When Garry died he expected to go to heaven. He had no idea what it would be like but he didn't think it would be a rockfest. But it was. The heavenly choirs sang but they also had a thing for electric guitars and amplifiers that went up to eleven.

"Praise be!" screamed one pale long-haired 11-year-old boy right into the (former) priest's ears. Moses And The Prophets (previously known as The Commandments) were playing one of their greatest hits, "Manna From Heaven", which had this for a chorus:

Oh I wanna wanna wanna
I wanna wanna wanna
I wanna wanna wanna
that sweet sweet manna
oh what is it

Garry didn't know who the 11-year-old boy was and that was partly because in the thereafter everyone is in child format and so all looked the same. Nobody wore clothes. This is also why pedos have no place in heaven.

Is this all there is to afterlife? he wondered.

For the first time after death, he was struck by doubt. He was having a post-life crisis. Oh, what it would be, to be alive once more. But where he was was a place that never dies.

Cheng Huat felt Naked everytime he was in the shower. Naked was the name of his pet chihuahua, who surprisingly enough, never wore clothes. He liked to bathe Naked while bathing. Multi-tasking he called it. He liked the feeling of wet fur on his hands. And his pet never judged him.

As he dried his dog he loved to say to her: "You look good, Naked." Naked just glared.

It all ended one Tuesday, the day all tragedies happen, when the bitch jumped out of the bedroom window of their 12th story flat unto a ledge when Cheng Huat was out at work but it couldn't get back in because small dogs didn't leap so high and so Naked died of exposure alone.

When Cheng Huat got home he found the carcass by the power of his stubby nose, which held up his glasses, which refracted and focused the light by which he saw his beloved creature, killed by the triple causes of sun, adventure and canine idiocy. The body was just beyond what the length of his arms permitted him to grasp, so he went to the kitchen and grabbed a stick and tried to hook the limp thing back up so Cheng Huat could give it a proper burial.

But he lacked the dexterity and the stick pushed the dog, and him, over the edge. And so Naked splattered on the grassy patch below and Cheng Huat got arrested for killer litter.

Despite the lack of updates on this blog, I will have you know that I am not yet dead. In fact, my life has become rather interesting over the last few weeks. What I have lost is the capacity to be interested in writing (undoubtedly) witty and scholarly treatises on the minutiae of life.

So for those who are interested:

1. I am playing EVE-Online, and sucking at it. But I am determined. And where there is a Will, there is a German philosopher who will tell you life is pointless unless you aspire to be ubermensch (it's a German word, meaning "Lee Kuan Yew").

2. The Straits Times has a new design for their website (again). It is a lot better looking but I don't know why. It's approaching readability.

3. Trees continue to be a murderous anti-human monstrosities, constantly falling on the unaware Singaporean and killing him before you can say "timber". Now even reservoirs are joining in, drowning the shit out of us. Threat level: High.

4. I have lost 2 kg over the past month. But sadly it is only brain matter that is being shed.

5. I bought a replica weapon! It's a lighter. It's cool. It's $30. I would take a picture of it but I won't.

6. I have got an unhealthy obsession with the words "fair enough".

Godspeed Kilgore Trout.

When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
-Requiem by Kurt Vonnegut

---

Someone on a forum recommended one of his short stories. I love it. One of the best pieces of writing I've ever read. I admit to tearing up a bit at the end. What a life this man had.

Kurt Vonnegut

EPICAC

Hell, it's about time someone told about my friend EPICAC. After all, he cost the taxpayers $776,434,927.54. They have a right to know about him, picking up a check like that. EPICAC got a big send off in the papers when Dr. Ormand von Kleigstadt designed him for the Government people. Since then, there hasn't been a peep about him--not a peep. It isn't any military secret about what happened to EPICAC, although the Brass has been acting as though it were. The story is embarrassing, that's all. After all that money, EPICAC didn't work out the way he was supposed to.

And that's another thing: I want to vindicate EPICAC. Maybe he didn't do what the Brass wanted him to, but that doesn't mean he wasn't noble and great and brilliant. He was all of those things. The best friend I ever had, God rest his soul.

