- Manvotional: The Gains of Drudgery | The Art of Manliness
“He who has never learned the art of drudgery is never likely to acquire the faculty of great and memorable work, since the greater a man is, the greater is his power of drudgery”.
Read the post once on its own accord once; there’s some truth in it. Then read the post once more – but on that reading, assume it has been written as satire.
- Kumar lied! I will never believe celebrities again | S M Ong
“But I’ve learned my lesson. I shall never believe anything celebrities say again.
The next time I see Gurmit Singh hosting a show on TV and says, ‘We have a great show for you tonight,’ I will retort, ‘No, you don’t.'”
The entire column is a riot but this joke is extra funny because this S M Ong fella is the same Smong of Live on Five fame (a variety show that Gurmit Singh used to host in the ’90s).
- Swivel shifts | Bobulate
“…small shifts in thinking that can have large effects… [e.g.] Dutch drivers are taught that when you are about to get out of the car, you reach for the door handle with your right hand — bringing your arm across your body to the door. This forces a driver to swivel shoulders and head, so that before opening the door you can see if there is a bike coming from behind… . The coexistence of different modes of travel is hard-wired into the culture”.
- What we SHOULD have been taught in our senior year of high school | The Oatmeal
Well, it makes sense. In a way.
- Don’t Go To University For The Sake Of It | kennysia.com
“My parents spent hundreds [of] thousands of dollars sending me to an overseas university, and I end up writing a blog and running a gym”.
On the other hand, one could say that this was THE lesson – albeit, an expensive one – he needed to learn in order to find out what he wanted to do with his life.
My latest article on POSKOD.SG.
Ten Steps to Effective Online Commentary.
A guide to online criticism and debate. (Mostly criticism.)So, you’ve got an Internet connection, an opinion and some spare time on your hands.
Congratulations! Like everyone else and their blogs, you are now a media hub.
Before you commence e-hurling your iNtellectualism @ the rest of the world, here are ten steps to effective online commentary, the cyber-Singaporean way.
- Increase your Internet presence.Set up a website on socio-political issues in Singapore and give it a cerebral, subtle and unique moniker, something like Socially Political SG: Thinking About Socially Political in Singapore.What you have to say is, after all, very ‘niche’, and no one thinks about critical issues affecting our nation in as classy or as astute a manner as you do.
- Read widely.Turn to Google and Wikipedia for all your edificatory needs.Besides being the only scholarly sources that can be found on the face of the earth, they are also the most reliable, according to teenage students who take a great deal of pride in referencing “en.wikipedia.org” and “ehow.com” in their homework submissions.
- Participate in community discussions on a consistent basis.Trawl other websites and forums every hour and leave comments on other posts, regardless of whether or not your advice is sound and/or logical.Bear in mind that we are a democracy, and democracy, as translated from the Greek, means ‘many people shouting loudly at each other in a self-important fashion’.
Moreover, your counsel serves to affirm and validate the existence of ‘netizens’.
Never underestimate the value of this, even if netizens do not seem to mention their appreciation of your beneficence, or worse, if they seem to respond negatively to what you say.
From a book I got at a book swap I went to over the weekend:
There was a story which my father and mother used to tell people about me when I was a child. They had said to me one day, “Today we are going to take you to school.” At the end of the day they asked me, “Did you like school?” I said, “I loved it.” The next morning they got me up early. When I asked why they were doing that they said, “You have to go to school.” And I said, crying, “But I went to school yesterday.”— V. S. Naipaul, Half a Life, p. 22 (my emphasis).