FIFA World Cup and miscellanies

FIFA World Cup

Adopting a team
At first I thought I could display a German flag as I write this. Since there’s only THIRTY-TWO teams playing in each World Cup every four year, many of the world’s inhabitants are not lucky enough to have a team and unsurprisingly adopt a team. Although I weep at Germany’s loss, I am still happy that my adopted team could still get a humble third place unlike most of my friends’ adopted England which lost to Germany.  But I don’t 100%appreciate the decline of World Cup-related statuses since English team was defeated. That wasn’t too much of an unexpected thing as time is needed for those England fan friends of mine to recover.

Predictions
May I express my jealousy at the amazing predictions of Paul the octopus? The reasons should be obvious. The question is rhetorical – in case it is unnoticed. Lastly, if I hypothetically come to possess a octopus I wonder how I can convince others that it is NOT a pet.

Border Patrol

I am talking about the TV programme about how Australian Customs protect the airports and the territorial waters. Obviously Australia is a country without land borders and “land” element is always lacking.

So, I have come up with two ideas: (1) make the Tasmania independent and build a bridge across complete with toll gates manned by officers; (2) (this one is more exciting) buy a piece of China right next to North Korea and make it a State of Australia – it will come with bonuses such a demilitarised zone, barbed wires, visiting UN officials, defectors, nuke test,…. You name it. These should make the programme far more interesting than air travellers – smugglers and those who cannot fill a form – getting into trouble.

Local affairs comment on Arrowtown

Firstly, let’s see the Arrowtown’s geographic location, http://maps.google.co.nz/maps?q=arrowtown&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=Arrowtown&gl=nz&ei=KEI4TLClGoLUtQPztIRT&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CB8Q8gEwAA , and what Wikipedia have to say about this tiny town,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrowtown

If you are accessing the internet from New Zealand these days, you would find ads with that orange bogeyman-like creature reminding that local elections are around the corner. After stumbling across Arrowtown which I noticed to be like the Kingdom of Far Far Away (from Shrek movies), I felt compelled to put forward some suggestions to Arrowtownites:

(1) Call your mayor as Lord Farquhar (2) adopt a stylised ‘A’ as the town logo (3) ban motor vehicles and make people travel in horse-drawn carriages (4) replace the bitumen roads with cobbled stone roads and (5) build a castle (charging the tourists an appropriate amount should raise funds for this)

fruity

Finally a week - hectic one - is over! :) An interesting addition to my ‘fruit’ repertoire. Here it is: a cubic watermelon. 

Google confirmed that there indeed are such watermelons, as a friend of mine said so. The cubic fruit still ‘wows’ me. I wonder what if every fruit comes in standardised sizes (much like sheets of paper or batteries) and shaped as cubes like this water melon. I reckon it would perhaps make my life easier when it comes to storing fruit and carrying them from supermarket to home. A cube obviously is less likely to ‘roll around and away from you’ than a boring old round(ish) fruit.

Lest we forget....

This aptly-worded phrase, or variant(s) - as we all know - concludes the ANZAC day dawn services, and is inscribed on Allied war memorials around the globe.  Yes, indeed we ought to always remember fallen troops whom we honour every ANZAC day, or Remembrance Sunday, or Veterans day.

Rather coincidentally, a friend of mine posted this youtube video of Akon's "Freedom". Source: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hW_3Nl2vVsA

While on the close inspection of the lyrics one can justifiably argue that the song is written from the point of view of a disenfranchised American, the images mostly from Africa glaringly tell everyone why they should always remember those we will honour tomorrow. Unfortunately yet factually, those images come from corners of the world  where despotic rule is as literally and figuratively endemic as poverty and warlords. If not for the soldiers who fought in the two World Wars against those who intended to dominate the world by their diktat,
we could had been wanting freedom the mentioned parts of the world do not have. 
Acknowlegdments
Picture of the Allied Memorial in Yangon, Myanmar, http://www.goldenpagodatravel.com/images/warcemetry1.jpg

Mang, K. - who posted the youtube link above on his facebook page.

http://www.metrolyrics.com/freedom-lyrics-akon.html

Revisting my flag proposal

This was the flag of the future I envisioned for New Zealand while  Hon. John Key was busy, doodling a silver fern.

Remembering that red ensign version of current New Zealand flag is recommended to fly on occasions of Maori significance, I realised my flag should reflect the Maori-Pakeha bicultural identity.

So, I suggest the koru becomes red or background of the koru becomes red. I am not in favour of flying red ensign on land since it is customary to fly one on private vessels. Hopefully, my suggestions and union jack in the canton would be sufficiently red for a historically bicultural New Zealand.

secular/religious holidays

In the Western world, these days there is a tendency to make almost everything Christian by history and tradition secular -and presumably "inclusive". Remembering a half-hearted coverage of this matter on TVNZ Breakfast a few days ago, it may be timely for this topic given Easter is this weekend.

