Monday, August 28, 2006

The two sides of the coin :D

STUPID HARD DISK!!!! Unfortunately, I seem to be having hard disk probelms. My PC now hangs every other hour..anyone with a spare hard disk out there ? :D I also noticed that Blogger is quite sluggish compared to Xanga. Is anyone using the new Blogger Beta? It looks pretty cool...

Just yesterday, as I was walking out of the school (school's already over at that time of course, I don't ponteng wan :D) with my friends, we were chatting bout last week's school holidays. So yeah, I mentioned to my friend that I was at this conference in SIB KL and didn't do any sort of revision whatsoever during the entire week. Halfway through the conversation he said that "You know ah, you Christians ah, like to gather one oh..You see us Buddhists like to do stuff, like donate blood. So good what? I get paid ten bucks somemore..."

Lest you get the wrong impression of a heated religious debate, we were just chatting casually about it. (And I didn't get paid for MY blood...is A-type blood cheaper?) He couldn't finish his sentence when we came to the gate and he went off to the bicycle shack. I didn't really think about the whole matter but I just let it linger in my mind. At home, I thought about what he said and yeah, to a certain degree his comments made sense. It did feel like we (I'm saying SJGC in general) aren't doing much for the community. I mean, the way I see it the emphasis is more on spreading the gospel and less on community service, what with all the Christian concerts and conferences doing mass evengelisms here and there.

I found myself caught between the two sides of the coin. On one hand, we could really put some effort into giving a little back to the public community around us. It sure is easy to be complacent with our lives. I have many things that I complain about, like how I'd like a new laptop and more pocket money. But everyday when it's time for lunch or dinner, I know that I'd be stoned for such lack of gratitude. My mom's the kind to never let us complain that there's not enough food, so a typical meal could feed many poor and hungry people around the world. I mean, I have yet to see anyone else whose mom makes rice with fried eggs and nuggets for breakfast before going to school in the morning. Most of the people I've asked are lucky to have a glass of milk, let alone cooked rice. And all the time there are people out there who live in such terrible, horrible conditions that you could hardly imagine what it's like to be in their shoes.

But then again the more articulate among you might argue that we should put God first. That God is the one who is able to make things right, so our first priority is to worship him and pray for those who are suffering. Like, how much can you alone do to help other people? How much can one church do? Just sit back and wait for God to save the people. If there's anyone who can do it, it's gotta be God, right?

......................

Interestingly, because my PC died while I was halfway writing this, I went to look up for some info in my bible regarding this issue. And I came to 2 Peter something..it went "Since everything will be destroyed in this way,what kind of people ought you to be? You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed it's coming....But in keeping with His promise we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness." Just like that, my questions were answered. (God must've thought very thoroughly about the questions that we would ask of him when He planned His salvation for us) It says 'holy and godly lives', so I take it that it goes back to obeying God's commands. The first being loving God fully and deeply, while the second loving our 'neighbours' as ourselves. Which means that yes, worshipping God comes first but it is also important that we make an effort to those around us who are not as fortunate as us. Community service, I feel, should come from having a close relationship with God where we realise how much he loves everyone and not just us, that we should feel compelled from our own hearts to spread God's love to other people, especially the non-believers.

I know it's hard, loving others as ourselves brings to mind something that only young children could do, like how they share candy, pillows, toys and what-nots so affectionately, sharing because they want to and not expecting anything in return. No wonder Jesus looked upon children so lovingly....

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Lost in wonder...

Finally, I'm back home early today! Ah..in case you didn't know, as of now I am currently attending a youth conference (like a workshop lah) in SIB KL (http://sibkl.org.my/htm/home.htm) church. It started with an opening night concert on Tuesday and today was a full-day workshop. Anyway, I just thought I'd post about what happened on the Tuesday night concert...

