Yours truly got to play with these today. More details at 10.

No I haven’t got arrested because someone mistakenly identified me as Mas Selamat. My webhosting bill apparently came and I didn’t receive it because I’ve since changed my email address. Paid up today and everything’s fine again.

Anyway.

I’ve a gig this weekend and I went shopping for a costume. I should really have gotten a costume a long time back except I don’t do gigs often enough and I’ve always resolved to hatch better money-making schemes but I’m easily enticed by the pay juggling/unicycling gigs offer. It’s like whoring yourself. I don’t necessarily enjoy it but I need to act like I do. And the pay’s good.

I’m a good actor.

This time it’s unicycling. I much prefer unicycling gigs to juggling ones because it involves riding around and is really good exercise. It’s also not too bad a job because it requires very minimal brain work and you end up sitting in a corner for half a day reading a book while waiting for your runs. Lots of entertainers I know are very smart people possibly because of that.

Usually I’d rent a costume mere days before but rental’s really expensive and saps quite a bit of what I’d make. Rental for 3 days from this shop with the widest selection of outfits cost almost $100. The cheapest place I know of rents their outfits from $20.

That’s me in the background. That outfit costs $65 to rent. It’s a last minute thing. As always.

I bought a costume finally today. It occurred to me that since people are having worse taste in fashion these days, it might actually be possible to get a decent outfit for a reasonable price. What’s worrying is that I actually managed to find what I want in the heart of town at a popular teen hangout. I am pretty sure I got ripped off though and paid at least $20 more than what my outfit was worth.

I’ll get pics up over the weekend. Wonder if anyone actually wears what I bought out…

Random anecdote:

10 years back in high school, during art lesson one day, someone annoyed me a whole lot. I splashed my paint water on him. He complained. I got hauled up by the teacher.

She asks me why I did that. I said he annoyed me and was being an idiot. She asked and I distinctly remember “Do you have the urge to touch him?” and asked if I needed to be referred to a councilor.

I’ve never understood why pouring paint on someone could lead anyone to believe that I had the hots for the person until recently.

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Choice extracts from here

“In an effort to boost the city-state’s low birth rate, Singapore’s Ngee Ann Polytechnic has launched a government-backed course teaching students about flirting and relationships. Subjects include love song analysis, speed-dating and online chatting.

“My teacher said if a guy looks into my eyes for more than five seconds, it could mean that he is attracted to me and I stand a chance,” 18-year-old student Isabel Seet was quoted as saying by the local Straits Times newspaper.”

Now no wonder I was single all throughout high school! When I was told that staring incidents would lead to confrontations, I didn’t know that these were romantic confrontations that would lead to a hot rendezvous behind the school yard.

The other day, this total dish looked into my eyes for more than 5 seconds. I tried to flirt back but then I realised it was the dirt in my eye.

This is better:

Student Kamal Prakash told the Straits Times that while his relationship with his parents has improved since taking the course, he is still single.”

So this kid takes a course about romance and flirting and boosting the nation’s population and his relationship with his parents has improved. Gee, it sounds wrong on so many levels I don’t even WANT to talk about it.

Remember Peeps? The mashmallow chicks?

There’s this diorama contest featuring peeps and you should check out the winners.

I bought an Egg cookbook the other day because there’s always lots of eggs in the house (eggs are cheap anyway) and eggs are always good breakfast food.

So I tried out some of the stuff in there this weekend. First up, Eggs Ben.

The hardest part supposedly is to get the sauce to be of a thick enough consistency. The recipe called for white wine vinegar or lemon, none of which I had in my house BUT I did have malt vinegar so I used that. The black bits aren’t flies or morsels of the saucepan that I’ve managed to scrape off. They’re pepper bits that I had to add because the concoction was tasteless. Salt wasn’t mentioned in the recipe you see.

I like how the poached egg looks and it would have been perfectly runny if I didn’t get a 17 minute phone call in the midst of cooking. It would also have been perfect if I had ham or muffins in my house but well, if you squint real hard…

ANYWAY.

There is a cup of cream left in my fridge after my rather bad attempt at creme brulee some weeks back. So I made creme brulee again. Sort of. Creme would be more accurate.

I screwed up the last time by adding too much sugar (in my defense, what i was referencing called for more than what I added) and then overcooking it (because my oven doesn’t have temperature dials but rather numerical heat settings). But like the saying goes, two wrongs do make a right (I never paid much attention in school) and because there was too much sugar and heat, I didn’t have to go through the whole blowtorch ritual to get the top layer burnt.

Today’s dessert was much more palatable but I couldn’t get the top to burn through numerous creative methods that people without blowtorches and other pyrotechnics would resort to. That’s after I kept my oven so I couldn’t try to caramelize the sugar by subjecting it to the grill.

All I want for my birthday’s a flamethrower. That’d solve the problem.

I drank some water

And then I drank more water

My bladder is full.