Around Christmas and Easter, it is quite customary for the media to sandwich/pepper a few religious-themed articles and present the commercial side of those holidays from advertisements of specials to Santa Clause/Easter bunny decorations in colourful, attractive styles, while fuelling a low-level argument over whether the original religious baggage of the holiday should be dropped altogether or not.  Consciously or otherwise, many people also very unsurprisingly try to secularise the greetings such as "Happy Easter/Christmas" by replacing with ubiquitous "Holiday". In reference to this , a blogger who identifies himself as a Buddhist monk said, "...if you can't join others in their celebrations, even if the theology behind it does not correspond with yours, then I think you lack mudita." (Mudita is a Buddhist (Pali and Sanskrit: मुदित) word meaning rejoicing in others' joy.)

Although the author said it to make a point on a Christmas greeting, everyone, who opposes state observance of any religious holiday - be it Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Wesak or some other - on the grounds that s/he does not share the faith, should ponder on the above quote.

Happy Easter to my readers!

Acknowledgment:
http://sdhammika.blogspot.com/2008/12/happy-christmas.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mudita

A note from soliloquies..

Good Morning Everyone!

Well, whether you are here in morning or at night, I am here to tell you that I am much delighted to be invited as one of your authors for this particular blog. I have read through most of the posts on here and am overly confident that your current author has some marvellous skill in delivering opinion in a textual medium.

You're probably not going see my posts too often on here, as I have my own little journalling medium ( http://hdsoliloquies.blogspot.com/ ) , but nevertheless I always have access to contribute to any and every scope that his blog encompasses.

See you around

H

Places I deem lovely

Partly due to: tourism adverts, random wikipedia-searching on different places, and my flag collection, I have some places that in my terminology are simply "lovely". Allow me to become a travel guide book-ish for a moment.

ASEAN: My country of origin is a member of this regional bloc. The abbreviation sounds creative. I sincerely wish it will become like what EU has become. Its flag is well-suited to a common identity of the region.

Christmas Island and Cocos Islands: They are lovely for they are part of geographical Southeast Asia and thus potential members of ASEAN. Plus their flags are colourful and unconventional - what a great mix.

Guernsey: One of the channel islands. I don't know why specifically but it's my favorite amongst what are known as the Crown Dependencies.

United States: I used to imagine myself as a head of a diplomatic mission presenting credentials to the US president in Washington DC. (As noted in my earlier post, I think I should make this imagination realisable for "it's never too late to change".) Besides Miley Cyrus's "Party in the USA" is one of my favorite songs.

Cayman Islands: The name itself is cute and pleasant. Appearing to be very beachy, as of now I do agree with the opinion that these islands are the "paradise". I kind of wish I was even born there...

Change

At the start of this month, much to my relief I learned that reluctance to change is quite natural (hence understandable by a little extension and few assumptions). Coincidentally just a few weeks earlier, at least two of my ex-classmates noted "I haven't changed much". Naturally and not too surprisingly, I did retort that I never promised any change the way Barrack Obama did spectacularly.  However on a purely objective note, it needs to be said that they in fact were and still are equally guilty of the same reluctance in my humble opinions. 

Having said that, I guess I can stop worrying about not yet becoming close to what I "intended" to change (as part of an assignment) - it included blogging about the "progress" too. I hope I'll appear to attempt at least. Whether change is impossible, difficult, or something that you must appear to attempt, over time I have become more and more acceptable to the idea that "we are never too late to change". 

Ratings for the early days of an academic year in Dunedin

At the end of the mentioned period, I think ratings should be given on some highlights. The rating is on a scale of 1 - 10 with 10 being the best. Here we go...

O week - 4.3 Cancellation of the toga parade was bad idea, click on O week .....liquor.....and thoughts for further information on this matter. The events were average.
  
Kristov Vodka Cruiser - 8.9 for being a alcoholic beverage that taste nice and still being in my budget range for alcoholic beverages.

House parties so far - 9.5 Judging by photos afterwards on facebook, everyone seems to have enjoyed them. So, it's a well deserved rating for the hosts.(There was an individual rating 10 in the time frame.)

Classes in the first two weeks - 7.0 Delays in supposed all-in-one web-based portal is less than impressive. However, for "easing" us back to books, notes and not-too-easy to understand concepts after more than two months away from all of those redeemed this from an abysmal rating.

"New Pharmacist"(yearbook) - 8.2 Good choice of photos. Mostly well written. But while giving information on "weekenditis" is commendable it seems to me that there is a bigger problem with "weekdayitis" from  Monday 8.00am to Friday (whenever the day ends).