So yeah, there we were: me, Simon, Arjund, Liesl, Jane, Shanice, Ii-Ern, Ii-Shan, Aunty Collene and Aunty Cindy. Of course, before that I think it deserves mention the fact that the ride to the SIB KL church was absolutely positively the zaniest,craziest one that I've experienced so far. I mean, I'd rather not elaborate on it but to sum it up let's just say that now I know KL people are the considered the rudest drivers around....

Okay, back to the concert..so there we were at the hall. Or SANCTUARY as they call it. And goodness it was big..so big. With two projectors projecting on both sides of the stage, the stage looked every bit suitable for an Eason Chan concert, or whoever else for that matter. Much to my chagrin, we had to sit closest to the stage. No chairs for us..(the seatings are ala cinema one) So okay. Nevermind. We sat. And when the event started, I was just sitting there blown away by the amazing programs that the church's media team came up with. It was so proffessional that I thought TV3 or something was there to record the event.

They made it seem like a real tv program, with the proffessional hosts and all. Humor was fairly abundant that night and we were certainly tickled pink by the emcees' antics. Not long after, the concert kicked off. It was the PlanetShakers super-energetic-jump-jump-jump that kind of worship style, as we all expected. I had never been really comfortable when in this kind of concerts, not too keen to lift my hands and jump around and preferring instead to just sing along. So, yeah, it was awkward..(they asked us to take five steps to the front in the beginning, and only Kelvin and I walked in front. When I looked back I was like 'What the??! Hoi, what you all doing at the back?!?!?" By now I was hopelessly close to the stage and what to do, when they started jumping I felt compelled to follow along. Ouch...

It was certainly VERY tiring to sing and jump around at the same time, so I take my hat off to the seven or eight on-stage singers who seemed to be running on Energisers while my Eveready left me breathless halfway through the songs....But one thing that I couldn't understand was that why need to jump? I mean...I just don't get it. So I did what I could, following the crowd somewhat aimlessly, not being able to really focus on worshipping and pulled back by my self-consciousness.

That was, until they sang the don't know how many-eth song...I kept thinking and pondering and finally, I figured out that it was never about jumping in the first place. Nor the fancy guitars. Nor the funky drum beats and the killer synthesizer tunes. It was just...just worshipping God. Just giving God all of me, giving Him everything; my soul, my mind, my body. Even if it's only for a moment. A minute. A second. It was about synchronizing with God's wavelength...the singing was just one of the means to help me do so. And two songs came to mind, first Martin Layzell's Lost In Wonder. The title says it all, lost in wonder...when truly close to God's presence, you are truly lost in wonder of just how awesome, how great God is. Another line in the song is "...lost in, love....", nicely summarising God's sea of love for us.

The second song that came to me was none other than Matt Redman's Heart Of Worship. I could feel it there. By removing the music mentally, all I saw were several pillars light signifying spiritual connection. The singers on stage all truly made an effort to connect and reach out to God, and I finally felt comfortable enough to jump with them. I jumped, because my entire focus by then was already on God. Being the mere human being that I am, jumping around was just what I could do to express my worship to God. But of course, rest assured that I won't be jumping around in church any time too soon. It's just that I've learned something about this whole worship thing. Slowly but surely, I am beginning to piece together the little fragments of knowledge that I have regarding this whole issue of what makes a true and whole-hearted worship. It remains though, that I still have a long way to go, and I'm certainly curious as to how we're gonna be worshipping God eternally in Heaven, with "no less time to worship God than when we first started". I just can't wait to know........

Thursday, August 17, 2006

PC Blues...

