Achy Breaky Feet

My feet ache.

I know enough about human anatomy to say this with some authority: feet were not made to ache. They’re meant to move their body from point A to point B. Without them efficient ambulation would probably take the form of rolling, akin to that favoured by a certain blue hedgehog.

Mind you, your feet can be used to make other people ache. But if that were their primary role then I’m sure they’d have, by now, evolved to look like little chinamen with ponytails, themselves with feet like little chinamen with ponytails and so on unto infinity. Being kicked by that would probably be like being toe-fucked by a ginormous millipede with severe consequences for the fabric of spacetime. Or something like that.

But yes, my feet ache. All they do these days is ache. I can be sitting by my pool with a cold lychee martini in hand and all they bloody do is ache. While the rest of my body’s basking in the warm, cancer-causing rays and savouring a beverage that is best described as liquid happiness and all my feet do is tie themselves up in the basement, make lots of noise and shit themeselves. Just like my in-laws.

(Yeah, bloody in-laws. I don’t even know how they managed to lock themselves in there, and from the outside too. Life’s full of mysteries, innit? -inno-)

Maybe they’re doing this to blackmail me. Give us stuff and we’ll stop hurting. And don’t even think of severing our nerves, we know what you and Mr Right Hand do together in your spare time. We have pictures.

Goddamn extortionists. Now if you see me walking around Orchard with red toe-nails and in a pair of pink bunny slippers, you’ll know why.

My feet ache. Maybe I’ve been dancing too much. Maybe this pervasive, invasive aching is their idea of a protest, a protest that starts with the aching, moves on to cramps, breaks out the blisters before finally resulting in them seceding from the mainland.

Yeah I’d like to see those punks try that. Mr Leftie and Mr Rightie are still under my dominion and as far as I know toes aren’t very good at manipulating circular saws.

My feet ache. I’m a frail, flawed human being. I might have to cut down on the dancing, the hiking, the running around school with a hockey stick yelling unintelligibly at chinamen.

Or maybe I should just get new feet. Wanna donate?

-Marc
“…we leave tonight or live and die this way”

Tears, bitter and sweet.

Today was Rag and Flag Day ‘07 and Science Faculty kicked some major ass. I’ll let this photo do the talking:

In total, Science Fac won:

• Gold Award (Flag)
• OSA Creativity Award (Float)
• Best Float Design
• Best Float Presentation
• Best Coin Collection (Flag)

Such a strong showing hasn’t been seen for a while and from my perch up the ladder I could see usually hard-bitten seniors, graduated alumni and even our dean turn red-eyed and sniffly-nosed as these results were announced. I’m not a big fan of tears, per se, but it’s always a moving sight to see the emotions that are so passionately entwined and deeply ingrained with the ragging project come bubbling to the surface at it’s ultimate (and this time, fruitful) conclusion. Good people have worked very hard for Science to win these trophy shields and I daresay that these awards are richly deserved.

These awards belong to all of you Science Raggers and Flaggers, even if all you’ve done to help was to mache some paper tiles or run around in public with a can like some kind of crazed beggar or come down to shout your hearts out today. The spirit of Science Fac was tangible and electrifying at the padang today and I’m sure that each and every one of you present there felt it too; I saw it in your eyes, heard it in your voices and felt it as the ground trembled beneath our feet as we did the adigi adigi ah-o-ah. The sun might have been mercilessly hot but I felt nothing except cold shivers up my spine each and every time we started cheering. Hell, you bastards gave me goosebumps large enough to be mistaken for some kind of exotic skin disease.

That covers the ’sweet’ part of the title. The ‘bitter’ part was that Business walked away with the Chancellor’s Shield again this year. We don’t know exactly how they managed to do this since none of the exact scores have yet been released but I’ve already heard rumblings that it’s due to their superior Flag score, which makes up 60% of the total score that determines who wins the Chancellor’s Shield. The Rag float and performance account for the other 40% and since we pretty much swept all the important awards in that category and since Business’ float looked like an ambulatory pile of excreta (sorry Kevin) and won no awards at all, it’s probable that Business must have outdone us in Flag.

