open line

someone did a good job for smrt.

love the vibrant colors of this poster and how the psychedelic lines that resembles the train tracks. and best of all, its finally open tomorrow! here’s to hoping for less horrid traffic and a smoother ride to work. and mind you, now with the opening of the line, so many more food options are connected, especially holland village where finally you do not need to find for parking in those measly car parks and can drink yourself silly! haha.

douchiest college in america

fun times.. =) [shot at treyman state park using out handphones, with an exposure time of 8s]

reading this article today brought an instant smile. from the cornell daily sun.

SEPTEMBER 16, 2011
BY AJ ORTIZ

For those of you who do not know, GQ Magazine has named Cornell University the douchiest college in the United States. And as expected, the reaction within the Big Red community has been mixed. Sane Cornellians have taken it as a simple joke. Prudent Cornellians are just glad their school is getting some national attention. Meanwhile, Cornellians who need to chill have seen it as an offense. I, on the other hand, realized GQ’s quest in the search for ultimate douchebaggery in higher education is not over. So let us celebrate being this year’s douchiest campus in America by going one step further. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the “crème de la crème”: the douchiest colleges within Cornell.

7. College of Architecture, Art and Planning: If you are glad we were ranked first, do not thank AAP. It is their fault we almost lost to that state school in University Park. I mean, AAPs are the anti-douches. Even though many of them are enrolled in the nation’s top program, they never brag about it. In fact, most of them do not even talk (or sleep). Many work tirelessly inside an old building that looks like an 18th century abandoned factory — which ironically harms the aesthetics of our douchy campus. Additionally, they are victims of our douchy tradition. Each year AAPs are forced like slaves to sacrifice capital, time and other valuable inputs in order to create a parade, not for them, but for the entertainment of others. In fact, the only thing that AAPs enjoyed about Dragon Day was the opportunity to burn the beast — a symbol of tyranny — that tortured them for most of the semester. However, as soon as the Fire Department found out about the motives behind this practice, it was outlawed.

6. College of Human Ecology: Throughout my three years at Cornell, I have only met one person from HumEc. But sometimes, one is more than enough. During my freshman year, I hosted a pre-frosh whose friend was hosted by a PAM major. I remember like yesterday the dinner the four of us had at RPCC. I easily recall this event because the HumEc guy was the douchiest and most annoying guy you will ever meet. Such was the case that his guest asked me if he could sleep in my room that night — I had the moral duty to accede. Although I do not know anyone else from HumEc, I am going to assume that all the other HumEcs are less douchy than this guy. Why? Because I really do not want to live with the idea that there are more people like him in this world. It disturbs me.

5. College of Engineering: It is common knowledge around campus that Engineers have the toughest course-load. Why? Because they never stop rubbing it in on our faces. Whether it is a top-tier sorority girl — if there actually is one — or a socially awkward Applied Engineering Physics major, the truth is that most Engineers believe they are inherently superior to other Cornellians. Most of us would really love to be engineers, but we have figured out that a social life in college is easier than studying continuum physics and cloud computing. I guess we know all of you are better than the rest of us, but please, you just do not have to remind us all the time. (Note: This description does not apply to Operations Research majors; they are not really engineers.)

4. School of Industrial and Labor Relations: A handful of ILR students want to work for NGOs or other hands-on organizations towards the improvement of society. However, most of them want to be either lawyers or politicians. Which means they just care about two things: money and power. You know when people say, “I have faith in our future generation?” Well, I do not. It is sad to see today’s politicians having trouble reaching a compromise regarding our nation’s economic future. But it is even sadder to watch the ILRies in the Student Assembly failing to achieve an agreement on whether to phase out bottled water sales.

3. College of Arts and Sciences: In the Arts College, we find the traditional Ivy League douches. On the one hand, you got the Yale-ish preppy with 33 credits — 12 academic and 21 in Greek life. On the other hand, there is the Brown-ish hipster who wears Urban Outfitters clothes and smokes a pipe under a tree in the Arts Quad while reading Friedrich Nietzsche. In spite of their differences, both groups share the same destiny outside the bubble we like to call Cornell: misery. Nobody in the real world cares if you were Alpha Phi’s Ivy Man or the president of the Vegan Club. They just care that you are a linguistics and religious studies double major and you have no real utility for society.

2. College of Agriculture and Life Sciences (or should I say, The Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management): I am really sorry for the agriculture and science majors, but this ranking is based on a college’s douchiness as a whole. The distribution of douchiness in CALS is extremely skewed to the right thanks to the greedy, cynical and pretentious AEMers. Some colleges at Cornell are douchy because they think they own the University. AEMers, on the other hand, just belong to a major and they think they own the world. But you know what? They do not. AEMers always dream of landing that 30K signing bonus on Wall Street. But at the end of the day, executives hire anyone except business majors because they know anybody can do Accounting, Finance and Marketing without being such “assholes” (shoutout to Tony Manfred!).