Yesterday, I was still happily surfing the web with my trusty ol' computer when I happened to chance upon this cool program to change the looks of Windows. So okay, I got it. I installed it. Mana tau it clashed with what I previously installed (a similar program) and through a series of wrong moves I finally managed to bring my PC to its knees.....It literally suffered a heart attack and wouldn't go beyond the first 5 minutes after starting up before hanging. Of course, being the sensible and experienced computer user that I am, I just slapped my forehead and uttered the popular catchphrase of all the computer users who are just too curious for their own good:

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

For that I was forced to spend the rest of my entire evening just to get my PC back to life. Take note that it's now just barely working and needs further maintenance. This is exactly what I hate most about computers: why are they SO easy to mess up with?!!? But then again, computers are made by humans, and being the fallen people that we are, it's just normal that our 'creations' don't work properly all the time I guess. The other thing is that I'm the only one in my house with enough experience to keep the PC running clean (my sis is a casual user while my bro doesn't have that much time to maintain the PC) so I've got 'heavy responsibilities',so to speak. And my sis asks me why I bother...doh.

On a lighter note, I borrowed two cameras for my brother's graduation day and snapped some really funny pics.

No prize for guessing what happens next :D


My sis, me and my mum. Note how it says 'UM' on top of my head. Looks almost like I'm wearing a cap...



My cousin Chi Mei and her sis. Photogenic eh?


To the battle station!!!


The battle station it is!!!


On a slightly different topic, I've always wished that I had a scanner actually. Then I'd be able to edit all my drawings on the computer...Puey Guan currently has my dream workstation : a WACOM tablet (to draw directly on the PC), a scanner and ORIGINAL photoshop software. Drool drool.... but armed with a 4 megapix Canon camera, this is what I managed to cook up using an ALMOST ORIGINAL (original in every way except that I didn't pay for it) copy of an Adobe software called ImageReady. Feel free to comment XDNote: I drew this on my chemistry notes,heheh

Saturday, August 12, 2006

Kajang no more...

At the recommendation of my cousin Chi Mei, I managed to arrange with Justin to go to a musical titled ROCK YOU (or something like that) staged at Cempaka (a private school ). So okay , I went to the school's site to print out the map, but I couldn't. (stupid site) So I drew it out. On the map, it looked like a pretty easy route, straight and all. I mean, look at this :


Of course, I wouldn't be blogging bout this if we actually managed to make it there in time. Rather, we never found our way there...it did look like we were on the right track but from the moment we took a wrong turn (or so I think) everything after that just went awry.....we soon found ourselves driving aimlessly around the place. Heck, we took a U-turn after thinking that we took a wrong turn like I said earlier (the U-turn was VERY far from where we turned in) only to find that we were STILL on the wrong path. It was already dark and there was no way we could tell where we were. All we saw were signs leading to Kajang (cause the map said to follow the signs posted to Kajang)

And to make things worse, some parts of the roads that we passed had these really, really eerie-looking overhead sign boards. They had black stains all over them like you normally see in those horror movies. And almost the entire stretch of some particular roads were near pitch-black and empty...~shivers~

We were even more afraid when not realizing that we made a U-turn earlier, we came back to a very familiar spot, the overhead bridge where we made the wrong turn. We went like "Eh? What the? OH NO!!!! What's happening?!!?" and it certainly didn't help that Judson kept saying that he read of a similar story in Singapore Ghost Stories (a popular horror story collection series) about getting stuck in cursed roads or something like that....it was crazy to say the least.

Not to mention that we were spooked out by the Kajang road signs. They're everywhere! Whichever way we turned we still saw the 'Kajang' followed by an upwards arrow road signs. And there was this road fork where both the roads lead to Kajang apparently. It almost seemed like all the roads led to Kajang. If possible, I wish never having to utter this stupid word again. Stupid road signs....

But having failed to catch the musical, we didn't give up hope. Justina suggested we go to Shah Alam to see One In A Million (if you don't know what's that, ask your friends :D) at the studio, and to Shah Alam we went. The real interesting performance was by Faizal who managed to squeeze Ashley Simpson's L.O.V.E into a manly rock song!!! It was memorable alright, never thought I'd hear a guy's version of that song. And the night ended with....McDonalds. I'm surprised of course that there are more people around midnight than during the entire day...

