Saturday, December 27, 2008

Scowl.

Oh eurgh. One thing that really gets on my nerve. When I'm out having an evening jog/walk/lung-busting-form-of-'exercise' around the empty piece of land near my house, I tend to pass many other local residents taking their evening constitutional. And so I sort of smile faintly and nod my head slightly as a form of greeting. More often than not, I just get stares that radiate thoughts labelling me a variety of names for 'crazy girl'. Bloody idiots.


Realised that I've only blogged here once so far this month. Hmmm. Would like to write more, but time just seems to get swallowed up. And soon it'll be a new year.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Relief from Boredom at What Cost?

2 Cheap and Cheerful - The Kills

Was listening to The Kills on the train earlier today, and it came to this particular track. I really like it - it's got a dirty sly sort of groove to it, but. But. As cool as the lyrics sound, I can't help but raise my eyebrows into my rather mangled-self-trimmed fringe whenever I hear the words. I can see where they're coming from, and -do- actually like the lyrics from a certain viewpoint. But I can't help feeling the.... danger? of perpetuating such a frame of thought. It's the
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're boring baby when you're straight
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're stupid baby when you're sane

chorus that causes me to wrinkle my brow. Really now? As unpredictable and out of the ordinary a state of non-sanity might be, is it really 'exciting'? Well, not for the person involved, I think. And definitely not in retrospect.

But maybe I'm reading too much into things. Hmmm.

However, I've been thinking about Boredom quite a bit lately. I recall complaining about being bored quite a lot when I was a child (oh how becomming - a whiney brat), and for the past few months, I have been whinging about ennui and restlessness and boredom. But perhaps it's just my brain and physical self being lazy and not spurring myself into action and entertainment. I don't know.... I was reading a book I borrowed from the library at the patisserie place earlier today, and found myself completely gripped and absorbed, with a whole gamult of emotions coursing through my brain as I followed the dipping and swerving of the narrative. And the awe and admiration for the author's craft and skill spread through my consciousness. And all the while, wondering why I haven't been reading as much as I used to in the past. I blame laziness and too many interests that pull my time and dedication in so many diverse directions. Not to mention blow holes in my bank account. Urgh.

And then I think of my city exploratiory expedition yesterday, the first in a rather long while, and sitting there with a milk shake and letting my hand wriggle its way across the pages to form a letter.

And the tingling of my spine as I pipe a once very much loved but now seldom listened to song into my ears as I gaze through rain-streaked bus windows.

Being alive is good.

Boredom is an extravegance that the living can afford to luxuriate in. But it is also a frame of mind that placing oneself into results in a deadening of the senses and a wastage of heartbeats.

And so, I shall drift off to gaze at wonder at more black printed words on yellowing pages and leave you with the lyrics that I found slightly objectionable.


Cheap And Cheerful

I'm bored of cheap and cheerful
I want expensive sadness
Hospital bills, parole
Open doors to madness

I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're boring baby when you're straight
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're stupid baby when you're sane

I'm sick of social graces
Show your sharp-tipped teeth
Lose your cool in public
Dig that illegal meat

'Cause love is just a dialogue
You can't survive on ice-cream
You got to same needs as a dog

It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)
It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)

I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're boring baby when you're straight
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're stupid baby when you're sane

It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)
It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)

It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)
It's alright (it's alright)
To be mean (to be mean)

I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're boring baby when you're straight
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're stupid baby when you're sane

I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're boring baby when you're straight
I want you to be crazy
'Cause you're stupid baby when you're sane

Friday, November 21, 2008

Before the Tumbleweed Start Throwing a Rave...

It's been a while since I've let my fingers do a little tapping in this particular corner of the world wide web. Thought I should take up a broom and whack away all the accumulated dust and cobwebs, though I haven't got much to say. Just adding to the amount of junk floating around in cyberspace.

I could express shock and horror about how little of the year is remaining, but that wouldn't make for compelling reading, would it?