This is not to say that the Flag comm didn’t do a spectacular job this year. In fact, I believe they’ve worked miracles, especially considering the unforseen disaster that befell them in the earlier part of the academic year. It’s all too easy to start finger pointing, but Rag and Flag have to work hand-in-hand if we are to win the Chancellor’s Shield next year. Any ‘you’ve let us down!’ mentality will only serve to drive a wedge between both projects and keep that Shield with Business.

So please don’t point blame at anyone. We’re not even sure how much they beat us by in Flag or if there wasn’t some other penalty incurred that pulled down our overall score. I’m sure everyone’s tried their best this year and hey, we did walk away with at least twice the number of awards of any other faculty. Hell, if we keep the spirit as high as it is now and work just a bit harder next year, NUSSU might as well just bind all the shields together into one package and hand it over to us at the start of Rag and Flag day to save time.

The week, in digest.

Heh heh, first update in a long long while so it’s going to be a doozy. -scuffles feet sheepishly-

First of all, a very happy birthday to Nicole and her friend Gordon. Dear Sotong-Ball-Nicole, we miss you very much over at En-Motion.. hope your scholarship at LADC is everything you wanted and more and takes you even higher as a dancer. And sorry about the almost-music-less birthday dance yesterday, yeah? Your laptop speakers really had no kick, but you still danced beautifully anyway :)

Speaking of which, I had the pleasure of giving two interesting ladies a lift home from Nic’s birthday party at Costa Sands. Turns out they’re Nic’s schoolmates from her St.Nick days… and they happen to be Warhammer 40,000 RTS nuts! One favours the Imperial Guard and the other the Tau… will wonders never cease?

Shouts out to my freshies from scamp. You guys made the experience a great one for me, what with your bubbly enthusiasm and all. Let’s keep meeting up for more Athos-outings, yeah? :) And don’t forget the bidding workshop that Eugene and I are conducting on monday!

The last week has been completely crazy. I don’t think i’ve had more than 4 hours of sleep a night! Been juggling massive amounts of tuition (my 2 Sec 4 classes are now running twice a week each), helping out in Rag, taking part in the Science Ori Week (SOW) prep camp and doing general admin for Dinner and Dance (DnD).

DnD was particularly draining: Thurs-Fri-Sat were the haircheck and clothes-fitting sessions for the contestants… Reds saloon at Clarke Quay did a fantastic job with the hair IMO, but they had to see us before noon.. which meant getting there by 10.. which meant waking up at 9.. which meant that my long rag/work nights that have me sleeping at 5am are really gipping me of quality sleep =X

Plus I’ve spent at least $20 on parking in town these last 3 days. And the bloody exit ramp at Parco Bugis Junction ALWAYS scrapes the bottom of my car, even if i inch over it with NO other passengers inside -_-

My DnD contestants are such wonderfully warm people. A few are still kinda shy, but they all seem sincere, cheerful and good-natured and I hope they’ll warm up nicely as the next few weeks go by :) Contrary to popular belief, it does take a lot of guts to perform on stage in front of a crowd and a few of my contesties are understandably anxious about it. Chin up guys, walking up there for the first time can be really hard but once you’re up there and everyone’s clapping and cheering for you… the feeling is indescribable and you might not want to come back down! -grin-

Module discussions with Eugene 1 and Eugene 2 continue this evening. Will post here once we decide which mods we’ll be taking for the next sem.

Jane, I really do not envy your commute to-and-fro from home to school :P

Zara, if you’re reading this… betcha like my blog name, huh? ;)

If a Government does it, it can’t be piracy!

Wowee. Brazil has just decided that it doesn’t need to abide by copyright/intellectual property laws where live saving pharmaceuticals are concerned. Not the first on that particular bandwagon but the biggest country so far, that’s for sure.

