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Showing posts from November, 2010

Of birds and bees

No, not those birds and bees but the PSLE birds and bees. After the Science paper (last paper), the boy happily told me, 'There were no bird beak questions'. I know bird beak questions (beak type - eating habits relationship) are easy for many kids but they are not among the boy's strengths. I also know this kind of 'academic weakness' can be addressed by a good diet of Animal Planet and some amount of drilling. However, for various reasons, we never got round to them. Tsk, tsk, lackadaisical parents. Is this bird carnivorous, herbivorous or omnivorous? Then came the news about the 'bees' cloze passage which, understandably I suppose, caused some to be up in arms, but which I just put down to being one of those things in life that you can't do much about. Don't blame me... For six years, I have known that our attitude towards academic performance is not quite so conventional but I think we have done what we wanted to do: have the boy go through...

Heroine steps out

One can only imagine the mood in Myanmar. I have lost touch with the few Myanmar nationals I knew in the past so I have no chance to ask them anything. Check out these BBC pictures . Isn't it interesting that the BBC still calls Yangon 'Rangoon'?

Now watching: unusual idol drama!

Warning: spoilers ahead It is not often that I watch non-TVB Chinese drama but I find myself following what I thought was a mainland serial, Infernal Lover . I thought it was weird that an idol drama guy (Mike He) was in a show with a largely mainland Chinese cast. I found out later that the show was by a Taiwanese and planned as an idol drama! Clever idea, I thought, idol drama in a historical setting (Republican period). In what sounds like quite a story in itself, due to problems with the original female lead and other stuff, they had to re-cast the cast, re-do parts of the story and re-film some of the scenes. And so it looks like what it does now. (Doesn't the other male lead look like Sammul Chan?) As with Royal Embroidery Workshop , I was fascinated by the (female) costumes and sets, and, really, not by the acting. I find mainland acting rather stage-y and staged. Mike He's style is so different. Plus, he had this modern floppy hair look while all the other (forgettabl...