ELECTRIC ERHU

This beggar is playing a homemade electric erhu. Usually you can barely hear the music from the guys that eek notes out of these things, but his loud notes could be heard from several meters away. I snapped this shot at Clementi MRT today.

RELIGIOUS BOOKS UNBANNED!

Prison chaplains tried to ban all but a select number of religious books in libraries. They were afraid that prisoners would read them and become "radical" followers of religion. The specific fear was that prisoners were reading books about radical, militant Islam, but somehow this ban required prison chaplains to remove a wide range of Christian authors, everything from the early church fathers to Focus on the Family. Leaders of many faiths petitioned to remove this ban; their pleas were heard, and the ban was removed.


Link
Karl Barth is Going Back to Prison

BEAUTIFUL TELUNAS BEACH

OOH! THAT SMELL!

My classroom has been wreaking for the past week and a half.  At first I thought that I had done something stupid.  I suspected that I had left an old sandwich or a mold bag of hawker center food somewhere in one of the nooks and crannies of the classroom.  After no luck and a thorough search, I began to suspect my students.   Maybe they were playing a prank with durian or they accidentally tracked the dead fish water aroma of a wet market into my classroom.  They were all innocent; I began to have class in the computer labs and spare classroom.  After cleaning the carpet and desks, nothing was found.  Finally, the construction workers began drilling into the walls of my classroom.  The awful smell was not located.  As an extremely last ditch effort, the decision was made to start cutting out parts of the ceiling to look for the odorific monstrosity that had been gagging my students for the past ten days.  The culprit was finally nabbed.  There was a two foot long dead python that had been rotting in the area between the roof and the ceiling.  As of today, I am liberated from the awful stench.

I'm glad that I bought a Creative Zen

One of the reasons I bought a Creative Zen: Vision player is because I didn't want to use I-Tunes or fumble around with DRMed music.  Now that Apple has totally locked down its product.  Even if you wanted to fumble around with some other programs, you now must use I-Tunes.  I'm extremely glad that I bought one from Creative.  Here are two essays about the subject:

Link
Apple Cuts Us Off
New IPods Reengineered

Excellent Blogger: Brett McCracken

I'm on the Singapore Tuesday Group e-mail list and another member sent a link to one of Brett McCracken's essays. From his writing he appears to be a truly introspective Christian. I am most impressed when he deals with the Christian quandary being able to engage the culture while at the same time denying the superficial values that the world offers.

Link
The Search

Please note- For those of you still reading this blog and tolerating my lack of posts, thanks. I promise that I'll eventually get back to writing original posts. I don't yet have internet access at my new flat, and I'm already behind on my essay grading so too much blogging from work would not be a good use of time.

DON'T STEAL

If you try to rob a store in my hometown, Springfield, MO, this is what may happen to you!  This happened about a half mile from my parent's house.

Citizens tackle man who robbed store next door