I’m suffering from Monday blues (yes, even people without day jobs get Monday blues if they party too hard over the weekend) and I’m feeling hungry, so I’ve decided to talk about food today.

The Goonfather and I discovered a Korean eatery in Suntec City (at the Fountain of Wealth food area) which we normally would have passed by without a second thought, especially since the signboard proclaims it as a fake Korean cafe.

See, it says Ya Zhou Cafe, which translates to “Asia Cafe”. And then, on the side, you see “Korean Cuisine”.

I mean, like, if you’re about authentic Korean cuisine, then drop the word “Asia”. If you’re a fusion cafe, then drop the “Korean” or add a few more adjectives. The way it is now, it confuses people and reduces your appeal.

(I’m not an expert on branding or signboarding, so don’t take my word for it. It’s probably just my own pickiness.)

Anyway, we chose this place because we were between events yesterday and in a hurry, and the pictures actually attracted the Goonfaher’s attention. He loves Korean food and he’s not as picky as me over signboards.

Yes, the place has nice photographs but we are usually wary of nice photographs. All the food courts in Singapore have nice photographs but the food is almost always horrible. (For cheap food, hawker centres are the way to go.)

We really only stopped here because we wanted something cheap and quick and this looked like the most appealing cheap and quick in that immediate area.

I only ordered fried guo tie (pan fried dumplings) beacuse we were going to have a picnic right after this (ballet under the stars).

The moment my order arrived and I bit into it, I wish I had ordered more items.

That was arguably the best guo tie I’ve tasted. Very crispy on the outside, juicy and flavourful on the inside.

It comes with the usual vinegar with ginger complement but you can grab some wasabi mayonnaise (or normal mayonnaise) because it tastes great with that, too.

My favourite sauce, though, is the Korean chilli sauce, which is kinda sweet and tangy and not really spicy.

The chilli sauce came with the Goonfather’s noodles.

Interesting looking, huh?

That big white chunk is a boiled pear. I didn’t try it but the Goonfather liked it. The little ice chips you’ll find in the noodles are not your regular ice chips. They’re soup-flavoured ice chips!

This dish is really very good for hot days because it’s super thirst quenching.

The taste is a little weird and I’m not even sure I know how to describe it. It’s mainly sour, but also salty and sweet and bitter. Haha.

I liked it on the first taste. But after a few more spoonfuls, I started not liking it very much anymore because of a strange taste in the soup I can’t identify right now. The Goonfather slurped it all down while I was enjoying my guo tie.

I stole all his chilli sauce (which was meant for the beef slices in his noodles) but I really love the chilli!

The cold noodles also comes with kimchi and anchovies. The kimchi is also one of the best I’ve tasted because the distribution of taste is just nice. I mean, like, a lot of kimchi is either too bitter or too spicy or something like that.

Our meal cost us about $15, including two sodas, which is more than reasonable, considering the quality of food.

I’m definitely going back for seconds!

And now, I have to scoot because the Goonfather is on leave today and I have to follow him around to do errands. Maybe I can talk him into taking me back to Ya Zhou Cafe again! Heh.

My weekend is totally packed so this is going to be short.

I’m giving you a preview of my weekend activities so you’ll know what’s coming up in my blog next week!

(You can leave a comment to tell me that my blogging about any particular activity is going to bore you to pieces, so please don’t blog about it. I’m very democratic, as you can see.)

My weekend started last night.

Friday

1. Yebber’s 1st Anniversary Party. It was totally awesome!!

Saturday

1. Social Media Breakfast
2. Youth Aids Blogger Forum
3. Rock band party at home!

Sunday

1. RX-8 Mega Meet
2. Giselle in the Park (Ballet under the Stars at Fort Canning!)

It doesn’t look that packed when listed neatly like that. But it’s still scary to have so many activities and events in one weekend!!!

I wish people would stop doing that!!! I mean organise their activities all in the same weekend for me! And then, like, my next six weekends are free! Haha.

Okay, not really. I’m seldom free during the weekends, especially now that we have Rock Band!!

By the way, thanks for all your answers in my previous post about giving up seats. I will reply all comments in a day or two so please be patient!

Alright, gotta go. Have a swell weekend, everyone!

In one of my recent twitters, I posed the question of how to gauge an elderly person’s eligibility to be offered a seat on the MRT or bus.

Nobody answered my twitter, of course. Nobody ever responds to my twitters via Twitter.

But reader Mike M did answer the question in my blog comments, so I’m throwing it out here to get more answers from twitter-shy people.

