London!

I went to the UK when I was 16. We spent almost a week in London and visited many interesting places too. We went to the Natural History Museum and saw this dinosaur exhibition. There was this dinosaur which was tall and had such short hands; it could have never enjoyed KFC if it had lived till today because it could not lick its fingers.
Then we went to Hyde Park, which is HUUUUUUGEEE! There were many trees, squirrels, flowers and a nice big pond. So much beautiful nature in a big city.
Next we hopped onto one of those famous red double-deckers and toured the city. Passing most of the places you see on the monopoly board like Piccadilly, Park Lane, Mayfair, Leicester Square, and many, many more! It was exciting to me as when I played the game, I never thought that such places existed!
We also went to Harrods, the departmental store owned by Mohamed Al-Fayed. On the surface, it was a posh shopping centre with ridiculously priced items. But I watched a documentary once called “Harrods’ Secrets” Wow! There were so many other interesting things other than the bombastic numbers on the price tags. It seems that the Sphinx and other sculptures that decorates the Harrods’ interiors are models of Mohamed Al-Fayed’s face. There is also a pillar with his children’s handprints mould into it. There are still old fashioned toilets in Harrods from the when it was first built and they keep an eagle on the roof top to scare pigeons away.
London is a beautiful place to visit. There are so many things to discover. Maybe I can write a piece on London to help those people who cannot afford to fly there, to enjoy London from the comfort of home. I could highlight only the major attractions there so that it would be a more intriguing read.

Music Videos Killed My Beauty Sleep.

I have been spending so many sleepless nights watching music videos on Yahoo! Launch.
Music videos play a big part in making the music work to me. Some songs are just, not much of a humdinger without these excellent videos enhancing them. In other instances, if the band just can’t sing or make music, all they need are a few drop dead gorgeous members for silly little teenage girls or slobbery men to swoon at them. With these eye candies, anything would be music to the ears, or perhaps these people are deafened by beauty.

Music videos also gives FSV graduates like me dreams. I never knew what I wanted to do after my O'levels. Then one day when I was watching Joe Hahn from Linkin Park doing his stuff on the turntable, I thought, "I wanna be just like him!" Then suddenly, the song titles came on, with the band name, composer and director of the video's name displayed below it. WhenI saw the name Joe Hahn, I thought, "That could be my name! I just have to have dreams and work my way to it!"

So back to staying up with Music Videos as my drug, I started wondering, who was the genius who thought, “Oh, what if I put the music on a video, so people can listen to music and watch their favourite artists at the same time?” I’d like to find out more about this person. It would be interesting to know what drove this person to do such a thing. Who was the first artist to have a music video and what was the video about, how it differs from the music videos we have today?

My, won’t this be a fun thing to research about.

An MC A Day Keeps The Doctors Paid.

I had to be absent from certain classes this week due to events happening at home. First, my parents were moving and therefore I had to go back to my hometown to help them. Next, I have to skip one class to attend a family member’s wedding ceremony.
These events may seem unimportant to some people, but to a very traditional and family-oriented grandmother like mine, missing such events would consider you being not filial and disrespectful. So because I just cannot miss these family events, I had to miss a few classes.
I spoke to my advisor about my reason for not coming to class and I was told that unless I am sick with a Medical Certificate, I have no valid reason to skip school. In my opinion if that’s the case, then a Medical Certificate should not even be a valid reason to miss school unless you are admitted in the hospital.
This is because some people are not even sick and they go to polyclinics to “buy” MCs so they can skip school. This maybe wrong, but it happens. So if an MC is a “valid” excuse to miss school, I feel that some other reasons should also be accepted like major family events and other personal issues that make it really inconvenient for a student to go to school.
Sometimes things just happen and we just can’t go to school. Not every student can afford to go out and buy an MC so it would be very unfair for them to be blacklisted for their misfortune.
So, MCs should not be the only reason to miss class.
Why can’t other reasons be accepted?
Maybe the school’s policies on absenteeism should be revised.
What brought them to this conclusion in the first place?
Why are they so harsh about it and wont give any allowance?

