dedicated to betta genetics), one for the Lindy Hop Club (duh), one for zebra killifish (OMG ... that was soooo long ago) and a porn site. Kidding about the last one, BTW.
Do give the page a look (click on the above image), loading time can be a little slow since it was meant for high speed connections and written with horribly bloated CSS code, but just do me a favour - run through the page, and let me know of any bugs/suggestions!
P.S. Just in case you were thinking that it's somewhat of a coincidence that I named the site as such after watching the Little Shop of Horrors, the site's name has been in use for over 2 years and yes, it was inspired by the musical. =p
I'm done watching the preview show yesterday, with a programme booklet as a souvenir (the rest weren't really worth getting, IMO). It's really not too bad a show, considering it's their first effort at a broadway remake. Just a few points:
1) They changed Audrey II (the Monster Plant) into an alien orchid - on the set, the puppet looks exactly like a Paphiopedilum orchid, albeit with teeth. I'm not too happy about this, as you can expect, but as Yx pointed out, you really can't expect the majority of Singaporeans to know what flytraps or butterworts are. They would prefer orchids, naturally. (BTW, there are no carnivorous orchids)
2) The show was Singaporean-ised. Ah-lians, Ang Mo Kio, carpark-fine-maciks. Not that I really mind - some parts held good satire - but they seriously overplayed on the Auntyfied Singaporean Drawl. Got quite irritating after a while, especially when you hear the EXACT same nonsense on radio commercials as well. "Maaaery ah, why yuuu naever cuuuuum yesterdaeeee?" WTF.
3) The 4 puppets used as Audrey II were REALLY GOOD. I'd give the puppets a score of 9.5/10 - much nicer than what you see in other remakes, to be really honest. The blacklight techniques were good too, although they could do with a little more green and less purple.
4) Dim Sum Dollies - highly-amusing at certain parts (like popping out from behind the windows and doing a chorus), although they did occasionally go off-pitch.
In all seriousness, I rather enjoyed the musical. It seemed quite heavily-influenced by the local theatre culture - the set (visible "musician" in the scaffolding), script and general execution - but it could have been worse.
I'm starting to wonder about the repercussions of this musical arriving in a place like Singapore. At best, they'll enjoy the show, google at home and learn the truth about carnivorous plants and be all the wiser - but more likely, they'll continue being the prats that they are and go home with the idea that there ARE carnivorous orchids, or even worse-that CPs are large enough to eat humans.
