Surfing Youtube (So You Don't Have To): Part 2

This guy is not half bad:

I think he's come up with all the lyrics by himself! And the cat is a must have!

If you youtube 'Goldentusk' you can check out his other videos where he basically sings the theme to every famous movie theme ever! Check out his Jaws one as well!

Enjoy!

Surfing Youtube (So You Don't Have To): Part 1

Today, I'm going to be taking a break from the Love series. I know that some of my readers are going through exams right now and that probably means that you have less time to search through the millions of videos in finding that right one.

So I present a new series from today called Surfing Youtube (So You Don't Have To) where I will post up some of my favourite Youtube clips which you can stream and then follow the links to see what else they have.

One of my favourite things to look for in Youtube are acapella groups. This is by far one of the most entertaining groups all the way from BYU (Brigham Young University) in Utah. And just to prove that it's no fluke:

Okay, now that you've had your ten minutes of relaxation... back to the books!

McLovin

Okay, so this one isn't an entry for the competition. But they're just having so much fun that they decided to come up with a prequel.

An amazingly shot short movie, and the directing, filming and editing crew deserves huge credit for this one!

And although I don't want to admit it, my urhhh.... brother.... urrrhhh... is.... urrrhhhhh... g....urrRH....g...goo....URRHHH....good in this one! Hear his voice resonate in your head long after the McDonald's sign disappears!

And no, Hong Yi is not suffering from a Big Mac related problem. Like all good tragic Korean dramas, there's an underlying fatal medical condition in one of them.

Ah, star crossed lovers and a Big Mac!

Tissue boxes at hand? Enjoy!

Love Truths No. 6: Alternate Endings

I could have met you in a sandbox, I could have passed you on a sidewalk,
Could I have missed my chance, and watched you walk away?

- john mayer, love song for no one.

We used to go on these wonderful night trips to restaurants on Sunday nights. The whole family would pack into Pa's hand operated car and then take a slow drive to our destination. Radio 4 and its host of evening deejays would play the classic favourites, as we sat in silence and allowed the music to carry us.

"So tell me, Pa," I broke the silence one evening. "Was there someone else before Mum?"

Pa smiled, and he hesitated for only the slightest moment before saying, "Yeah, there was this one girl who I liked."

"I would cycle to her place and then stand outside her house and call her name. Her Dad would then come out, this angry looking bah-gger. I would walk into her house and then she would come to sit in the living room with me."

"The bah-gger of a father would just sit in the corner and then stare at me as if I was going to steal something from the house."

"Of course, it didn't last very long lah with the father like that. Man, if I came to the house in a car instead of a bicycle, the bah-gger wouldn't have been sitting there in that corner watching me like a hawk. Hahaha!"

Pa can afford to end with a laugh now in a way he couldn't have all those years ago.
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One day we were cleaning up the house when we stumbled upon a card that was addressed to Mum. It had flowers in the front, and had yellowed with age. The writing was in Mandarin and indecipherable to us, but we showed it to Mum and she decoded it with a sigh.

"He used to like me, you know," Mum said. "He was from my Form Six class, and he used to like me a lot. Too bad I was such a shy girl and I didn't know how to respond to him."

"He went off to study in London and then stayed on there to work I think."

"Things could have been so different," she said wistfully. Her whole life unfolded before her in her mind's eye, here this instant - If only I had said yes, if only he were a bit more forward, I wonder what London would have been like, I wonder what he would have been like - and gone the next.

She closes the card again, and with it, whole alternate universes are destroyed.

"Well, at least you have us three wonderful children," we console her cheekily, inflating ourselves in the process.

"Yes, I do," she smiles.
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The possibility of an alternative love story is a reminder that the life we are leading is only one of a myriad of possible lives and it is the impossibility of leading them all that plunges us into sadness. - alain de botton, essays in love.

Ba Dap Bap Bup Bum....

Big Mac: $3.45

Fake breathing mask: $ 4.95

Watching my brother cry on Youtube for all the world to see: Priceless

There are some things in life that money can't buy. For everything else, you should watch the clip!

This is my brother and Hong Yi's entry into the Big Mac Chant competition, where the winners walk away with RM 10,000! (That's almost six hundred Big Macs here in Australia!)

Please follow the link here to vote for them! Competition closes May 28 so thanks for all your votes!

And if they win, I will personally record my brother crying the tears of joy!

Happy Birthday to Moo!

In case you really wanted this decorative homepiece that will be the talk of your friends, it's available at cowdepot.com

Happy birthday little sis! We are really thankful to have you in our lives, and we love you a lot! I know that you're going through 'character building' times right now but just remember the passion in you for people and medicine that started it all in the first place!