Thy lecturer shalt always be, aye? Nay!

Just last week, a classmate of mine, X, did not bring his textbook to a certain tutorial. He was then asked to write his name and leave the classroom. I feel that what the lecturer has done is wrong. She said that the textbook was essential in this tutorial (but we barely looked at it), and it was her ground rule that if you do not bring the textbook, you cannot attend the class. This is very unfair in my opinion. It has not only hurt X’s self-esteem to be shamed like that in front of the whole class, but it is a very childish punishment that should be bestowed upon a primary school child, not a polytechnic student.
We pay a great deal amount of school fees to be schooled here and I feel that missing a class is wasting our parents’ money. X did not bring his book but had a valid excuse. His excuse, however, was not taken into consideration. It was also only the second tutorial, so a warning should suffice, and action should only be taken the second time round.
In fact, I believe polytechnic students should not even be punished for mistakes such as this one. We should be treated like grown ups that are responsible for our own action. If a student should choose not to pay attention in class, a lecturer should not reprimand him/her because as a young adult, the student is responsible of his/her own action. The student can choose to waste his/her parents money by paying fees but not bothering to learn and that is entirely his/her own business. I may be contradicting what I said in the paragraph above about wasting our parents money but the student can choose to waste his/her parents money. A lecturer should never be responsible for wasting parent's money, because parents pay fees to pay the school to pay lecturers! At the end of the day, you can fail the student for poor results but the student should never be sent away and marked absent for something as minor as forgetting a textbook. The lecturer should only take action if the student who is not paying attention is disrupting the class causing commotions. If the student is just seated alone not affecting the class, he should be left alone as it is the student’s choice not to learn. In the end of the day, s/he will suffer the consequences.
So after babbling on so much, what am I getting on to?
I only want to know, what exactly are lecturers thinking?
Some go as far as asking us to call them by their given names, instead of Mr.T or Mrs.P , chatting with us as if they are our peers, making friends with us. Others are so strict, showing us they are seemingly a class higher than us student. I find that for today’s society, the I-Lecturer You-Student mentality is all wrong and not working anymore. Students do not necessarily, respect lecturers who have this kind of mentality. Students learn better and respect lecturers much more when lecturers put themselves at our level to understand us.
Lecturers should threat students in tertiary education like young adults instead of primary school children.
Lecturers should show respect to their students first if they expect the student to respect them.
Students are much more willing to respect and learn from a lecturer who approaches them as a lecturer-friend rather than a lecturer-superior.
These are possible thesis statements, right?
Or am I going to be expelled for writing this?

Are You A Slave to Fashion?

Today, I was brainstorming with my IAC classmates. We had some pretty interesting ideas, but there’s one particular idea I wanted to steal. Then we decided to use that idea. So I’m thinking that, if I use this topic for my thesis, I wouldn’t have to do as much research on my own. But will this be unfair to my group members? Maybe if I have their permission to use some of our research materials, then it won’t be a wrong thing to do, right? I hope so.
Anyway, the topic is fashion. Yeah, the statement should go something like: Are teenagers slave to trends?
I could cover sub-topics like; how the fashion world evolved, what influences a teenager’s dressing, how much a teenager spends buying clothes on average per month, so on and so forth.
This would definitely be something I would enjoy writing about and if I write it good enough, people would definitely want to read it even if they aren’t the most fashionable person around.. This is merely because we are all slaves to fashion. Everyone wants to look good, whether they admit it or not. The world is vain.
Hmmm…..

Smells Like Human B.O.