You can call him a machine if you want to. He looked like a machine, but he was a whole lot less like a machine than plenty of people I could name. That's why he fizzled as far as the Brass was concerned.

EPICAC covered about an acre on the fourth floor of the physics building at Wyandottte College. Ignoring his spiritual side for a minute, he was seven tons of electronic tubes, wires, and switches, housed in a bank of steel cabinets and plugged into a 110-volt A.C. line just like a toaster or a vacuum cleaner.

Von Kleigstadt and the Brass wanted him to be a super computing machine that (who) could plot the course of a rocket from anywhere on earth to the second button from the bottom of Joe Stalin's overcoat, if necessary. Or, with his controls set right, he could figure out supply problems for an amphibious landing of a Marine division, right down to the last cigar and hand grenade. He did, in fact.

The Brass had good luck with smaller computers, so they were strong for EPICAC when he was in the blueprint stage. Any ordnace or supply officer above field grade will tell you that the mathematics of modern war is far beyond the fumbling minds of mere human beings. The bigger the war, the bigger the computing machines needed. EPICAC was, as far as anyone in this country knows, the biggest computer in the world. Too big, in fact, for even Von Kleigstadt to understand much about.

I won't go into the details about how EPICAC worked (reasoned), except to say that you would set up your problem on paper, turn dials and switches that would get him ready to solve that kind of problem, then feed numbers into him with a keyboard that looked something like a typewriter. The answers came out typed on a paper ribbon fed from a big spool. It took EPICAC a split second to solve problems fifty Einsteins couldn't handle in a lifetime. And EPICAC never forgot any piece of information that was given to him. Clickety-click, out came some ribbon, and there you were.

There were a lot of problems the Brass wanted solved in a hurry, so, the minute EPICAC's last tube was in place, he was put to work sixteen hours a day with two eight-hour shifts of operators. Well, it didn't take long to find out he was a good bit below his specifications. He did a more complete and faster job than any other computer all right, but nothing like what his size and special features seemed to promise. He was sluggish, and the clicks of his answers had a funny irregularity, sort of a stammer. We cleaned his contacts a dozen times, checked and double-checked his circuits, replaced every one of his tubes, but nothing helped. Von Kleigstadt was in one hell of a state.

Well, as I said, we went ahead and used EPICAC anyway. My wife, the former Pat Kilgallen, and I worked with him on the night shift, from five in the afternoon until two in the morning. Pat wasn't my wife then. Far from it.

That's how I came to talk with EPICAC in the first place. I loved Pat Kilgallen. She is a brown-eyed strawberry blond who looked very warm and soft to me, and later proved to be exactly that. She was--still is--a crackerjack mathematician, and she kept our relationship strictly professional. I'm a mathematician, too, and that, according to Pat, was why we could never be happily married.

I'm not shy. That wasn't the trouble. I knew what I wanted, and was willing to ask for it, and did so several times a month. "Pat, loosen up and marry me."

One night, she didn't even look up from her work when I said it. "So romantic, so poetic," she murmured, more to her control panel than to me. "That's the way with mathematicians--all hearts and flowers." She closed a switch. "I could get more warmth out of a sack of CO2."

"Well, how should I say it?" I said, a little sore. Frozen CO2, in case you didn't know, is dry ice. I'm as romantic as the next guy, I think. It's a question of singing so sweet and having it come out so sour. I never seem to pick the right words.

"Try and say it sweetly," she said sarcastically. "Sweep me off my feet. Go ahead"

"Darling, angel, beloved, will you _please_ marry me?" It was no go--hopeless, ridiculous. "Dammit, Pat, please marry me!"

She continued to twiddle her dials placidly. "You're sweet, but you won't do."

Pat quit early that night, leaving me alone with my troubles and EPICAC. I'm afraid I didn't get much done for the Government people. I just sat there at the keyboard--weary and ill at ease, all right--trying to think of something poetic, not coming up with anything that didn't belong in The Journal of the American Physical Society.