Justin made pretty good use of McDonald's 'free fries' card and made a mini mountain of fries. Check his blog for the pic if you're curious XD

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Not a proper post...

Just wanna post a link for a Japanese song. I thought the guitar licks (is that what you call it? licks...) were pretty cool,haha. Enjoy :D

http://rapidshare.de/files/28133503/Hirano_Aya_-_God_knows.mp3.html

Monday, August 07, 2006

Updating ain't easy...

While I really enjoyed the fact that some of you enjoyed reading my posts, I find that blogging has somewhat become a chore for me. Suddenly, I felt like I have 'fans' to answer to,so to speak. And this is just so different than when i first started blogging, when I blogged more for my own enjoyment. Now every post seems like it needs to be trimmed and edited to suit public tastes...but then again, maybe it's just me :D

Just want to say that I might seem like I take forever to blog but that's because I need to do research for the topics. Sure, I can hentam but the upcoming topic of my blog takes quite a bit of initaitive to pull off nicely. You'll know when I finally post it, or if you can't wait then you can ask Justin,haha. As I'm kinda busy this week (St. John's exam coming soon, this Saturday) I might not be able to post anymore this week but I'll do my best. Over and out guys!

Friday, August 04, 2006

The Birthday Cake Of The Century

Having just celebrated James' mom's birthday last week, this week I had the opportunity to celebrate yet another person's birthday. You know who you are, birthday girl. I'm not referring to Hannah cause I couldn't go for the whole surprise party thing(won't they sort of expect a surprise party if it's done too often?), Happy Birthday to Miss YJ!! (I didn't wish you cause it wasn't your birthday that day)

I must say that a tremendous amount of planning had gone into making this birthday celebration a success. The plan had to be chanced numerous times and countless hours were spent discussing the whole matter of where to celebrate and how to celebrate it. Zhen Ee was the one who wanted to celebrate it in the first place though I dunno why...nudge nudge wink wink :D He so semangat wanted to do it at Secret Recipe somemore. In the end we DID do it at Secret Recipe but the cake wasn't what we expected lah.....sorry YJ :oP

The dinner at Pizza Hut was at 6 plus, so I hung around for a while there after I arrived in front of Taylor's College shortly after 3 o'clock. And what a good thing it is that I'm not studying there, I don't think that I could get used to it ler...so much freedom. Too much freedom, in fact. Zhen Ee had mentioned to me of the one time when he was in Physics class and paying attention when suddenly, a couple sitting in front of him decided to lock lips. Right there. While the teacher's teaching. Like...woah. I would've had them hung and shot and hung again for such public disrespect if I were there :D

But this being about the birthday, I'd talk about that in the post. Back to the topic, I was wondering whether I'd be able to meet some of my old friends there and moments later,there they were: Brian+Catherine (I put the '+' sign cause couple), Kay Boon, Pik Ying and er..yeah. Them. And then I was wondering whether I'd meet Jasmine who's in Business School and funnily enough I saw her too while on the way to cafe. Why didn't I think whether I'd find a million dollars by the road side...darn.

Although much thought went into planning the whole thing, it turned out to be a somewhat dull affair. Maybe it's because it wasn't a surprise. I guess that's how it works ler. Surprise surprise... Some more YJ got Bio test the following day lah, so I guess couldn't really enjoy lah. Anyway, I heard she was surprised today by some of her other classmates, so it kinda put a damper on the previous day's celebration. Haih...but the important thing is that you enjoyed yourself k, Miss YJ?

But anyway, the highlight of the celebration was not the cake itself (Secret Recipe Classic Cheese) but rather the way the candles were put!! I mean, I doubt anyone's seen this kind of candle arrangement. Have a look yourself, here's the original cake :

And here's the 'battleship-style' candle-lit cake....


TADAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You've got to give her credit man, cause she insisted that it be arranged this way. Memang creative betul...


Once again, hope you had a great time for this year's birthday, Miss Tan Yik Jing!!!!!!

