cartoons

this guy's comics are funny!

BAD Reporter by Don Asmussen!
[ http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/BADreporter/main.asp ]

parents, or to generalize slightly, people who love/care/dote on you are generally more amenable to selfish motivations than selfless, altruistic ones. such as, getting them to buy something for yourself versus donating their money to charity; going vegetarian for health reasons rather than "sympathy" for the suffering of animals.

selfish reasons are easier on the people who love you; they are more willing to sacrifice for you than for the others you wish to help.

i'm treading into "deal with the devil" territory if i suggest to them that i can eat fish/seafood if they agree not to eat other kinds of meat too, right? haha...

more furniture rearrangements in the house, this time in the living room, where my laptop is. it's right next to the desktop. anyway, it used to be on this small little table that had just enough room for the laptop and a mousepad. now, this other table, suitable for use as a study table but all this while simply used as elevated real-estate (previously, tuition used to be received at this table), is now being used as a computer table for me. and it's sweet, because it's so big, and even has a cabinet on the right.

now tux is on the table too, and i found a pair of speakers, and am listening to radiohead. my external cd-burner is also on the table. and so is the phone. so this is a veritable office space. where i have no work to do. and i have my rollerblades and skateboard leaning against the table. plus a lamp.

by the way, the gmail invites have been used up, somehow people who visit my blog never seem to want gmail. and my sister still isn't back, though it's almost midnight. she usually gets back around 2 i think. so it can't be said that my parents are too strict, can it?

but that day, at seletar club with aaron, before say yang and jasper arrived, and we were playing table tennis, the two of us, there were an unprecedented number of people there too in the table tennis + pool room, and there was this family; the mom was really a case study in "strict parenting style".

she was teaching her kid how to play table tennis, and hardly allowing him to have fun or explore the game for himself. give him a feel for how the ball bounces off the bat and the table and the delicate, pleasant trajectory of the hollow plastic shell, for goodness' sake! she put pressure on him all the time and even spoke of how if in a match cannot like that one...

which reminds me, last week aaron and his girlfriend and jasper and me went to east coast park, and we tried to teach jasper how to ride a bike. he almost got it.

this is getting to be quite a long blog post, huh. i guess when you get started, it's easy to go on. i initially planned only to give you that link.

seiyu at junction 8 is selling big Donatello for about $40. if i do end up getting it, i would probably get the smaller one, because $40 is quite expensive. just think of how much more kids in poverty would appreciate the money. that kind of thinking can be quite crippling, of course, so i usually try to cut out things that i can cut out, and cut myself some slack.

the olympics are underway, and i must say the event that has impressed me most was the gymnastics thing with the horse i think it's called, which is long and thin and these people are doing sommersaults and cartwheels and landing on their hands and on their feet and not losing their balance. jumping and flipping round and landing on their hands or feet. on the horse.

but also there's weightlifting, though i didn't actually see it, but i saw that the winner of the women's 48kg lifted something like 220kg. that means someone weighing 48kg or less lifted something like 220kg of weight. i know that "that means" doesn't explain much, but, well, you know what i mean.