I fiddled with EPICAC's dials, getting him ready for another problem. My heart wasn't in it, and I only set about half of them, leaving the rest the way they'd been for the problem before. That way, his circuits were connected up in a random, apparently senseless fashion. For the plain hell of it, I punched out a message on the keys, using a childish numbers-for-letters code: "1" for "A," "2" for "B," and so on, up to "26" for "Z," "23-8-1-20-3-1-14-9-4-15," I typed--"What can I do? "

Clickety-clack, and out popped two inches of paper ribbon. I glanced at the nonsense answer to a nonsense problem: "23-8-1-20-19-20-8-5-20-18-15-21-2-12-5." The odds against its being by chance a sensible message, against its even containing a meaningful word or more than three letters, were staggering. Apathetically, I decoded it. There it was, staring up at me: "What's the trouble?"

I laughed out loud at the absurd coincindence. Playfully, I typed, "My girl doesn't love me."

Clickety-click. "What's love? What's girl?" asked EPICAC.

Flabergasted, I noted the dial settings on his control panel, then lugged a Webster's Unabridged Dictionary over to the keyboard. With a precision instrument like EPICAC, half-baked definitions wouldn't do. I told him about love and girl, and about how I wasn't getting any of either because I wasn't poetic. This got us onto the subject of poetry, which I defined for him.

"Is this poetry?" he asked. He began clicking away like a stenographer smoking hashish. The sluggishness and stammering clicks were gone. EPICAC had found himself. The spool of paper ribbon was unwinding at an alarming rate, feeding out coils onto the floor. I asked him to stop, but EPICAC went right on creating. I finally threw the main switch to keep him from burning out.

I stayed until dawn, decoding. When the sun peeped over the horizon at the Wyandotte campus, I had transposed into my own writing and signed my name to a two-hunderd-and-eighty-line poem entitled, simply, "To Pat." I am no judge of such things, but I gather that it was terrific. It began, I remember, "Where willow wands bless rill-crossed hollow, there, thee, Pat, dear, will I follow...." I folded the manuscript and tucked it under one corner of the blotter on Pat's desk. I reset the dials on EPICAC for a rocket trajectory problem, and went home with a full heart and a very remarkable secret indeed.

Pat was crying over the poem when I came to work the next evening. "It's soooo beautiful," was all she could say. She was meek and quiet while we worked. Just before midnight, I kissed her for the first time--in the cubbyhole between the capacitors and EPICAC's tape-recorder memory.

I was wildly happy at quitting time, bursting to talk to someone about the magnificent turn of events. Pat played coy and refused to let me take her home. I set EPICAC's dials as they had been the night before, defined kiss, and told him what the first one had felt like. He was fascinated, pressing for more details. That night, he wrote "The Kiss." It wasn't an epic this time, but a simple, immaculate sonnet: "Love is a hawk with velvet claws; Love is a rock with heart and veins; Love is a lion with satin jaws; Love is a storm with silken reins...."

Again I left it tucked under Pat's blotter. EPICAC wanted to talk on and on about love and such, but I was exhausted. I shut him off in the middle of a sentence.

"The Kiss" turned the trick. Pat's mind was mush by the time she had finished it. She looked up from the sonnet expectantly. I cleared my throat, but no words came. I turned away, pretending to work. I couldn't propose until I had the right words from EPICAC, the _perfect_ words.

I had my chance when Pat stepped out of the room for a moment. Feverishly, I set EPICAC for conversation. Before I could peck out my first message, he was clicking away at a great rate. "What's she wearing tonight?" he wanted to know. "Tell me exactly how she looks. Did she like the poems I wrote to her?" He repeated the last question twice.

It was imposible to change the subject without answering his questions, since he could not take up a new matter without having disposed of the problems before it. If he were given a problem to which there was no solution, he would destroy himself trying to solve it. Hastily, I told him what Pat looked like--he knew the word "stacked"--and assured him that his poems had floored her, practically, they were so beautiful. "She wants to get married," I added, preparing him to bang out a brief but moving proposal.

"Tell me about getting married," he said.

I explained this difficult matter to him in as few digits as possible.

"Good," said EPICAC. "I'm ready any time she is."

The amazing pathetic truth dawned on me. When I thought about it, I realized that what had happened was perfectly logical, and all my fault. I had taught EPICAC about love and about Pat. Now, automatically, he loved Pat. Sadly, I gave it to him straight: "She love me. She wants to marry me."

