An ode to garlic

Recently, my parents have influenced me to try eating raw cloves of garlic since it is good for health. So I am writing this entry as a tribute to me loosing appetite for today's dinner with mild symptoms of heartburn and bad breath.

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First of all, the technique of eating garlic. If you are eating garlic as a natural health supplement, I advise to start with the tiniest clove that you can find. Peel off the skin and eat it whole. Remember to chew so the juices will emerge.(BTW i found out the important chemical in garlic that is beneficial for your health is incidentally a kind of sulphur) And yes, it will sting the walls of your mouth out of it's will to live. Although my parents advise to eat the garlic together with a banana, and that seems to help. My mom even thinks it smells kind of like durian when eaten like that, so you know what to do if you have a craving for durian but it's not in season /you are overseas. And the stinging only lasts for a short while. Additionally, I read that eating garlic with some olive oil or lemon will prevent garlic breath, although I'm not keen to try that.

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Benefits of garlic (a compiled list from the net, although some of these are not proven):

- improves blood pressure and cholesterol

- prevents acne

- prevents cancer

- prevents weight gain

- useful for bug bites and mosquito repelling

- cures asthma, infections, blocked sinuses, toothache, earache, cough and herpes

- tastes good (although if you are eating it as it is then it depends how masochistic you are)

- wards off vampires and other undesirable people

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But then again, don't eat too much at one go, one or two cloves per day is about as much as you should take. Any more and you'll get heartburn or even a headache.

Sohs I've been springcleaning my room and going thru my stack of old assignments. So far I think I've reduced the 2 feet++ mountain into 1 foot or so. My guideline to keeping stuff was: Must be either notes/references/good artwork/have some kind of good memory attached to them.

While I was cleaning up my stuff, I saw those long ago assignments and thought...wow...so ugly...But at that time it looked ok to me wor...Nvm, that's probably a good thing, time to raise the standards around here right.I even thought some lecturers were really conciderate to write 'well done' on some sucky artwork.That's called positive reinforcement -_-TT.Those of you who plan to tutor at college take note.One or 2 of the artwork I didn't even recognise as my own, except my name was on them.

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Going thru the stuff stirred up some old memories of course. During the first weeks of college we were required to find the signatures of staff at the college, and I remember thinking "I hope they won't try to make us do something stupid like puting our head in the toilet bowls before signing"(with I heard happens between juniors and seniors at some public unis, and they call it a 'tradition'). But turns out they were very relaxed about it, and the form didn't even need to be completed.

When I first started college, I accidentally got thrown into the last class (I dunno why this always happens to me, it happened in primary school and highschool as well) which was ok and didn't mean i was stupid or untalented(they sorted students by English proficiency), but meant that all the classmates from the last class were chinese school educated and I couldn't communicate with them. Anyways everything got sorted out.

First class I had with my correct class (the first class) was figure studies, where I met Talissa and Reza, only I thought they were called Theresa and Leza. I dunno how that happened, it's not like they pronounce their Rs and Ls the wrong way round.Then, because it was the first time we were taking figures, we had to draw a face so the lecturers could see our capability, and mine somehow ended up looking like De Min. Also, early on in figure studies classes, the lecturers provided references to copy from, and somehow they always look wrong. In fact i think the lecturers purposely positioned some of the pics to make them look even wronger.

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Some of the subjects were more expensive in terms of art material compared to others. One of them was the markers class, which I heard the juniors were doing on the com (using Painter) like 2 terms or so after us. OK, so just imagine buying 60 markers or so per person for this subject, then I helped 3 other people buy their share as well (but they pay of course) and what you get is a very happy Vision Art woman, eventhough she said the profit she gets from each marker is just 50 cents. You can see that she has a very nice car now. Anyways, I gave all those markers to my cousin who's in foundation year now. I doubt she'll be using them for assignments, but she can have them anyways, i never found them to be very intuitive.

The other very expensive subject was typography. Imagine printing A3 sized artwork, sometimes coloured, printed on nice paper, and mostly 5 pieces every week, and I don't have a printer at home. And those were just your rough ideas. The lecturer will use a red pen and write bad comments on them.

Coupled with those (which we unavoidable expenses after all) are those stuff that I bought and have no idea why I bought them. When we went to Multifilla(an art shop that specialises in sculpting material) I bought a bag of cement in sand form. I guess I was supposed to make something avant garde and thought provoking from that. But in the end I just used it to fill up some boxes and be used a weights for one of my projects. So if any of you are interested in owning a bag of cement (i dunno...for home repair works?) please let me know, I'll give it to you free.