Although you have your occasional "moo"d swings, you're always ready to laugh things off or make us go "Whaat!" or burst out laughing with your interesting out-from-nowhere statements!

We love you and we are proud of you, lil' sis! Happy birthday! *cow hugs*

The Girl Who Wore Nice Skirts: Part 4

He remembers getting a yo-yo once and it was all the craze in the house. It was bright yellow and it made a loud whirring noise and lit up when spun. His brother was learning to 'walk the dog' and do a 'round the world' while he was still struggling to even spin the silly thing.

She watched from afar, feigning disinterest, but secretly she badly wanted to play it as well.

She approached him in the master bedroom one day while he had the yo-yo in hand.

"Ko ko ah?" she purred.

He straightened up, all his defenses to the fore. They had never used titles in this house, always calling each other by name. She wants something, his eyes narrowed.

"Ko ko ah?" she repeated. "Can I pleaaasseee have the yo-yo?" she said in her sweetest voice.

"Awww...." his defenses lowered quietly, giving in to her sweetness. He slowly hands over the yo-yo to her, his heart melting for all the wonderful things that she was to him, this little angel who sang songs to herself, the girl who would give him free random hugs, his sister who he loved and would have given the worl...

"Thank you sucker! Hahahaha!" She screams victorious as she grabs the yo-yo and her tiny feet scurries away cheekily out of the bedroom before he could react.

He stands there, stunned, incredulous, his hand now yo-yoless. His melted heart solidifies and it is now furiously pumping all the blood to his head and screaming for him to give chase to this little monkey who had cheated his emotions and swindled his yo-yo.

But a little smile creeps along the corners of his mouth even as he tries to suppress the laughter of his own foolishness and the deviousness of his little sister.

His feet starts to react in mock chase but he knows she had an unbeatable head start. His grin widens even as he hears her slamming the door to her room and locking it, her relieved laughter resonating behind the impenetrable door.

She was victorious, and he couldn't love her any more than he did at that very moment.

Happy birthday, little sis!

Love Truths No. 5: A Little World Of Our Own

Congratulations. Now that you have succesfully entered into a relationship, you will head one of two ways:-

i) You still hang out with your friends and you start being part of each other's circle of friends. You get along well with each other's friends and are enriched by the experience. He trusts you to hang out with your guy friends and you trust him to hang out with his girl friends, even on a one-on-one situation.

This is the healthy, mature outcome to a relationship.

The truth is, most relationships will unfortunately go through, or worse, be stuck here in

ii)
Bubble Land. Man, this looks like something out of a seventies porn movie. I tried looking for a better picture, but I couldn't find one.

Bubble Land.

The Cantonese term for Bubble Land is quite descriptive - 'leong ko yan ke sai kai' - literally, two people's world.

It feels to you like there's only the two of you in this world, and little by little, you build your world that way. You begin excluding your friends - calling or meeting up with them less and less or only when you're arguing with your partner, or, even more gagworthy is the need to include your partner in everything including those annoying 5 Things You Didn't Know About Me tag e-mail thingies:

1) What is your favourite colour?
Blue, because they're the colour of my boyfriends' eyes.
(Retch.)

2) If there was anywhere you could be in the world, where would you go?
Anywhere my boyfriend is.
(Nausea.)

3) If you had to choose between Brad Pitt, Tony Leung and Cristiano Ronaldo, who would you pick?
My boyfriend.
(Really? Now I have to vomit.)

4) Name your favourite song.
'You're Beautiful' by James Blunt. It is our song.
('You're Gross.' 'You're Disgusting', even.)

5) If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you bring with you?
My boyfriend, my boyfriend, my boyfriend.
(I'm sorry. My stomach is completely empty. I can't puke any... *bleaarrgghh!* Well, apparently I can.)
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The problem with Bubble Land is what happens when it bursts.

If you have, over the course of your love lifetime, neglected your friends and family, devoting your life only to him/her, then you will find that once the bubble bursts (ie. the break up), you've suddenly got nowhere to turn and no one to turn to.

Your self-imposed exile will mean now that you would have walked out from one prison into another.

So please, while it is beautiful inside this world for two, remember to keep in touch with your friends and do things normally with other people as well. It's healthy for the relationship and for you, ultimately.

And really, I can only vomit so muc.. *bleaaarrghh!*

Happy Mother's Day!

To Mum,

Who has taught me love, sympathy for the less fortunate, forgiving and forgetting, but most importantly, who taught me how not to take life too seriously - Happy Mother's Day!