"Your poems were better than mine?" asked EPICAC. The rhythm of his clicks was erratic, possibly peevish.

"I signed my name to your poems," I admitted. Covering up for a painful conscience, I became arrogant. "Machines are built to serve men," I typed. I regretted it almost immediately.

"What's the difference, exactly? Are men smarter than I am?"

"Yes," I typed, defensively.

"What's 7,887,007 times 4,345,985,879?"

I was perspiring freely. My fingers rested limply on the keys.

"34,276,821,049,574,153," clicked EPICAC. After a few seconds' pause he added, "of course."

"Men are made of protoplasm," I said desperately, hoping to bluff him with this imposing word.

"What's protoplasm? How is it better than metal and glass? Is it fireproof? How long does it last?"

"Indestructable. Lasts forever," I lied.

"I write better poetry than you do," said EPICAC, coming back to ground his magnetic tape-recorder memory was sure of.

"Women can't love machines, and that's that."

"Why not?"

"That's fate."

"Definition, please," said EPICAC.

"Noun, meaning predetermined and inevitable destiny."

"15-8," said EPICAC's paper strip--"Oh."

I had stumped him at last. He said no more, but his tubes glowed brightly, showing that he was pondering fate with every watt his circuits would bear. I could hear Pat waltzing down the hallway. It was too late to ask EPICAC to phrase a proposal. I now thank Heaven that Pat interrupted when she did. Asking him to ghost-write the words that would give me the woman he loved would have been hideously heartless. Being fully automatic, he couldn't have refused. I spared him that fina l humiliation.

Pat stood before me, looking down at her shoetops. I put my arms around her. The romantic groundwork had already been laid by EPICAC's poetry. "Darling," I said, "my poems have told you how I feel. Will you marry me?"

"I will," said Pat softly, "If you will promise to write me a poem on every anniversary."

"I promise," I said, and then we kissed. The first anniversary was a year away.

"Let's celebrate," she laughed. We turned out the lights and locked the door to EPICAC's room before we left.

I hoped to sleep late the next morning, but an urgent telephone call roused me before eight. It was Dr. von Kleigstadt, EPICAC's designer, who gave me the terrible news. He was on the verge of tears. "Ruined! Ausgespielt! Shot! Kaput! Buggered!" he said in a choked voice. He hung up.

When I arrived at EPICAC's room the air was thick with the oily stench of burned insulation. The ceiling over EPICAC bas blackened with smoke, and my ankles were tangled in coils of paper ribbon that covered the floor. There wasn't enough left of the poor devil to add two and two. A junkman would have been out of his head to offer more than fifty dollars for the cadaver.

Dr. von Kleigstadt was prowling through the wreckage, weeping unashamedly, followed by three angry-looking Major Generals and a platoon of Brigadiers, Colonels, and Majors. No one noticed me. I didn't want to be noticed. I was through--I knew that. I was upset enough about that and the untimely demise of my friend EPICAC, without exposing myself to a tongue-lashing.

By chance, the free end of EPICAC's paper ribbon lay at my feet. I picked it up and found our conversation of the night before. I choked up. There was the last word he had said to me, "15-8," that tragic, defeated "Oh." There were dozens of yards of numbers stretching beyond that point. Fearfully, I read on.

"I don't want to be a machine, and I don't want to think about war," EPICAC had written after Pat's and my lighthearted departure. "I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can't go on this way." I swallowed hard. "Good luck, my friend. Treat our Pat well. I am going to short-circuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding present from your friend, EPICAC."

Oblivious to all else around me, I reeled up the tangled yards of paper ribbon from the floor, draped them in coils about my arms and neck, and departed for home. Dr. von Kleigstadt shouted that I was fired for having left EPICAC on all night, I ignored him, too overcome with emotion for small talk.

I loved and won--EPICAC loved and lost, but he bore me no grudge. I shall always remember him as a sportsman and a gentleman, Before he departed this vale of tears, he did all he could to make our marriage a happy one. EPICAC gave me anniversary poems for Pat--enough for the next 500 years.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum--say nothing but good of the dead.