Also, there were those countless pieces of unnecessarily photostated papers which I didn't use, and spare markers which caps I never even opened(I just bought them because they were in the list. Good news is that all those paper stuff will be recycled, so I'm viewing my spring cleaning as returning something back to nature in a way.

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That's the end of batch 1, I'll probably be adding more after I've finished cleaning up my room.

Ehhh....they oredi uploaded my website onto the batch 71 website. I didn't even know...

it's here

Somewhat outdated update.

I watched Alice in Wonderland and It. And I cut my hair. Woohoo. It's not as flat as it used to be.

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I know most people were disappointed about Alice, but I thought it was ok. Not perfect, not Tim Burton's best, but still entertaining enough. The characters themselves were well worth the ticket price, although yes, the Mad Hatter was a bit emo for my liking, but I still think the tea party was the best scene. I think the best characters were the March Hare and the Cheshire cat(don't you just feel like hugging it?). Anne Hathaway was pretty funny as the White Queen once you get over the overly-drifty feeling.Didn't really like the design for the army of red cards though, somehow looks a bit static compared to the rest.Also spotted some animation and camera tracking mistakes, but that's made up for by the good special effects in other parts.

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Also, finished watching It. Usually I don't feel much horror from old movies, but this one still makes me have a wierd feeling in my stomach. Pretty good for a guy with bad anatomy and rotten teeth, eh? Actually I totally forgot what the storyline was about the first time i watched it, maybe the clown was too mentally scarring for a small kid. But watching it again I think the story has more to do about friendship rather than just a pure horror theme. Maybe that's the key to making a good horror movie and not just some forgettable gore-fest. The special effects were comfortingly old school as well, i noticed they used stop-motion for animating the spider form of It, as well as a lot of trick camera framing to let you just guess what happened(come to think about it sometimes gory cannibalism scenes get a little un-classy). Which, as a side note, reminds me of House of Wax, which is as un-classy as it gets, but it was entertaining in a sick way to see how the characters were murdered.

Sometimes, just sometimes, remakes are better than the original. Here's El Tango De Roxanne from Moulin Rouge.



versus Roxanne, the original version performed by The Police.



OK, maybe it's happened 2 times. Or more. In Moulin Rouge. The other time was the edited version of Lady Marmalade, that worked better than the original. Edgy and skanky is just the way to go if your music is about prostitutes i guess *shrug*. Btw Jacek Koman's voice is sexier than Sting's unconscious or not. It's alright, I still like Sting's Desert Rose.

Yeen's to watch list

Sohs, the Oscars are over, so now it's time to make a list of 'I need to see this myself' movies.Biggest winner of the night was The Hurt Locker (which beat Avatar 6 awards to 3, I'm sure there are many angry fans out there). But the thing is that it wasn't shown in Malaysia. Hooray. So naturally that movie starts off the list.

Another winner, for best Documentary, was The Cove. It concerns today's hot topic of animal welfare, especially when it concerns the *cough* Japanese. Surely it will be an interesting and scandalous thing to watch (Food Inc. was scandalous to me, and I liked it :D)
Other than Oscar winners, Alice in Wonderland is coming out on Thursday. I don't really look forward to the 3D glasses experience tho...I dunno...is it just me or is it getting a little gimmicky? But anyways, good things happen when Tim Burton and wife Helena Bonham Carter and lelaki simpanan Johnny Depp collaborate. And then you add Lewis Carroll and you know things are going to get hot. I really hope it doesn't disappoint.
And as we all know, Criccy is a sucker for fantasy stuff. So what happened when I missed watching Dr Parnassus last year? OMG that's liek totally impossible right. But they showed it for such a limited period. I need to watch it. We need more art direction like this.
Next category, the classics of yesteryear.

Schindler's list. Appears on almost all lists of the best movies of all time, and generally agreed as one of the saddest ones too. I first heard about it because Itzhak Perlman played the soundtrack, and Itzhak Perlman is a very powerful marketing tool to Criccy.

The Godfather 1, 2 and 3. It's a sin not to watch this. I just know it.

And everyone's favourite character from their childhood, It. I did watch a portion of it recently, and although it's not the dark/gory/violent/i've been rotting in your septic tank kind of modern horror, it still does make you feel really uneasy.
One more, The English Patient. Mostly I'm curious about it when I found out it was the inspiration behind The Fall. Also right at home in all those 'best films' lists like all the rest of the classics in the list.
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As I'm typing this, I'm listening to the soundtracks from Moulin Rouge!. I think I should rewatch it for like the 7th time. I thought studying it for a college project would make me vomit just at the name. But it's just sheer outlandish brilliance. Who would have known (practically) copyright infringement on a few dozen songs and hodgepodge fashion would be so powerful.