To cut a long story short, Merck has developed a HIV drug called Efavirenz which Brazil thinks is too expensive to pay for (Brazil’s health ministry practically sponsors anti-virals to all sufferers). So, Brazil is going to get an Indian company to manufacture the drug generically for one third of Merck’s asking price. By doing so, the health ministry reports a rosy 236.8 billion US dollars in savings (out of THEIR budget, mind you, not directly out of the pockets of the afflicted) by 2010.

This is a complicated situation because it’s so morally ambiguous. Thailand is another country that has invoked the terms of the WTO in this way - that a country’s government can manufacture any patented drug ‘deemed critical to public health’ - and yes almost anyone would have to agree that AIDS is a pretty big public health problem.

But Efavirenz is hardly a miracle drug. It’s merely a reverse-transcriptase inhibitor that some strains of HIV are already resistant to. It doesn’t even cure HIV; it only slows it down when taken in the early stages of the disease. Brazil’s actions over this drug today may doom the HIV-positive people of the world tomorrow, for why would any drug company wish to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to develop any more drugs under full knowledge that their creations could just be taken away from them? Bear in mind that these companies are generally controlled by shareholders and shareholders demand returns. Reducing the price of their drugs to cost once the R&D losses have been recouped just won’t cut it; besides keeping the shareholders happy, where would the funding for the next round of drug development come from then?

While an ideal world would have personal or corporate profit completely seperate from health-care in general, this world is far from ideal to begin with. Removing any chance for human greed to drive the various chemists, toxicologists, pharmacists and biologists.. hell even the doctors and surgeons involved with health-care in general would probably lead to a decline in quality and service.

I strongly believe that if governments around the world began to listen to bleeding-heart lobbyists who claim that ‘Big Pharmacy’ is already making too much money off the misery of their customers, well then scientific progress in this field would just grind to a halt. I’m not idealistic enough to believe that even a majority of pharceutical researchers are in the industry for the good of mankind over their own wallets.

As for people who cannot afford the cures.. well, tough luck. Everyone has to die someday. I think it’s pretty sad when any tom, dick or harry truly believes that the state has an obligation to keep them alive just that much longer… and even worse when the state reinforces that line of thinking with shortsighted action like this.

It was a dark and stormy night…

Flying scrotum-monkeys and assorted winged vermin soared (or flip-flopped) through the air above the decidedly ramshackle little hut that stood alone in the field behind the decidedly ramshackle huge mansion that bore the neon logo of the National Inebriated Creative Writing Society.

An electric fault some years ago had left the ‘Creative’ part of the sign sparking on and off like a firefly which had just ingested its body-weight in white happy-happy powder. Incidentally, this was first viewed as a terrible portent from the Prose Gods by the more soberly religious in the society. That is, until some young wit pointed out that the loss of the word has hardly a loss at all, per se, given the viewpoint that once a piece of ‘work’ becomes unrecognisable as work it automatically has to be creative in nature. just like modern art and paintings made by elephants in zoos. Thus the Society’s elders cheerfully decided that the almighty Prose Gods intended for them to focus on vicarously achieving creativity through inebriation. The accountants at the local brewers were reportedly very supportive of this new philosophy.

But we digress.

A jagged bolt of lightning, universally regarded as a powerful Literary Tool of the Prose Gods, struck the 10 storey tall antenna above the little hut, killing a covey of scrotum-monkeys and causing hot balls (hur) of fire to rain onto the field in the process. Cerulean arcs raced down the antenna’s length at the speed of write, finding a conducively conductive copper cable at the base that guided the current to pierce through the insulated roof and into the gloom below.

Gears whirled. Sparks arced. A monster stirred. A madman laughed, then choked on his dentures.

(to be continued sometime, was supposed to describe how this blog was created. It’s a monster. Sort of. The bastard offspring produced betwixt my fetid imagination and the crazy, crazy world out there.)