 

Colonial vestiges

Although the apparent need for a new New Zealand flag seems to have quietened for the moment, I think it is a good idea to examine our colonial vestiges.

In my brief encounter with New Zealand literature, the colonial past and wether or not we are living in "land that we cannot really call ours" has been explored. Yet, I still see a nation still deciding to complete the move away from that history. Thus, I deem the proposal of "deleting the Union Jack" from our supposedly conservative Prime Minister very ironic.

Doesn't all british-ensign-based flags including ours signify this vestigial connection to an empire that no longer exists/barely exists(if you count the British Overseas Territories)? Given our keeping left traffic directionality, and similarity to legal systems based on English common law(which in effect was exported by the same people who came up with it) amongst many other examples, is there a need to be ashamed of a minor one - the current flag?  

O week .....liquor.....and thoughts

  Today I bought tickets for the Oweek events and strings of thoughts flew past me...

As far as I could remember, O week in Dunedin, New Zealand has been associated of drunken antisocial behavior according the media at least. Last week or so, in a publication a columnist wrote how this O week is not sponsored by alcohol brands in a tone almost resembling a 'sigh' - perhaps a sigh hoping what O week used to be like won't occur again. I wish them a good luck in their expectation of "saintly" O week not sponsored by alcohol companies. I am also dismayed at the cancellation of Toga Parade. Come on! Toga Parade may be messy but it honestly is not at all chaotic and/or deadly unlike thingyans(songkran) I have seen.

Talking about alcohol, I googled "Myanmar Beer" recently after tasting whatever crappy cheap beer was in the keggs at NZAPS camp last Sunday. Surprising, I found this on a blog :"Myanmar – Junta aside Beer Myanmar is such an excellent brew that the country deserves to be listed". I would have to agree with what is said on the blog about Myanmar Beer having tasted it and known that it's better-tasting than Tui or Speights  or the  shitty beer in the keggs though it along with the latter cannot measure up to Carlsberg or Stella's almost perfectness.

Acknowledgement:

http://beerasia.blogspot.com/

Different kinds of Hook - ups/ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲအမ်ုဳိးမ်ဳိး

All hook-ups are fine. However I believe there should be some categories and subcategories of hook - ups according to nature of each hook up.

There are the conventional ones, which involve ONLY two partners making love. It doesn't matter if the partners are hetrosexual or LBGT. It remains conventional.

Hook - ups are to be deemed unconventional although still being perfectly acceptable when

(1) one or both partners are  intersexed or undergoing gender reassignment

(2)one or both partners passes out during a mutually consensual hook -up (but NOT before a mutually consensual hook-up is clearly established)

(3)This is a difficult one to explain. Allow me to exemplify : person A hooks up with B who is making love with C. And C is also a partner of A as well as B at the same time. (Yes, it's also unconventionally complicated.)

Hope your hook -ups are mutually consensual and fun - whether conventional or unconventional.



ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲအားလုံးသည္ မွားယြင္းၿခင္းမရွိ။ သုိ႕ေသာ္ ခ်စ္သူစုံတြဲမ်ားကုိ ေအာက္ပါ အတုိင္း ခြဲၿခားရန္ အဆုိျပဳလုိသည္။

ခ်စ္သူႏွစ္ဦးတည္းသာ စုံမက္ျခင္းသည္ သမာရုိးက်စုံတြဲမ်ုဳိး ျဖစ္ေလသည္။ ထုိသမီးရည္းစားျဖစ္သူ ႏွစ္ဦးမွာ လိင္တူသည္ျဖစ္ေစ၊ ဆန္႕က်င္ဖက္လိင္မ်ားျဖစ္ေစ သမာရုိးက်ျဖစ္ျခင္းကုိ မထိခုိက္ပါ။

သမာရုိးမဟုတ္ေသာ ရည္းစားမ်ားျဖစ္ရန္ ေအာက္ပါ အခ်က္တခု နွင့္ ကုိက္ညီရန္လုိသည္။ သမာရုိးက်မဟုတ္ျခင္းက လက္ခံဖြယ္ရွိျခင္းကုိ မပ်က္ျပယ္ေစပါ။

၁။ တစ္ဦး(သုိ႕)နွစ္ဦးလုံးသည္ လိင္အဂၤါနွစ္မ်ဳိးလုံးပါရွိျခင္း သုိ႕မဟုတ္ လိင္ေျပာင္းလဲျခင္းကုသမႈကုိခံယူေနျခင္း။