Some time ago, I did a piece of descriptive writing entitled “Perfume”. Since I said descriptive writing, you’d get the idea that it is hardly a factual essay. So you’d be expecting a story about a girl getting a bottle of perfume from her boyfriend, or how a little boy misses the smell of his dead mummy’s perfume. But actually, my essay wasn’t on “perfume” at all. Okay, it is some form of scent, but you’d hardly call it “perfume”.
Right, so my story was about body odour. Yeah, body odour. “Yuck”, you say?
Actually, I keep hearing that, humans are attracted to other humans first and foremost by their scents, but it is unconscious to the mind.
I think that this is a really interesting discovery. I mean, who would have thought we civilized homo-sapiens, would ever be attracted to natural scents emitted by the human body. In my opinion, any form of scent emitting from the human body, if it isn’t fart, it is body odour. Eek! We humans are attracted to B.O.! Gets me feeling like an ape.
So let’s go back to my story. It was about this girl who was attracted to her boyfriend’s scent, not cologne, mind you. When they broke up, she was devastated and she smelled that scent everywhere. It was driving her to the brink of insanity. She killed herself in the end.
If this is my thesis topic, I would like to find out, just how true this theory about the human scent is, and would my story ever come true, though I hope it wouldn’t. But there are so many possibilities in life.

Bite Me!

Okay, this should be a wee bit more serious...
I have always had this fascination about vampires. I don’t quite know why, but I’m really drawn to them. I was thinking about writing a piece on them, but what am I supposed to write about? The whole vampire scope is far too wide and there aren’t many reliable sources about them. This is because they are supposed to be “supernatural” and therefore have no hard facts to support this topic, scientifically. So “facts” about vampires are usually handed down from generations to generations since the beginning of time from grandparents to children just to get them peeing in their pants at night because they have been “naughty” or “disobedient”.

People from different countries and cultures might have their own definition of what makes a vampire. For instance, a Chinese vampire is usually the one you see in dynasty dramas. They are those pale faced human looking “thing” wearing court clothes with the Chinese hat and a feather stuck in it, hopping around landing on both legs with their hands held out parallel to the ground in front of them. They suck blood, like what almost everyone expects vampires to do but they are relatively easy to stop. Just stick a talisman on their forehead and they would stop like an Energizer Bunny with zero amount of energy left. But let us not be fooled. Like how Chinese humans have traded in Chinese traditional costumes for Western get ups like trench coats ala the Matrix and jeans, our Chinese vampires have also evolved and westernized. Now they look like western vampires. They wear trench coats ala the Matrix and jeans.

Now, just how do Western vampires look like? Well... I'm not quite sure. I used to think they were all porcelain skinned, all beautiful and mesmerizing like in Queen of The Damned or Interview With The Vampire, until I saw Nosferatu. I had to really rething alot about how much I liked vampires after i watched Nosferatu.

Vampires, nice. This could be a great topic. So I shouldn't blabber on too much here and go do some research about them. Hopefully, I'll get to do my thesis on them... YAY! I could write about all the different species of vampires from all the different cultures. Cool....

LifeStyle of the Rich and Famous... Maybe We Should Rob Them.

So we were told in the first day of class that we had to get this "Idea Journal" for class. Either write it in a plain boring "so yesterday" paperback book or we can, WOW, blog it! (So in!) Lecturers are so cool these days, huh? And school is making us so Tech savvy. Wow... amazing stuff. So anyway, this journal is supposed to help us get ideas for some thesis we have to write, interesting... We can do any topic we want... Interesting...
So then I was paying full attention to my lecturer, trying to make up for being late.

"Hmm..." I thought, "Maybe I should do one about tardiness among Poly students..."

Then again, could there be a topic more boring than that? I don't think so.
So I put on my thinking cap again.

"Maybe I could write a piece about a hamster my boyfriend gave to me..."

Oh, such a bad idea because then I would have to do a research, like what they did for Finding Nemo. No, I don't have to go diving, but I do have to go find a boyfriend and make him buy me a hamster. So no, too much trouble.

So I think I'm going to write about Bon Jovi, because they ROCK!
But suddenly, I hear Mr.Wong's voice echoing in my ears... "Go away..... Go away...."
Eerie...

I guess for now, I'd like to write about Rock Culture. Write about rockstars like Bon Jovi, Aerosmith, Rolling Stones, etc. I could write about their lifestyles. Are their lives really as cool as it seems? What are the things they go through? How did they get where they are today?
Yeah, I guess that's a thought.