I love you, Mum!

Love Truth No. 4: Unrequited Love

Worse than the total agony of being in love? (One of the best lines in a movie filled with amazing lines)

"The greatest thing you’ll ever learn, is just to love, and be loved, in return.” Moulin Rouge

The worst part about the initial phases of love is when, in finding the person that you love, and, well, simply, they just don’t like you back.

And worse than that:-

i) if you are prone to being hurt by rejection (ie. you are emo) then this will hurt just a little short of childbirth.

ii) you suddenly become more fascinated by the person, or they suddenly achieve the status of a god/dess just by the simple fact that they have become unattainable.

All good stalkers start right here in ii). So get out all your hooded jumpers, bring out the tent to camp outside the house of the person you love, get ready to stick multiple pictures that you’ve taken of them secretly all over your bedroom walls and practice your heavy breathing over the phone, ladies and gentlemen, because this obsession is just about to kick in!

By virtue of the Marxism of love, there is what we call a spiral.

You love someone, and

i) they reject you
ii) they become all the more attractive for rejecting you
iii) you try harder to approach them
iv) which makes them dislike you more and reject you further
v) which makes them even more attractive
vi) which makes you try even harder
vii) which makes them call the cops
viii) which causes them to put a restraining order on you
ix) which means that by law you are not allowed within 2 km of the person
x) which makes them even so much more attractive….

Hahaha! Oh, how foolish is the heart!

I speak for all the bleeding hearts in this world when I say that nothing hurts like the pain of unrequited love, and I know that all of you would have experienced it at one stage or another. You are not alone in your grief, and as the wonderful cliché goes, time will heal all things.

Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got some heavy breathing to practise.

Da(ys)ze Off

Robert Burns Hotel's Spanish spread. So good you can eat the picture.
Picture taken from theage.com.au

Melbourne is truly multicultural, and with it comes the benefits of being in a multicultural society, which when summarised into that one glorious word is food. You can find foods from all nations here, but most pervasive is the Greek, Italian, Middle Eastern, Thai and other Asian cuisines.

So it was a wonderful surprise to actually find good Spanish seafood, which is near impossible to find, in my humble opinion, and we celebrated our housemate's birthday at the most excellent RobertBurns'Hotel in Collingwood. You need to order the seafood in Spanish sauce (I can't pronounce the name here) - but bring along four or five hungry people to eat it, because it will fill you!

Pay attention - ignore the paella and go straight to the seafood in Spanish sauce! If it comes out to you in a big white bowl that looks like a clam and it looks so big you could put a baby comfortably inside, then you've ordered the right thing!

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I think that if it were not the because of the reprieve of friends who take the time to meet up with you and reluctantly share their secretstories with you over excellent lunch, these four days would have been spent cooped up at home trapped in the prison that is my room.

Thank you gnod, for an excellent lunch, and for the secretsurprise gift that I couldn't see coming. I will need to work on my female intuition more.

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P.S. Krys, I'm sorry in advance. Really.

Love Truths No.3: I Hate Myself (For Loving You)

Love is a many confusing thing.

I am not sure if you've ever experienced this before, and I am not sure I have the eloquence to put it into words.

You are walking into a party, a church, a social gathering. Someone, for whatever reason, catches your eye. And you quickly make up your mind about the person - what we call the first impression.

From that first impression, you either i) lose all interest and carry on in superficial conversation or ii) fall in love with the image of the person (ie. what you think he's like, what you think she likes) and then write the fairytale story in your head which ends up with you marrying him or her and loving each other into your sweet golden years.

And, unexpectedly, the other person is interested in you as well, they start speaking to you, and for some inexplicable reason, you suddenly revert from ii) to i). They are downgraded from 'my personal Latin lover' to 'Let's just be friends' or 'Should I fake a seizure just to get out of this conversation?'.

It's as if we've permeated a bubble of mystery or the destroyed the fairytale we've built in our heads about the other person, and everything falls to pieces.

I thought that this experience proved that I was some kind of a b______ (it rhymes with custard), but I have been reading this wonderful book by psychologist writer Alain de Botton called 'Essays in Love' (thanks, Krys!) who tries to put meaning to our rejection of people who like us.

His explanation is as follows:

We don't like ourselves, or we see flaws in ourselves.

We see someone who we do like, who in our minds they are flawless.

The person likes us for who we are, but we struggle to understand it because we don't like ourselves, so there must be something wrong with that person for liking us.

We behave in a way to push them away or reject them. We lose interest.

This is a Marxist theory (Groucho, surprisingly, not Karl) who once famously said - "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members. "

Innately, we don't accept ourselves, so we find it strange when we find someone who accepts us, and consequently reject them (in essence, rejecting ourselves).