So maybe I'll dither on a little about my hunt for gainful employment. More specifically, my single job application. I submitted another one, but it was for something I was no way near qualified for, so no surprise if the application just disappeared down a black hole of no return. I just finished the second round of the process, which was the assessment centre thing. Since this is my first proper job application, it was really quite interesting, though I felt like I screwed up pretty bad. Oh well. But what I want to meander down a tiny tirade about is the 'Personality Questionare' they had us shade in at the end of it. Oh joy. My entire existence and psyche reduced to a series of True/False, Yes/No statements. I also happily lied my way through portions of it and sat on the fence with the ? option quite a bit. Take that, character profiling computer! I wonder what kind of split-personality welded-together creation I must have come across as. Muahaha.





Anyway, this being a former colonial outpost, there are all these relic street names like 'Waterloo Street'. I was doing a little exploration of the old part of town, um, last month, and when I got there, I was compelled to put on The Kinks' Waterloo Sunset as well as David Bowie's cover of it. Which made me think of the last time I was in Waterloo in London and put the song on as well. 

I haven't been on an exploratory expedition in a while. Would like to embark on one soon. Hmmm. 

Right, now to euthanise this rather pointless post. 

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Fingering the Rough and Scrunching the Eyeballs

It's pretty much 3 in the morning and I can't seem to get down to sleeping. :((((((((((
My night after dinner was spent painting my nails while listening to a drama CD (#12 of the Fushigi Koubou series with Takahashi HIroki, which wasn't tooo impressive), and then going through my wardrobe and being dismayed and dully depressed by the amount of under-worn clothes and foolish buys. I then stumbled upon my old notebook in which I copied out bits of books as I read them, and entertained myself with that for a bit. Following which, I did some fresh copying in my current notebook as I continued to make my way through my collection of W. Somerset Maugham short stories, Far Eastern Tales. I chanced upon the book in that lovely bookshop on Marylebone High Street, was taken to it, but set my heart on buying it after seeing mention of Tanah Merah (an area in S'pore) on the very first page. Got it off Amazon, though, as I was already clutching three other volumes coaxed off the quaint wooden shelves that day. But yes, I finished the third story in the collection, "P. & O." just now, and it impressed me a lot more than the first two did, and Maugham has shot up in my esteem. The first story was nice enough, but a little on the predictable side, perhaps. The colonial coating made it more enjoyable than it might have been in another setting, perhaps. The second was more a ditty than a short story, and was amusing in its own way. But the third, however, was filled with lyricism and tinged with mysticism. Perhaps ending on a minisculely trite note, but you could put that reaction down to my once not so latent cynicism that still loiters. A selection of some of the bits I copied out:

She was occupied with her own thoughts. They crowded upon her when she was sewing; they came between her and the novel with which she sought to cheat their insistence.

-

'And at that age you feel that you can't afford to throw away the chance of happiness which a freakish destiny has given you. In five years it will certainly be over, and perhaps in six months. Life is rather drab and grey, and happiness is so rare. We shall be dead so long.'

-

With the suddenness with which after tropical rain in the spring you seem to see the herbage grow before your very eyes, she saw him go to pieces.

-

A late star twinkled palely close to the horizon. There was a shimmer on the sea as though a loitering breeze passed playful fingers over its surface.



I continued flipping through my quote books while listening to anime soundtracks, and then tried to fall asleep. Failing which, I did the worst thing I could possibly do in such a state - turned on the computer. Hah. And here I am.

And here I shall present a number of bits from books that I copied out with the theme of "Sleep".

* Travels with A Donkey in the Cevennes - R.L. Stevenson *

I questioned at first if I were sleepy, for I felt my heart beating faster than usual, as if with an agreeable excitement to which my mind remained a stranger. But as soon as my eyelids touched, that subtle glue leaped between them, and they would no more come separate. The wind among the trees was my lullaby.

~

What seems a kind of temporal death to people choked between walls and curtains, is only a light and living slumber to the man who sleeps afield.

~

* Thank You, Jeeves - P.G. Wodehouse *

I counted about five more medium-sized flocks, but it was no good.