Monday, July 31, 2006

So busy, yet still wasting time...

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Due to the massive demands for biographies after the post that I wrote for Justin, I shall not write another biography for a while until the whole matter has subsided....JUST KIDDING!!! Don't worry guys, you'll get your share after I know you all better. Say, another year or two maybe. MAYBE....maybe :D
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Aduh, looks like Lower Six won't be a honeymoon year for me ler. So many man, so little time....oops. That was a Dance Dance Revolution song,haha. Sorry for that. *Ahem*. So much homework, so much time..... but I'm wasting too much of it. And I just seem to have so many things to do, though this is relative and might not seem much to you. The thing is that I'm used to having entire months free back in my Form 4 Form 5 days. But now...

In the coming month (August) alone, I've got to study for my coming St. John's test, I have three friends' brithdays coming up, I need to work out the payments for TRU's treasury, I need to attend the SIB Youth Conference and we're not even into August yet!!
College is probably tougher but for me this is just overkill. Just the other day I was worrying that I would not be able to pass the St.John's exam as I only have 2 weeks left to study and I 've forgotten a lot about first aid. Trouble trouble,and I began to think whether it would be worth it to renew my first aid certificate. All the other activities soon came along to haunt me and the thought of not having enough time to do everything bugged me a lot.


However, one night as I wanted to read the Bible, I picked up the red-coloured Bible Bytes (yea I know, it's really old) cause I saw it sitting so lonely among the books in the rack behind my desk. So I just flipped it and read some of the notes. Just a moment later I was reminded of this passage in Matthew 6 that says "Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own." And yeah, it sure made things a lot better for me. I've finally figured that if it's God's will for me to pass the exam, then I have nothing to worry about. Not in the sense that I don't have to study for it, but that I can rest easy knowing God would provide the means for me to overcome it.

I still lack time management skills but each day has enough worries of it's own I guess. No point thinking bout trying to save time tomorrow when I'm wasting time now. Gotta get going then guys, must try to save time!!

Monday, July 24, 2006

Cousinship at it's best...

This post is dedicated to my cousin, the one and only Justin Lee!!

I had known Justin for as long as I could remember, dating back to when we were just wee little tykes. Yeah, those were the days that I treasured, being young and carefree,or 'freely winged' as Crissy would put it. Justin used to come down to Kuantan (when I lived I Kuantan that time) together with his family to visit us and all the other relatives about once or twice a year. Of the 365 days in a year, the week or so that he would be in Kuantan had always been more memorable and enjoyable than all the rest of the days in the year put together. True enough, I remember little of my childhood days save for the times that I spent with him.

Back then before I knew about videogames, my favourite past time was watching Hindi movies. Yup, the three-hour, action-packed and ala High School Musical kind of Hindi movies. Then came along one of my uncles who brought home a console (can't q
uite remember what it was) and from then on Justin became my gaming partner-in-crime. Oh the many games that filled my childhood memories...

We also bought quite a number of gaming machines together, I bought the Sega Mega Drive, he had an Atari (I think) and later I got a GameBoy Pocket, then we both got ourselves a Playstation and a GameBoy Color. Following that Justin bought a PS2 three years later while my friend gave me a GameBoy AdvanceSP for my birthday. So yea, gaming goes way back in our cousinship because if it wasn't for games, I know I wouldn't have learned to speak English. He only knew how to speak in English so it became a necessity for me to brush up my English every year to better communicate with him. It used to be that we spoke more Malay I think, then Malay-English then English-English as of present. I have him to thank partly for my As in English language.

I must say that Justin had always been a very positive influence on me. As I often dwelled on all the negative aspects of situations and circumstances, to me Justin led a really good life both spiritually and socially. He always seemed to be so happy, with so many seem
ingly close friends . I envied the fact that his life was constantly sunny and enojoyable while I had to wade through thunderstorms and heavy rains more often than I would have liked. So everytime he came back to Kuantan I made it a point to learn something from him and I would experience positive 'high's, so to speak after he had gone back to Kuantan. And now I think I know why: it must have been his Christian upbringing and having been involved with the church's youths that he had developed such a good personality and mentality. Ah....