The postman delivered a box of stuff the other day and for that, I’m very appreciative of the fine people at Qu-Ax unicycles.

You see, after getting this shop to ship in some 29″ unicycles, I realised that the cranks that came with them are much much too long. The shop can’t get shorter cranks shipped in because there’s a minimum order requirement and cranks don’t cost anywhere near the thousands. The next alternative would be to get them via online merchants and this particular one had no stock of them at that point in time.

I wrote Qu-Ax explaining our predicament and asking if we could get some shipped in through them instead.

I got a package the very next week. It contained cranks -

The one at the top was what the stock unicycles came with (170mm). The middle one is a 125mm crank while the bottom’s a 114. The difference between the 125s and 114s is negligible really but compared to the 170s, the speed difference is phenomenal.

Apart from cranks, we also got…

A cap and jersey each! The tees came in two Ls and an M - I took the M and my male friends are going to have the Ls. I’m quite touched by the gesture and the thoughtfulness of the person behind this (an Egon Becker responded to my emails) because I don’t believe I mentioned our gender in any of the emails.

I’m now hugely impressed by the customer service at Qu-Ax and it’s not even because of the freebies.  It’s been so awfully difficult to get any unicycle parts to Singapore and I’d have been eternally grateful just for them to entertain our shipping request.

To all you pervs out there, yes I am wrong.

Annabelle Chong no longer holds the world record for having sex with the most men at once.

GEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEZ.

So the sponsorship deal fell through. Again.

It went around in circles. First, the extreme and adventure sports division told me that we were a traditional sport. Then our application was passed on to the youth division which passed our application back to the extreme and adventure sports department which told me that we’re being considered as an adventure sport. And I just received an email stating that unicycling’s not identified as a key extreme sport.

It’s worth noting how we’ve been classified as traditional, adventure and an extreme sport at different points in time but never all three at once.

I’m racking my brains out, bleeding my head dry of ideas on how to get funding. I’m thinking of targeting a few segments just for irony. Since Singapore’s such an uptight country, it’d be REALLY AWESOME if we could get some porn website to fund our trip. We’d be perfect ambassadors because really, I know a lot of random trivia about porn and a Singaporean (that’s right, my country!) holds the world record for having sex with the most men at once. We ARE reputable in that respect (irony unintended).

So yes, that’s what we should do.

To be continued…

This is going to sound very dumb.

I’ve this phone. It’s kinda cool. So I opened the back and saw that it had something in its SIM card slot right? And i wanted to put my SIM card in so I tried to pry it out thinking it was a dummy SIM card that new phones have.

I pried.

And I pried.

And I pried.

I read the manuals and everything and gave up after 30 minutes. Then I turned on the phone and realised that that thing slotted in there was an actual working SIM card.

Hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah hell yeah.

Wha..?

Oh right. The Apple Store is being updated. I hope the iMacs are going to be upgraded. My laptop is dying.

 This would make a thoroughly lousy engagement ring (or a great one depending on your uh, interests). If you decide to cheat on your future wife, being smacked with the horns dug deep in your flesh has got to hurt. Heck, you could probably rip an eye out with this thing.

Which kinda makes it really cool doesn’t it?

Desperate Housewives has very sharp, clever scriptwriting.

I wish I could write well.

 The batch of 29″ unicycles finally arrived and I got mine today. It’s really hard to explain why it’s more tiring to be riding a unicycle with a smaller wheel over a distance so this pic ought to make it clearer.

The pink one has a 20″ wheel and the black one has a 29″ wheel. Pedalling a full cycle on a unicycle moves you the same distance as the diameter of the wheel.

I rode about 15km today on the new uni. It’s a rather lousy idea to take a new unicycle on a distance ride right off because the seat’s unseasoned and it takes some time to get used to the crank size/wheel ratio. I’ve used my pink uni on almost everything and even on rides twice the distance of today, my butt and insides of my thighs have not felt anywhere close to being this sore.

The weight distribution was easy to get used to - I didn’t have a problem getting up on it and even on back-pedals, recovery and changes in direction was rather easy. What was unexpected to though, was how handling changes drastically in windy conditions. I’ve never felt wind resistance so severe before. When cycling along a coastal stretch where the wind was blowing from the sea, the only way to move in a straight path was to cycle and aim to head 45 degrees away. More than once, I just plain lost balance and fell off.

Over the next few weeks, I think I should get shorter cranks and change the seat before I develop callouses on my butt.

A little update on the unicycling situation.

Interestingly enough, SSC called again 2 days ago and I’m told that we’re now back in the ‘pending consideration’ loop. And whoohoo! We’re now officially an ‘Adventure Sport’.

If we do get the funding though, it seems likely that the support person in the team will not be funded despite the fact that food and accomodation are provided for by the race organizers and all that’s required is little more than airfare.

We’ll see how that goes.