~

* Stamboul Train - Graham Greene *

If I could sleep, he though with longing, I could remember more clearly all the things that have to be remembered.

~

His face fora a moment disappeared from view as the lights of a station turned the walls of the coach from mirrors to windows, through which became visible a throng of country passengers waiting with children and packages and string bags for some slow cross-country train. With the darkness the face returned, nodding into sleep.


-

And I really should leave it at that and have another stab at invading dreamland. Right ho!

Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Oh to Be Able to Type in the Pool

Went for a swim just now. By the time I tumbled off the bed, had a cup of tea and some breakfast, went through my morning ablutions, and got myself organised to leave the house, time had already skipped into the second half of 11 o'clock. Getting to the pool at lunch time, possibly combined with a steely, dusty, fluffy threatening sky, meant that I had it all to myself, and it was nice to have a swim for the first time in more than a year. While loping along through the laps, I was struck with an interesting short story idea, and as I swam along, the sentences and images took form in my head and unfolded and unfurled and darted around. I even came up with an ending for it. As the words scuttled through my head, I couldn't help wishing that I could write it all down at that very moment, so as to not lose these sparks ricocheting off the walls of my skull. I really think that so much good (?) composition of mine is done in my head when I have no means of preserving it, and almost all of it gets lost in the murky depths of my mind as it leaps onto another source of external stimulation or decides to traipse down an entirely different thought avenue. I tried to keep the plot bunny alive and hopping in my mind over lunch and on the way back, but it inevitably drifted to less prominent parts of my brain (like how rabbits slowly make their way across the field in their shuffly, sniffly grazings). After hitting the power button of my laptop, my fingers decided to check up on the various sites that enjoy my just ever so slightly obsessive-compulsive checking and surfing, before finally starting up Word. All I've managed to produce is 98 pathetic words that cover a mere splinter of the grand plan that unravelled itself through my brain while in the pool. I'm using the same font as I did for my dissertation, and it is now triggering oh so lovely memories of sitting hunched before the glowing screen and staring that the Word Count That Refused to Budge. I am also being slightly hypnotised by my animated lj userpic.

Maybe I'll get back to trying to reproduce and preserve those swirls of inspiration.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Vroom Whine Squeal Zoom

I tried formulating (hurhurhur) an anthropological reading of Formula One earlier today. I got as far as thinking about how the drivers can be seen as portraying a seemingly physically immobile ('just sitting in the car' - an erroneous impression, in actual fact), and yet highly mobile (high speed racing, jetting over the world) form of masculinity, and was thinking about the equation of men with shiny, fast machines. I was vaguely wondering if any of this represented a shift from any perceived so-called 'traditional' forms of masculinity. Then my brain gave up, and I decided to happily devote myself to trying to memorise the drivers' helmet covers. Shiny lights, ooooh.

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Stumble Mumble Trumble

So we have tripped our way into the final quarter of 2008. A couple of days ago, I was involved in a conversation where I was convinced for a moment that Teachers' Day (1st September) had yet to come. Denial or mental degeneration - you decide.

Anyway, I'd been meaning to type out something vaguely like a review for a film I saw about a week ago, The Murder of the Inugami Clan (犬神家の一族). While googling and imdb-ing about after seeing the film, I realised that it seemed really familiar to me because it was showing at the 2006 Tokyo International Film Festival, and I saw it while looking through the line-up. It's a 2006 remake, by Ichikawa Kon, of the film he did in 1976. 


The film was whodunit murder mystery, set in the days just after Japan's defeat in WWII, in the Shinshuu region, which is where the Japanese alps are. The patriarch of the wealthy Inugami family dies, leaving behind three daughters, each mothered by a different woman, and their progeny. When the details of his strange will are disclosed, blood starts being splattered, literally, in wonderfully kitsch old school red-pastel-paint style, and it is up to the bumbling (and just ever so slightly unhygienic) self-styled private detective, Kindaiichi, to unravel the mysteries that stretch back in time, and solve the case.