1. School of Hotel Administration: The Hotel School is so douchy that it has its own restaurant, ATM and professor who yells at students who yawn overly loudly. But nothing makes a group of persons douchier than being extremely pretentious. Hotelies boast 10 times more than AAPs about their program’s prestige even though their school has 10 times less competition. Oh, you busted your ass to get an “A” in Culinary? Great! Then shut up and cook me something. However, we all know Hotelies are really a joke when many claim their hardest course is about wines. How can it be that difficult to be enrolled in a pass/fail course that is really just an excuse to get drunk? Give me a break.

Some of you might think that I’m the douchiest person at Cornell for writing this, but that would just make you douchier than I am.

i shall not comment on the veracity of the story considering i don’t wanna offend too many of my hotel school friends, but.. hehe =)

 

 

minimalist travel posters

featured these before, but now i chanced upon the entire set of minimalist posters depicting paris and NYC here. really find them so cool!

mmm.. i miss my cream cheese + lox on a sundried tomato bagel courtesy of collegetownbagels.

just a random gripe about the taxis in singapore.. i notice how every time i urgently need a cab, every cab i try to flag down is changing shift and heading somewhere in the opposite direction. annoyed.

hmm.. what would be the singapore equivalent?

notes the address for a good croque-monsieur. hehe, singapore would feature ya-kun kaya toast. hmm, i should really go try and do a series.

top chef just desserts: the willy wonka challenge

literal recreation. [image from chron.com here]

how cool is it to be able to recreate your own magickal wonderland from one of the most well-celebrated childhood tales? this episode of top chef really worked for me because it was as much a visual feast as it was a savory one that we viewers couldn’t partake in. i mean, my main gripe of the top chef series is that, compared to project runway, you can’t really know just how tasty something is unless you taste it. so yeah, what a charming episode with such nice desserts that makes one yearn to head to do canele or the likes to grab some delices. my favourites of the week were carlos’ pb&j macaroons that looked gorgeously tasty as well as katzie carrot patch cakes was true creative genius. ahhh.. how nice would it be to really own a shop that essentially recreates the wonka landscape and sells such tasty snacks?

singapore restaurant week

temptation

OMG. you do not know how glad i am that restaurant week is happening in Oct whilst I imposed my own diet/embargo on atas food for the month of September. Yippee!! thanks to Wise Guy’s post i can now make my plans to divide and conquer the remaining atas restaurants on my list. lol

more info found here. people who are interested in dining in the following places, jio me please!!

- Absinthe – Basilico – Boathouse – Ku De Ta – Le Saint Julien – Tatsuya – The French Kitchen – The Lighthouse -

cool designs: egon gade

stumbled upon the portfolio of photographer Egon Gade from Denmark and boy are those some beautiful shots. i really like how the single starting point of a bumble bee inspires such a creative shot. there are multiple levels of interpretation – from the illusion of honeycomb created by the shelves to the interest Project Runway-eqsue bumble-bee inspired outfit. nice.

anyone knows what equation this dude is scribbling on the board? more pictures here.

photographic memories

9/11 imagery, photographed by det. greg semendinger

was looking at many photos documenting 9/11 and how unreal the photographs looked, how much it looked like a scene from a movie flick. but it was sadly real. if images need to serve any purpose, it serves as a haunting memory to remind us collectively to never let such tragedies happen again. there’s enough tragedy with natural disasters.

see more shots here.

 

cool designs: the mutewatch

[Meet the Mutewatch from Mutewatch on Vimeo]

this watch looks pretty cool, and has jumped onboard the whole humanly-intuitive swiping/pinching/touching motions phenomenon to create a functionally sound and aesthetically pleasing watch. hmm, actually don’t really know the size to know whether it looks good for now, but yeah looks like a cool new gadget that embraces both sound design and technology. gotta love it.

and it’s made from sweden!

the masterchef challenge: v8 cake

the cake equivalent of a marathon [courtesy: masterchef website]

its gonna be time to bid farewell to some of my cellies soon so to send them off, estelle decided to accept william’s challenge to make the v8 cake, christened by one of the contestants as “8 layers of hell”. 0_0.. anyways, the cake is a creation of adriano zumbo whose shop takes 3 days to make 70 of such cakes. contestants on masterchef were given 4 hours to make one, so u can imagine the ensuing hell unleashed in the kitchen. we’re taking no chances here, and alloting 3 days to make one cake. here’s to hoping for a eight-layered success. =)

in case you were wondering, what eight layers? [courtesy: myfoodtrail.blogspot.com]

a step by step guide is offered at the masterchef website for daring amateurs, whilst i found another blog post detailing the baking process. this really looks fun, but to be honest, the realization of just how much sugar, cream and glucose goes into the different layers makes me feel kinda wary of the cake.