I think it would take me quite a while to really describe Just
in as he is, but I'm sure that most, if not all of you who know him doesn't need to hear it from me to know that Justin's a great guy. If not, how would he have managed to woo (is that the right word i wonder :D) Miss Lee Xin Xin. It's pretty amazing that both Justin's parents' surnames are Lee and now his 'companion' is also from the Lee family line. Too bad mine's an obscure one,haha. 1 Timothy 5: 24-25 "The sins of some men are obvious, reaching the place of judgement ahead of them; the sins of others trail behind them. In the same way, good deeds are obvious, and even those that are not cannot be hidden."

I think I would end here lah and instead just let you guys comment
on the post. Had Justin done something good to you? Or was he naughty in the past (hmm..that'll be interesting) ? But here's a toast (a real one, not the marmalade toast from earlier) to the decade plus of great cousinship that you've given me dude. And I hope you like this:

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Just some babbling....

The sad thing with writing blogs is that you have to update it often or it gets stale really fast. Then there's the pain of choosing which topic to write about. Do I write about this? Or that? Or maybe...ah nevermind. But I like it when people come to read my blog, it's fun when I've done a good job at making a post that's both nice to read and insightful at the same time, though my stringent quality check ensures that each blog takes more than 2 hours on average...guess I'll have to be more efficient :D Thanks for coming to read my blog guys!

Sunday, July 16, 2006

The ball's MINE!!!!!!

Another week, another Sunday. Time sure flies by whether you're having fun or not. But then again, the past weekend has brought me a lot joy, a great break from the daily grind of battling with Biology and Maths T (teruk). Sometimes, I think that I'd have a lot more time for myself if I didn't need to go for TRU and Sunday worship. I could play Dota with my friends, I could go out and watch movie without the need to rush home before 3 o'clock and ALSO sleep later on Sundays. Sometimes. Of course, weekend after weekend I continue to be proven wrong. If I had not gone to TRU,what would I have done? Play Dota with my friends? Go watch movie? Suddenly, from the perspective of a TRU-er I showed little concern for these kind of activities...and last Saturday at the post COPA-IBA dinner I really had a good time at the session and dinner. If I had stayed home instead, I would have whacked myself hard on the cerebral region....kudos to the ones involved in organizing last Saturday's activities!

On the following Sunday morning, things were like normal except for the Committee meeting and the fasting. Actually, I kinda like going for the meetings,in a sense that it's more fun to be involved in the 'team' but of course ol' Spidey's quote always trails along. Yea yea, with this comes that. With roti canai comes teh tarik.......aih, though responsibility is a good way to build character I guess. But the REAL highlight of the day was in the evening. I went over to Ju
stin's place to deliver his Maggi mee goreng and dropped by to play some games. So we played Naruto first, and he's better lah of course (to explain the entire gaming lagacy between us would take on an entirely different topic, so I'd save it for the future).

So then he recommends Winning Eleven 10, a football game with a pretty good reputation but I've never played it lah cause I sucked at real football, what more th
e digital version. But nevermind, I played along and in the first two games we played I had two of my players getting slapped with the red card. Thats's justified of course if you had seen how I tackled Justin's players. I even injured his player once or twice. Needless to say, I lost (we even played a really close penalty).

But then during one of the later rounds, I got a better grip of the game. I dribbled like mad to get higher ball possession (maybe like 60-70%) and my first goal scored in the game came from...JUSTIN'S GOALKEEPER!!!! I had one person like 3 feet in front of the goal and he had two or three persons there taking the ball. The replay showed his player passing the ball to the goalkeeper right in front of the goal, my player standing there l
ike a banana and the goalkeeper did the most brilliant thing ever. Turned around and dribbled into the goal. YEAH!!! I don't care if it's his fault, I, ME, YOURS TRULY SCORED!!! After a terrible spell of laughing over the own-goal, we managed to carry on.