I suppose the film was slightly stylised, as evidenced by the ostentatiously fake blood, and the state of some of the murder victims. It did have rather happy dollops of humour as well, despite some of the splatter elements. If you squint at the picture I placed above, you can see a creepy white-headed fella sitting near the middle. That's Sukekiyo, the eldest grandson who had his face destroyed in the war, and wears that mask to hide his wounds, which he does show the rest of the family, provoking gasps of alarm and disgust both on and off screen. 

All in all, I thought it was a pretty good film, and really enjoyed the atmosphere and the setting of the story. The luxuriant green of the Japanese summer, the fraying wooden building-lined streets, the click-clack of clogs as our hero runs down them. I love period pieces, though this doesn't go that far back in time. The mystery plot was also rather good, though not exactly the most wonderfully brilliant of revelations. But it was good enough for me to enjoy. ^-^ 

I went to see the film all by my lonesome, quite possibly a first for me in S'pore. It was the last day of school before the one-week long September break, and so the cinema was teeming with packs of uniform-clad teenagers. I think there's something akin to a stigma attached to watching a movie or eating out in a restaurant alone in this society. In Tokyo, I remember eating out alone or sitting in a cafe alone was a tad too common. I think London probably felt like it had the best balance and atmosphere for solitude. Hmmm.

Anyway, I've also seen Wall•E since, and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I suppose Naomi's slightly hesitant response to it made me lower my expectations, and so the film didn't disappoint. 


The not so latent Sci-Fi geek in me lapped up the desolate futuristic scape, and I wouldn't have minded if the film spent an hour nuzzling its way through Wall•E's little 'home'. I think this was the best Pixar film since Finding Nemo. And one of the more inventive ones. 

Speaking of Sci-Fi, I -finally- got down to watching the first episode of Gankutsuou, the anime interpretation of Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo, one of my all time favourite books. I'd heard of the series before, and was interested, but after finding out that a certain voice is in it, I was determined to watch it. However, it took me something like 2 months to finally get down to checking it out, and I'm glad I did. The setting was transferred to a fascinating space age that retains a period air. The animation was full of rich textures and they employed a strange technique where by the patterns of clothing stayed stationary even when the characters moved. So you'd get the bizarre feeling of feeling as if the characters were walking through pattern-scapes. At first I thought it was a fault with the video, but I'm now pretty sure that was the desired effect. 

The series opened with the moccoletto scene, which I loved in the book. I was inspired to dig up my old notebook where I'd copied out bits from Monte Cristo all those years ago. Will get down to watching the next episode soon. :3 They're releasing the DVD box set in November, and I'm toying with the idea of either buying it, or asking for it for my birthday. Haha. 

My phone is currently attached to the 'umbilical cord' a bit too far for bluetooth to work, so I can't transfer pictures to my computer. The pic-spammage will have to wait, I suppose! 

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Photo Flow


Just going to pic spam a little since I've been a jolly snapper with my phone. The one above was taken on my way home on Tuesday afternoon.

The following are from lunch at the Island Cafe yesterday.


And now for a little rage: I hate how it's noisy in residential areas in the day. Leaf-blowers are usually what drive my frustration levels up, and today there's some hammering going on punctuated with the sound of wood making contact with other hard surfaces. Grrr.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The Butt that Itches

No, I do not have some skin ailment in an embarrassing and inconvenient location. The title refers to a Chinese turn of phrase used to describe the impetus for the ill-advised biting off of more than one can chew, foolhardily overstepping boundaries, and the like. For example, perhaps, "Saddam's butt itched, so he decided to provoke the States with lies about weapons of mass destruction, and so ended up swinging from a rope instead of carrying on as a happy (not so) little dictator."

Well, in my case, I decided that I wasn't spending enough time in front of the computer as it is, and so volunteered my services for an online translation (fan) project. Japanese to English. On lj. Of a certain someone's blog. So I spent something like 4 hours last night labouring over bizarre sentence structures and even wierder katakana words [katakana: the alphebet/script used in Japanese usually for foreign words and loan words]. I'm heavily dependent on the online J-> E dictionary, and am struggling to make the text sound natural in English. Booh.