၂။ နွစ္သက္သူ(၂)ဦး အျပန္အလွန္သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ရရွိျပီး ဆက္ဆံမႈျပဳေနခုိက္ တစ္ဦး(သုိ႕)နွစ္ဦးလုံးသည္ (အရက္မူး၍)သတိမဲ့သြားျခင္း။ (သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ကုိရရွိျပီး ဆက္ဆံမႈမျပဳမီ ဤအခ်င္းအရာျဖစ္က အက်ဳံးမ၀င္။)

၃။ ဤအခ်က္မွာ ရွင္းျပရန္ခက္ခဲ၍ သာဓကျပရန္လုိ၏။ A သည္ B ၏ခ်စ္သူျဖစ္ရုံမက Cနွင့္လည္းတြဲေနျခင္း၊ ထုိနည္းတူ Bနွင့္Cတုိ႔မွာလည္း တျပဳိင္နက္ စုံတြဲျဖစ္ေနျခင္း။ (ထုိသုိ႕ ျဖစ္က သမာရုိးက်မဟုတ္သည့္အျပင္ ရႈပ္ေထြးလြန္းလွသည္။)

သမာရုိးက်ဟုတ္္္္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ မဟုတ္သည္ျဖစ္ေစ ခ်စ္သူစုံတဲြတုိင္း အျပန္အလွန္သေဘာတူညီခ်က္ရရွိျပီး ေပ်ာ္ရႊင္ႏုိိင္ပါေစ။

New flag for NZ

Prompted by a friend and disappointed by the John Key's proposal of what might be a new flag of  New Zealand, I designed this.

The koru instead of the southern cross would make it different from the Australian flag. I don't see any problem with Union Jack being the canton on New Zealand's flag given we have used it for many years (since 1869 to be exact). Besides Australia, Fiji, and Tuvalu - which are all unambiguiously independent nations - still use blue ensign-based flag.

Of course, the other ensigns would need to be changed should a new flag is adopted.

Acknowledgements:

http://www.pl.net/pics/notices/koru.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Ensign

Waitangi day, Flags, Identity, etc....

Flags.... ah a topic very dear to me.  While a "new" flag is to fly besides the national flag on Waitangi day, on Thursday 4 February NZ herald ran this editorial Editorial: Flag change need not cause rancour , which prompted me to updating this blog.

True that NZ flag is not unique but I, while agreeing with the editor's title, would say big 'no' to removing the union jack from the flag. Being of Anglo - Burmese descent, the union jacks of blue, red, and white ensigns almost reflect me in a few ways. In short, it is a piece of Kiwi identity in the NZ flag I can eagerly share.

Have a look at a large number of these http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Flags_based_on_British_ensigns.

Turning to my Burmese side, flags used in Burma throughout time had never been a perfect match to my heart's desires and doubt if one would become so in the foreseeable future. A link again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_of_Burma .

Finally out of irritations about many many things, I sometime wonder this. If I could get hold of a nicely - coloured distinctive flag , perhaps I could carve out a micronation of my own or more feasibly boost and advertise my outbursts of ego from time to time. How? - of course by flying a flag from the rooftop of   my abode in "scarfieville" .

Views.... Opinions

A friend of mine on facebook claimed to be very opinionated. Having been "opinionated" to the point of having to manage the anxiety of seeing people who oppose what you think with equally strong ferver, I question the logicality of being "an open book". Many people I know of readily recognise my desire to be a more of a mysterious figure.

Even though shrouding in mystery is not recommended by anyone who "counseled" me, it is a stone that surely kills two birds at the same time. One: being mysterious makes u intriguing - a big plus for anyone who enjoy spotlight. Two: It cuts out arguments which inevitably follow once you let others know that you are opinionated and are not going change those no matter how close they are to you. 

a little thought on the occult

An old relic of the past? When it comes to "occult practices", it has become almost invariable true in most part of the world - even including Burma/Myanmar where superstition is said to be rampant. Let me admit that I am also no stranger to such stuff as well as displaying what might be  called a casual belief in that. Learning that those 'charms' which are intended to bring money, health and other goodies are just as effective when syncretised with Catholicism rather than as with Buddhism as most Burmese Buddhists I know tend to do, I have searched for charms to fatten my bank account - of course by googling.

The most interesting thing that I found must be.... "St Expdite". Said to be powerful in bringing about urgent results. Since i have decided to offer candles in the manner described in the articles I found, it seems that my auctions have become a bit more attractive to potential buyers. But, desired results are yet to come by......

Maybe such supernatural forces exist or maybe not.... For now, I need to light more candles...

Why blog?

Truth be told, I don't really have any strong reasons for this. But still I am too often so opinionated. Perhaps that's going to the most important function of my blog.... About the title of the blog...I'll eventually prove that blogger is cute.

Is it a "late start" to blog? The answer to this again appear to be a question as well - when should have I started?

Well, anyway it is only a "test post".... hoping it works!