That game I owned the ball in dribbling and passing, and a beautiful, beautiful goal came not long after. This time I 'orchestrated' the goal, so to speak :D And boy, did we have fun or what! The adrenaline high was akin to taking two shots of hard whisky and knocking your head on the wall repeatedly (NOT that I've tried it of course...no no...nope)

By the time the game was over, I was adrenaline-pumped and
felt giddy and was sweating quite a bit. Good exercise man. But Justin being the "Not satisfied!!! AGAIN!!!" person that he is, we played again. I lost lah, but still the game was truckloads of fun. Man, next week's gonna be a blast :D

winning_eleven2

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

Google Adsense? Hm....

LOOKS like I finally decided to put up my own blog, after taking a hiatus from blogging since my early days of playing with MSN's MySpace (not the US one). Of course,I noticed that there is an option to put AdSense into to the blog, so I'll use this to see if it actually works. I'll come back to you guys once I start making a hundred dollars or more a week, heheh :D Here's a toast to the opening of my blog! Ehmmm...that's a good-looking toast dressed in marmalade.

For those of you who has no idea whose blog this is, you can take a look this camp photo (2nd from left)

Here's a recap on the interesting events that happened to me recently...
(a) I had been to an inter-church Bible Quiz and as a member of the floor team (all the five churches that took part had four people on stage and several people off the stage doing separate but similar tasks), I was the one who scored all the points....NOLAH!!!! Haha, kidding kidding...everyone did a great job but too bad my church only got second-place.

The winning team was pretty good, but I think most of us (my teammates)
were pretty mystified as to how they could actually win when in the beginning they had difficulty answering a REALLLLLYY simple question. In layman's terms, it would've sounded like "What is the other name for football in America?" or something like that...BUT, I guess they had a good floor team and with all due respect, I think they deserved to win the quizlah in the end.

For them, they were merely the defending the title that they've been holding for the past two years but for my church, I think the whole magic of it lies in the fact that (well, magic for those of us in the quiz team lah at least) we all worked really hard for the quiz and the second-placing (compared to the previous year's bottom ranking) was really just God patting us on our backs saying well done. Winning wasn't important, as I learned a lot from the book that we studied , 1 Timothy and while on the way home after the quiz was over, the warm and beautiful sunset ended my first Bible Quiz experience on a high and positive note.


(b) Yeah, the World Cup is finally over and boy am I glad or what. Not that I didn't like it but I just thought that the adverts that they had been putting on TV, on the radio, in mamak stalls and practically every nook and corner of available marketing space were starting to get on my nerves. I mean,come on lah, I can only hear the "FOOTBALL MAD NATION, RULLLLLED BY CELCOM!!!!!!!!!!" shouts on the TV so often before I feel like giving those advertising people over at Celcom a piece of my mind.

The most ironic thing is that I was at my cousin's house to catch the uber-late night live match of the Finals (Darn the FIFA members, can't they have it somewhere nearer to Malaysia?) and guess what, I fell asleep through the first seven minutes of the game and brilliantly missed the first goal. Fine, so I sat up and mustered whatever mental energy I had left in me to watch for the next 40 minutes or so until the half-time break. No goals. WHAT?!! Gah, at that point my eyes weren't there anymore...they had taken a holiday and so with scarcely any idea of what happened in the second half, I suddenly awoke in the morning to find everyone sleeping in the hall. The match was..over. And I don't even remember falling asleep in the first place.

So much for the cup..give me a Pixar animation any day lah, World Cup was never in my genetic code and probably won't be. But I liked the hype in some ways lah, in a sense that it's a 'once every four years' thing. Sure livened up the year and I'd look forward to 2010 to watch it again I guess.