In other news, I spent quite a long while (maybe amost an hour?) in Kino yesterday looking at manga and trying to find stuff by Yuki Kaori (she who wrote the Count Cain series I was blithering on about in an earlier entry). Was about to give up scouring the shelves when I found her books nestled right next to Hino Matsuri's (of Vampire Knight fame) and realised that she was for some strange reason out of the alphabetical order. But anyway, I chose to go with Neji, a single volume standalone, as they only had the fifth title in the Count Cain series, God Child.


It has 3 seperate but continuous stories, and I've finished 2 so far. It's science fiction as opposed to the fantasy/horror/gothic genres I know her for, but I'm enjoying it a lot. The stories centre around Neji, a young boy who was cryrogenically frozen along with his girlfriend after they were brutally killed in 1992. His corpse is appropriated by a government body that carries out research into ESP and other powers, and they experiment on him. When he finally wakes up 40 years later, his memories are wiped, and they coerce him into training his powers and try to make an assassin out of him. Her art's pretty, but it has the problem of having characters that are hard to distinguish from one another.

Edit: I forgot to add that I was really surprised to find that the volume I bought was from the first print run, way back in 2001. So does that mean that the book's been sitting on the bookstore's shelves for the past 7 years or so? Hmmm.


And here we have a shot of a yummy green tea flavoured mooncake!!! Bought our first box of mooncakes a few days ago. Gosh I love green tea mooncakes! Anne and Pygmy might recognise the saucer in the picture. :p I realised it was the perfect size for these miniature mooncakes! Wehey!

Oh, I -did- manage to get a clam/flip phone in the end! I threw my vague sense of brand loyalty into the air and went with Sony Ericsson. ^-^ I'm still not used to their predictive text platform, though. Hrmmm.

Looks like the rainy (more like stormy) spell we've been having is still going to continue for a while. It was annoyingly sunny for a while earlier this morning, but the felines and canines are now descending upon this tiny little splodge of a country once more.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

A Mean Meander Followed by Mildness

 
I can't concentrate properly on typing this when I can hear my maternal ancestor yakking on the phone. I miss having the entire house to myself. Haha. :p 

But anyway, lately, I've been ranting quite a bit about the lack of cultural stimulus and creation in this country. Literature, music, art, or film. Only smatterings that don't seem to rise above a certain level of quality.  When I was in Iceland, I saw that there was a flourishing publishing industry. The total number of Icelandic speakers in the entire world hardly rises above 300,000 individuals, and yet, they are able to sustain a literary scene, AND produce a Literature Nobel Prize laureate. Sunny litte Spore, with her overcrowdedness of 4.5 million people, is in an appalling state when it comes to literature. There was an article in the newspapers (All hail the oh-so-wonderful Straits Times) yesterday, I believe, about book circulation statistics for the National Library. It appears that what my fellow countrymen enjoy reading most are ghost stories. One of the most popular local writers is Russell Lee, who authors the True Singapore Ghost Stories series, which has been floating around since I was a kid. There's also this Mr Midnight series for children, which ranks right behind Harry Potter. If my memory serves me well, I think Mitch Albom's books as well as The Kite Runner were at the top of the adult fiction list. 

Oh, I am filled to the brim with trembling patriotism when I think of my beloved motherland and her glorious ethos of good grades, business, finance, and banking. Hooray! Let me conform! I want to volunteer for lobotomy and make the transformation into a reproducing drone~! \(^o^)/

-

Hmmm. I think that came out a little bit harsher than I expected. But whatever. Haha. I am filled with envy when I look at some of the Japanese creative industries - publishing, animation, and music. Ok, fair enough, wikipedia informs me that Japan has a population of 127 million. Hardly a fair comparison. But still. Also, books are dirt cheap there, and there is that lovely huge second hand industry. Oh well.