First, the question.

How do you know who to give your seat to on the MRT or bus?

The loose guideline is what’s printed on signs: “Please offer this seat to someone who needs it more than you do.”

We know that “someone who needs it more than you do” typically refers to the elderly, the pregnant and the handicapped, and maybe little toddlers who are wont to topple over if the train brakes too fast.

Photo by Beate W

Yes, most of the time, it is easy enough to identify persons belonging to the above categories.

But what about borderline cases?

You know they exist.

In the first place, how old is “elderly”? 40? 50? 60?

I don’t know what’s the average age at which a person really needs a seat each time he gets on the train.

40? 50? 60?

What makes it even more complicated is that it’s hard to tell people’s age these days because more and more people are getting younger as they get older.

Photo by Gustavo Bueso Padgett

Besides, some “elderly” folks take better care of their healths than us young ‘uns. They don’t go clubbing or play computer games overnight like we do, so they are able to wake up every morning at 6 am to do qigong.

Photo from Wikipedia

If old people are healthier than youngsters, do they really “need it more than we do”?

I know there is no fixed rule and we’re supposed to make intuitive judgement calls case by case. But what about offending people?

Yes, offending people.

There was this case on the MRT once: Someone had offered his seat to a pregnant lady. The lady glared at him and said, “I’m not pregnant, you doofus.” (Not in those exact words, but thereabouts.) She just happens to have a very large belly.

Photo by Jonathan Willmann

So much embarrassment is at stake when you offer your seat to the wrong person!

What if I offered my seat to this man whom I think is old because his hair is all white and his face is all wrinkled? And then he feels slighted because he is not actually old but just suffers from an unfortunate case of premature aging? And he has wrinkled skin because he sun tans too much and doesn’t use sunblock and moisturiser?

Also, there are people who are kind of prideful and hate to be thought of as weak, so if you offered your seat to them, they’d hate you.

Personally, I don’t get into situations like that very much because when I’m on the train, I’m usually buried in a book or in my DS Lite, oblivious to my surroundings.

Well, I can’t help it if I get absorbed in my own activities to relieve the boredom of commuting!! I think it’s for the better, anyway. Then I don’t have to suffer a dilemma every time a borderline case boards the train.

But I’m not 100% selfish! I have given up my seat a few times when I happened to not have a book with me and encountered clear-cut cases who really needed my seat.

What about you, then? Do you give up your seat at all and how do you deal with borderline cases?

My calf is aching, my throat is sore and my thumb is screaming.

Such is the result of the evil that is Rock Band.

I can’t wait to torture my body again!

I was really excited about Rock Band when news of its impending release came. We camped our regular gaming store and waited miserably for it to arrive in Singapore.

It took forever. By the time it did, all the excitement had died. I got busy with other stuff and lost all interest in the game.

So when the Goonfather bought the game unannouced on Tuesday night, I was, like, “Dude! That’s $389!!”

(I don’t actually call him Dude in real life. It just seemed right to type that.)

The game box is really huge. It filled up the entire car boot.

We took it home.

The Goonfather took photos of the unwrapping, so I have to publish them because this is like the first time he voluntarily took photos for me.

(Every time I ask him to take a photo of me, he makes a face and grumpily takes a hasty, blur shot. Which is why I had to master the art of self-camwhoring.)

Okay, back to the box!

A scary looking bright pink warning slip!

It looks scary but when you read it, you’ll go, “Duh.”

Duh.

Ooh. The software and drumsticks!

Strangely, that makes me feel hungry. I’m thinking of chicken now.

Ahh, the microphone! It looks rather small and retarded if you ask me. Very not glam. Hmm… in the first place, do rock stars use this kind of microphones? I thought they use headset mics. I can’t remember cos I don’t watch MTVs or concerts all that much.

This looks more fit for karaoke. Hahaha.

Ok, next.

Everything out of the box!

There’s a drum set, a wireless guitar and a microphone to form a three-man rock band.

Rock Band allows up to four players for a jamming session (drums, vocals, lead guitar, bass guitar) but the box only comes with one guitar, which is so inconvenient!!

The company doesn’t sell individual guitars. If you want an extra guitar to form a full band, you need to buy another Rock Band set.

Of course we’re not going to do that. You think we print money is it?

Anyway, since we have two people at home only, the Goonfather decided to get a mic stand so one person can play the guitar while singing and the other person can play the drums.

It was too late to rush out to buy a mic stand, so the Goonfather made his own. (How much does a mic stand cost, anyway?)