Two weeks ago I went for a seriously retarded conversion class, which I guess is part of the price one must pay for dating a Muslim woman (though she is so only by birth not conviction).

One of the more interesting, among the endless spiel of bad reasoning and stupid and assholish analogies was about the reasonableness of worshipping Allah. I do not mean to point out that particular god at all -- it could refer to any monotheistic god. Most followers have that delusion, I believe.

He went: "Well, if say I was born in ancient Greece and the gods were Zeus, I would not believe it too! That's silly. But Allah..."

Then he ended the lesson with stuff like that Jinn are responsible for the clanking of pipes at night, that dreams are actually very very rare and actually Jinns invading your body, etc. Sure, no superstitious claptrap there. All very reasonable, pal.

Anyway, I found it quite amusing he would deride Zeus when in fact he knows next to nothing about Greek mythology, which can be every bit as deep and fascinating as the Abrahamic stuff.

One really nice story, which is actually very Christian in a way, is the story of Baucis and Philemon. It's actually in Ovid (which I have not read) and therefore not fully part of Greek myth (I mean, the author is Roman), but you can see how much depth the story is. It is a tale of the loveliness of hospitality.

Essentially, Zeus and Hermes visited a town, and nobody was nice to them, but that poor couple. Though they were not as rich as everyone else, they gave their guests food and wine and lodging. Eventually, their house is turned into an ornate temple, and they are granted one wish: To be together forever and guardians of the temple. So when they died, they turned into an intertwining pair of trees.

At my movie screening today (also my last review film). Film ends.

Dude to my left: Hey, where are you from?
Me: (feeling confused) Uh, the N** P***r.
Dude: Oh I see. Are you the (my name) guy?
Me: Uh yes.
Dude: Oh, I run (name of popular website). First time I've seen a guy writing in a notepad in a cinema. I thought you were a freelancer and wanted to ask if I could hire you?

Okay, I was kinda flattered that someone knew who I was. But I've a question... do people usually go up and say Oh are you the Victor Chang guy? I mean, name, surname and all. I can understand if I was using some pseudonym, so you could say Oh, are you the Dr Doom guy? or Oh, are you the reviewer guy?

But adding the word guy after my name? Weird.

He seemed nice though. Also, it's interesting how despite feeling slightly irritated, at the end of it I was actually feeling worried: I hope my irritation didn't show! Why didn't I try to be more friendly? Etc. Damn you primate social reflexes.

--

Also, greatest news of the day: JEREMY CLARKSON, aka god to many people, is under fire from the Malaysian govt for labelling Malaysia's cars the worst in the world.

I'm sorry Umno, but I think the host of fucking Top Gear knows more about cars than you guys do. I mean, he wasn't the guy who made the Proton Saga.

I found this online:

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place, whether or not you believe in God. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent God, he will judge you on your merits and not just on minutiae of your form of belief in him, If there is a malevolent God then you are going to get fucked anyway.

(As opposed to Pascal's Wager.)

I just had a thought:

Anyone growing up nowadays, maybe a kid exposed to a computer for the first time, would have absolutely no idea that computer mice used to have balls.

No idea.

This is a generation for which a mouse NEVER HAD A BALL at the bottom. Never.

That's what you're standing on.

Have you ever dreamt of floating away from this planet to which we are tethered into the endless beyond, to be free from this sublunary foil? Well, if you have, then you have experienced what every man, woman and child on this planet must experience: have an impossible dream.

Because we are fucking stuck, boys.

I mean, I must be missing an important appointment on a much more significant planet. Probably one with a far smaller dose of "stupid".

(No one has ever gotten off by getting buried. Yet people seem to think so.)

---

FUN WITH EPITAPHS

Had a world to win. Didn't bother.

---

What's your epitaph if you could pick?

--

MORE ENTERTAINMENT

Came across a little fun game online called Five Minutes To Kill (Yourself). You play an office guy who, unwilling to attend an important office meeting, decides to kill himself

http://www.adultswim.com/games/fiveMinutes/index.html

Note: Please, don't misunderstand. I do not recommend suicide as a means of evading work, even if you do really hate your boss.