My two-year old mobile phone is starting to die on me. It was already at a certain stage of being handicapped, but now, the screen has displayed (haha) a tendency towards white-outs. Not good. I desperately want a clam/flip phone, and have something akin to brand loyalty to Nokia, but the only model that is a clam phone has yet to be releas
ed, and is bound to be rather pricey when it eventually is. Boo. 

I am now the proud owner of a 500GB external hard drive. Rather excessive, but since it only cost $10 (approx. £3+) more than a 320GB one, I decided to plan ahead for the future. :p

Another purchase I made that made me happy, was the August issue of Cure, which subtitles itself "Japanesque Rock + Visual Styling Magazine". As you can see, Ayabie are on the cover, and the photo shoot was done in a carnival/funfair setting. I read part of the interview, and at one point, they started talking about their various pets. Intetsu has a floppy eared rabbit! Haha.  



I think I'm going to have to sit around on my butt at home for the next few days to save some of the not-exactly green stuff. Oh wait, there's something called 'Studying for the Japanese proficiency test" which is supposed to be my primary occupation. 


I can't seem to get the formatting of images right. Grrr. Well, this is on the right, but I wanted it in the centre, and now I can't seem to change it. *shakes fist* Oh well. Anyway, it's a pretty pretty picture of a pretty pretty pick (yay, I score for my wide range of vocabulary!) from Intetsu's blog. Picture thief I am. 

By the way, the "ceiling fan" tag here shall serve as my tag for random-ness. 

Oh, and the picture right at the top of the post I snapped while walking back home yesterday evening. It was a nice and atmospherically (in both senses of the word?) overcast day. Also somehow managed to be drenched or splattered by too many raindrops while we were out.  

Monday, August 18, 2008

"And the clouds will open for me"

I feel an urge to redeem this blog from the frivolous, babbling posts that have filled its archives so far. Haha.


It is now raining in that wonderful way it can only do so properly in the tropics. There was the build-up to the storm, with overcast and cloud crowded skies, with the wind whipping it all up. And now it's all coming down, accompanied by the languid rumblings of the thundergods. Lovely. We had rain yesterday as well, which made the bus windows mist up when I was riding down south for a class gathering. It was my class for only less than three months, and I hadn't seen almost all of the people there in real life for something like 6 years. Deliberated for quite a bit before asking Jg to tell me to go. Haha. I am stupid like that - I'd be indecisive, more or less make up my mind, but would want someone to tell me to commit to the choice, or to ask me to do so.

Here's a snap of the view from the bus, with the lights dispersed by the misty windows:


And the view from the boardwalk of sorts where a very stoned Jg and I hung out:


I told Jg "You and I make a very good combination when you're stoned", which is so true, because when Jg has full command of her mental capacities, we'd both end up wanting to talk. A lot. So I take advantage of her vacantness and happily prattle on.

Ok, really need to get out of these pyjamas before Cc arrives.

And it All Breaks Down.....


Just watched the latest episode, Turn 19, of Code Geass R2. And wow, what an episode it was. After the last one, I was looking forward to much drama and great plot shake-ups, but this surpassed all expectations. Brought tears to my eyes, this episode did.

WARNING: Spoilers Ahoy! Rambling and Babbling also sighted on the horizon

But I don't think anyone who reads this at the moment will really care/mind if I put spoilers for anime up here. Haha.


Lelouch, Lelouch, Lelouch! Why must you lie so? Two episodes ago, he lied to Suzaku concerning the truth about Euphy's death, and now he lied to Kallen by saying that to him, she's merely a pawn. He's set himself up as the ultimate villain and evil mastermind, and has driven all his allies away from him. All but the one who's too [psychotic/thick/emotionally twisted/underdeveloped/all of the above]. The irony is that what Lulu said to Rolo about hating, using, and wishing to kill him was actually a rare explosion of truth amongst the expanding tangles of lies. But of course, being emotionally deranged, Rolo comes back to save Lulu's skinny anime arse, and finally performs an act free from manipulation and control, by, you guessed it, dying.


