reading several popular blogs where their authors have recounted the strange search engine keywords that have brought people to their sites, i decided to do the same for my not-in-the-slightest-bit-as-popular blog.

here goes:

sarong party girl
now, either people think (a) that i’m her, which cannot be since she has her own very prominent site with a very prominent and obvious URL or (b) that being female i’ve probably bitched about her, which i hadn’t, but made an innocuous reference to the term itself or (c) that because my surname is ho, that they can treat me with such disrespect. hmm.

classy words
such a wrong place to be for those.

contact or mail or email or phone or fax or tel site www.vickiho.com
somebody really wants to get in touch! but no one has. i feel rejected.

swinger
another uncalled-for reference to my surname, i’ll bet!

boneless
well excuse me. i believe the right term is spineless.

for all people say about the chinese standard of hygiene, whether it’s random spitting on the road, the public picking of orifices, the eating of animal organs which process the almost-completed stages of fecal matter, you can’t beat the overfastidiousness of them when it comes to eating with spotless cutlery. in most eating places, especially those found by the roadside or even mid-level chinese restaurants, you might find people neurotically wiping their utensils with tissue paper or napkins the minute they are set on the table.

i was in kuala lumpur a couple of weeks ago, and i just managed to import this video from my phone. it starts with someone going on about the importance of the water source’s location, then her anecdote on diarrhoea. towards the end someone realises i’m just filming so she reaches over and wipes mine for me too. twitch, twitch.

download the minute-long clip [wmv, 1.69 mb]

realising my birthday’s coming soon, (no, this is not some broad hint for a gift; i intend to request for one. haha.) i started thinking about my birthday last year, and all the instability in my personal life, new music being discovered—incidentally, the first girlyman album, and the second one just arriving last week—and i’m thankful for the relative stability now, the quieter birthday i want to have, the “new chapter” of life i’m in somewhat, for the first birthday i’m not in school during.

i do hope i have jody, jun and joanna with me next year. they’ve been in the US for all these years, and we’ve all grown accustomed to the phone call yelling happy birthday to each other. a slight stress i foresee for myself however is that whatever gets done for me this year, i might have to replicate in full force, doubly, triply impressively come early next year. being a bit of a worrier, i just know this will cloud over my birthday sentiments somewhat.

moving swiftly on. i wanted to get the zoom MRS-8 for myself, but the purportedly only shop that has it in singapore is out of stock till… who knows. the smaller model, the MRS-4 is coming in in december. my only niggle with it is that it doesn’t record in full audio; it compresses the audio at 32 kHz i think, because it’s supposedly lower end or something. not that i’d be able to tell even if it were compressed, i suspect, but it’s just the knowing it’s not at 44 kHz that’ll make me imagine it’s impeded.