He has a bunch of toilet pipes lying around at home from a previous, abandoned project, so he dragged them out and drilled some holes and played lego with the toilet pipes to form this:

Wahahahahahaha!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s so terribly unglam lah!!!!!!!!

I think we should call our rock band Toilet Pipes.

Close up:

The drilling was to make a lobang for the wire to stick out of:

I don’t know why they can’t give us a wireless microphone if they can give us a wireless guitar. It’s so stupid.

Last night, we invited Morte over to jam with us.

They are both still in their work clothes!!! Hahahahaha! I could just die laughing.

Here’s a back view picture of me on the drums.

There’s no front view because Morte didn’t photograph any.

We were too busy to take photos, anyway. Most of the night, we took turns swapping instruments and trying them all out. It was so addictive that Morte stayed till 10:30 pm, even though he had to be at SIM at 10:30 pm to pick his wife up from school. Hahahahaha. (It’s about a 30-minute drive from my place to SIM.)

I wonder if Wang Wang (Morte’s wife) gave him hell for it. I would if I were her. Hahahahaha!

As you can tell, I am highly amused by the entire incident.

Okay, that was a preliminary jamming session and like everyone was in their work clothes, so I didn’t take too many photos.

I’ll take better photos when we organise a proper session on a weekend with all my friends!

It is damn fun!! And damn funny!!! Especially when your friends are crap at a particular instrument and you can scold them for making you die. Hahahahaha.

Okay, of course dying is not funny. But you know what I mean.

I love playing the drums. Playing guitar is more glamorous but I’m kind of sick of it because it’s like Guitar Hero.

The drums is cool! But its hell on your right calf because you’re using your calf muscles to step on the foot pedal. I found out last night that I have really weak calf muscles. It’s a muscle I didn’t even know existed until last night! *lol* It started feeling irritated and trembly when I played too many songs requiring a lot of fast, nifty footwork. (Or maybe our chair was too low.)

The vocals part is fun only if you know the song. They do give you lyrics to sing to and a pitch indicator to tell you whether you’re singing the right note or not, but it’s better if you already know the song.

And it is DAMN COOL playing the guitar and singing at the same time… like a real rock star! Hehehehe!

But I’m not going to videotape myself doing that cos I sound horrible singing rock songs, like a frog croaking. Luckily, the game doesn’t judge you on voice quality. It only judges pitch. You don’t even have to sing the right words. You can la la la through the whole song and still score top marks if you hit all the right notes. Hahaha.

We made a band last night to play in career mode and called it Buns N’ Hoses. (Morte’s idea.) Hahahahahaha!!!!

I better stop blogging now before I kill myself laughing.

More pictures next time!!

This is going to be fun, although I guess it depends on whether people are going to be shy or sporting.

I’m helping to organise an event called Social Media Breakfast (Singapore franchise) for people who are into social media, web 2.0, blogging, and all that.

The fun part is that we’re borrowing an idea from a cool American guy named Jeff Pulver, who invented what he calls “real-time social tagging”.

It’s kinda like bringing Internet interactivity to real life, which is the opposite of what people have been trying to do for years, that is, bringing real life to the Internet. That makes it highly amusing and entertaining.

Ok, watch this video, in which I attempt to explain how real-time tagging works, but doing a bad job of it because we only had 45 minutes to shop for props and shoot the video, without a storyboard or script.

I left out a lot of things I wanted to say because I just couldn’t remember everything on the spot. So, if you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, ask.

The two guys who decided to bring this event to Singapore are Derrick Kwa and Daryl Tay. They bumped into each other on the net several weeks back and found a common purpose. Funny thing is they will probably be meeting in person for the first time at the very event which they are co-organising. Hahaha!

By the way, everyone is invited this Saturday (March 29). You can just drop by, but it’ll help if you inform us beforehand so we can prepare the correct number of breakfasts and tagging toolkits.

Breakfast is not free. But it’ll only be $4 or $5, so don’t be a cheapo! The tagging toolkits are free. Getting to know more like-minded peeps is priceless.

We encourage casual discussions on topics relating to social media, web 2.0 and blogging, although I suppose you could just choose to mingle, get to know people and tag them. Tagging is very much encouraged!

If you’re in Facebook, you can sign up for the event here.

Details
Social Media Breakfast Singapore
March 29, 2008 (Saturday)
9 am — 12:30pm
Frujch @ SMU (Basement 1, School of Information Systems)
50 Stamford Road

See you there!