I'm afraid MSN (and the maternal ancestor moving around the house and trying to interact with me) is distracting me from typing out a proper reaction and analysis to the episode. Many thoughts ran through my somewhat dulled brain while I was watching it, but unfortunately they have scattered. So once again I fail to rise above the level of "OMG THAT WAS SOOOO COOOL!!"-esque comments on anime. Ooh whellll. Need to get out of these pyjamas now.


EDIT: I forgot to add that it turns out that the casualties for the nuking of the Tokyo Settlement (in the anime, in case you didn't realise :p) was actually revealed to be in the millions! Something like 35 million in total. Whoa. Someone commented somewhere that it was incredibly brave to show an episode last week of Tokyo being nuked the week of the anniversary of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima bombings. I won't bother to launch into an analysis of how the nuclear bombings have been etched into the Japanese psyche and all that.

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Muddle

Last night as I lay there waiting for sleep to take me, I made a resolution not to come on the computer for the weekend, for the sake of my poor shriveled eyeballs. So when I woke up this morning, I decided to entertain myself by listening to a Drama CD that I downloaded a while ago but never got round to putting on - Miss Pudding, who was Sliced Up and Eaten (Kirikizamare Taberareta Miss Pudding. It's based on the Count Cain manga series by Kaori Yuki (she did Angel Sanctuary and Fairy Cube too, and has a rather typically beautiful shoujo manga drawing style). This Miss Pudding CD I acquired together with another from the same series, Kafka, which involved vampires. A few minutes into Miss Pudding, it started bothering me that I couldn't remember the cast properly, and the only way to rectify that was to press that little button on my magnetic laptop and pull out those CD booklet scans nestled within my ever increasingly snug hard drive. Sadly, I caved in and my resolution turned to dust and was scattered by the Wind of Lack of Self-Control.

I only finished the first part of the Drama CD, which dealt with the series of mysterious murders in which the culprit allegedly has long blonde hair, sings a Mother Goose nursery rhyme about puddings (I'm lost here. Does such a rhyme actually exist??), carves up the victim, eats them (I think I got this right), and leaves a plum pudding at the scene. Our protagonist is the Earl of Hargreaves, Cain, who is known as the Earl of Poisons for his predilection for collecting and studying different types of poisons. His little sister, Meryweather (played by Kawata Taeko, who I really enjoyed as the Duchess in Are You Alice?) tells him of the string of homicides, and creepily starts singing the song/rhyme. He makes her stop, and fires the servant who's been telling her those stories, and departs for a party. There, he saves a young woman from the unwanted advances of another man. She turns out to be the newly-wed Gladys Radcliffe, and asks if she could stay with Cain in the room that has been prepared for him in the manor. She is extremely distracted and distressed, and finally confesses that she thinks that she's the pudding murderer. She tells how she falls into a sleep way too deep, and on the morning after one of the murders, woke up to find a blood-stained pudding knife at the foot of her bed. She says that her husband, Radcliffe (of some title or another), disbelieves and dismisses her fears, and she has no one to turn to. At this moment, her husband barges in after knocking over some interior ornamentation of some sort, and yells at Cain to get away from his wife. Radcliffe is played by Chiba Susumu, and it was fun listening to him as a slightly angsty klutz. I didn't like Chiba as Ichijou in the Vampire Knight anime, but am minding it less now.

Anyway, I'm afraid I've got to go get ready to leave the house to meet my twin now. Can't reveal the conclusion of the story, or go into a detailed ramble about the CD, but might do so later. I'll turn off my computer, and hopefully it'll remain so till Monday, when it's time for me to get my Geass fix. :p

Bobeep

And so I'm back on blogger. Wehey!

My eyeballs are pretty much shot from spending the afternoon on my magnetic laptop youtubing and sharing the enthusiasm and appreciation on MSN, so won't be able to bang out an opening post of any consequence here. Am also dead tired. I think I should aim to sleep before the clocks in this part of the world make the skip across the 01:00 dot/line/spot.

So here you go. First post accomplished in blind, exhausted style. :p