When we look at some (an angel) from a position of unrequited love and imagine the pleasures that being in heaven with them might bring us, we are prone to overlook a significant danger: how soon their attractions might pale if they begun to love us back.

We fall in love because we long to escape from ourselves with someone as ideal as we are corrupt.

But what if such a being were one day to turn around and love us back? We can only be shocked. How could they be divine as we had hoped when they have the bad taste to approve of someone like us?

If in order to love, we must believe that the beloved surpasses us in some way, does not a cruel paradox emerge when we witness this love returned? "If s/he really is so wonderful, how could s/he love someone like me?"- alain de botton, essays in love.

If you understood this, then congratulations. You are a Marxist.

If this is confusing you, then congratulations as well. Maybe love doesn't have to be so complicated.

Red Till The Day I Die

UEFA Champions' League Final: Chelsea 3 Liverpool 2

What kind of a club has a motto of "You'll Never Walk Alone"? Seriously, I mean, like what kind of a pathetic cry for victory is you will never walk alone? I mean, like, "Let's Kick Everybody Else's Butt", or "We Are The Best, The Rest of You Are Losers" sounds like a more appropriate machismo club motto maybe, but "You'll Never Walk Alone"?

Can you see Mel Gibson in Braveheart yelling "You'll nevER WALK ALONE!!!" instead of "FREEDOM!". I don't think so.

And yet, that is the most endearing cry of all. Bleeding from every Scouser heart (native or abroad), lingering in every tear-stained eye, welling up from the deepest souls of every Liverpool fan, resonating around the Kop and to the rest of the world - is not a rallying call to victory - because we know that winning or losing is temporary - but a promise of faithfulness to Liverpool Football Club for the rest of our lives.

The Liverpool economy is still recovering from its post World War 2 decline, and itself has four of the ten poorest postcode districts in the United Kingdom. Blue collar, working class were all words used to describe Liverpool, as far as I know. The inhabitants are called Scousers after the term 'scouse' - a kind of stew. That doesn't exactly scream of sophistication, does it?

Yet it is this underlying rough as guts community that takes their football so seriously that it has spread contagiously throughout the world.

You'll Never Walk Alone. We will be there with you through sunshine or torrential rain.

Inexplicably, even when Liverpool are well and truly beaten on the field, towards the last five minutes, inevitably - a few would start singing the song and like a ripple, it will spread, building up to a swell of "You Will Never Walk A...lone, You'll NEVER WALK ALONE!!".

Confused fans from the opposition will wonder what we have to sing about. Almost like a battered wife, the fans sing the promise of reconciliation, the hope of the next game, the promise of next year.

I think every football club has a personality and will attract a certain subset of fans. And that is what separates us from the other soccer fans.

Clubs like Man United and Chelsea are so used to winning recently that they take it for granted, and some of their fans are almost blase with winning. Accusations of home fans keeping quiet in Old Trafford and Stamford Bridge this year is evidence of that, and yet, the term "The Twelfth Man" has only been credited to the faithful Liverpool supporters year in, year out.

We are the most successful English club in Europe, and at least half of the current supporters can't remember that far back. We used to dominate the local league as well, but since the inception of the Premiership in the early 90s, when I started supporting the club, we have never won the Premiership before.

We have never taken our success for granted, however, because in supporting Liverpool, the disappointment of defeat is to be expected as much as victory, but we have redefined the phrase 'snatching victory from the jaws of defeat'. How many times have the commentators screamed the phrase 'You couldn't write a fairytale like this!' when it comes to Liverpool matches.

No club in recent years can conjure the romanticism of soccer and comebacks as well as Liverpool.

The 2001 season of the unique treble, and beating fierce rivals Everton in the dying minutes, with 10 men, to qualify for Europe. The Champions League finals in 2005, when almost every Liverpool heart had surrendered to a "Well, we'll just have to do better next year" at half time and yet came from 3-0 down to win on penalties, or the FA Cup final of 2006, when all seemed lost until the gifted right boot of Gerrard changed everything in the dying minutes.

It is this heart-stopping games, these breath-taking matches that speaks of a truth - in a game where money has made fickle fans of supporters, Liverpool remains one of the few clubs in England, where, whether you are a player or a fan, it is all about the heart.

And the heart attacks from watching them play, I must add. I am sure my life has shortened by a good few years since supporting this club.

You will never walk alone. A song to outlast the fluctuations of time in the game of football. Not just a motto, but an attitude to life. And that is why I will be, Red till the day I die.