skype
go download skype at www.skype.com and talk to me online for free. really clear and fast too.

Washington D.C.
Hurrah for the three day weekend. Americans are so afraid of offending minorities (i.e. African Americans) that all the good colleges (Yale and Messiah included, *wink*) ignore all federal holidays (Veteran's Day, Memorial Day, Columbus Day) except Martin Luther King Jr Day. Who am I to complain though.
Woke up at 12pm today, walked groggily to the bathroom for my ritual beautification and then a guy from the floor pops in and asks if I'm interested in a road trip. Hell, yeah!
Where to? Umm, we don't know.
Do I have to pack clothes? Umm, if you want to. But we're guys so we'd be fine.
So off we go, venturing into the unknown (south of Highway 15). We drive for hours and then we come to the Crossroads. To the left, Baltimore. To the right, Washington D.C. . I say 'Right' and we turn right.
Entered Washington through Georgetown, the affluent Georgetown Uni suburb. Very very nice. I wanna go also.
Drove around in D.C. and it starts raining icy rain. We find Chinatown (always the favourite) and settle on a confused Asian restaurant called 'Wok and Roll' . I order sushi.
We drive around more. See all the monuments and cathedrals and memorials. See one you see them all. Get lost in D.C. and drive around in circles. End up in a Starbucks in Arlington, Virginia. Starbucks reminds me of the times we used to study at the Starbucks in Marine Parade, really sweet memories. It doesn't matter if it's a Starbucks in New York or in Arlington, VA (wth?).
Try to find our way home. On the way home, play a game called Puddidle. Spot a car that has only one headlamp working on the opposite lane and hit the ceiling of the car and yell 'Puddidle'. Last person to hit the ceiling has to take a piece of clothing off.
So here I am on this 2 hour journey back to Messiah with all my clothes on and these two guys stark naked (including the driver). This other guys is just about to lose his pants when we turn into the gas station and then decide to start the game over.
Good day at the office.

Beating the System
By DONALD CARSWELL
Crimson editors over the decades have made some memorable attempts to capture exam period in newsprint. The following op-ed, “Beating the System,” won the Dana Reed Prize for undergraduate writing in 1951. The Crimson proudly ran it every reading period until 1962, when it irked one maligned and anonymous grader enough to reply.The Harvard examination system is designed, according to its promulgators, to test two specific things: knowledge of trends and knowledge of detail. Men approaching the examination problem have three choices: 1. flunking out; 2. doing work; or 3. working out some system of fooling the grader. The first choice of solution is too permanent and the second takes too long.
This article is designed to explain how to achieve the third answer to this perplexing problem by the use of the vague generality, the artful equivocation and the overpowering assumption.
It seems pretty obvious that in any discussion of the various methods whereby the crafty student attempts to show the grader that he knows a lot more than he actually does, the vague generality is the key device. A generality is a vague statement that means nothing by itself, but when placed in an essay on a specific subject very well might mean something to the grader. The true master of a generality is the man who can write a 10-page essay, which means nothing at all to him, and have it mean a great deal to anyone who reads it. The generality writer banks on the knowledge possessed by the grader, hoping the marker will read things into his essay.
Every non-mathematical field in the University has its own set of vague generalities. For instance:
“Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme.” (Philosophy)
“The whole thing boils down to government rights vs. property rights.” (Government)
“Moby Dick is written on three levels.” (English)
“The Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman nor an empire.” (History)
“Locke is a transitional figure.” (Philosophy)
“Marx turned Hegel upside down.” (General Education)
“Any theory of underconsumption and purchasing power must be grounded in the psychology of the people.” (Economics)
“Berlioz is the founder of modern orchestration.” (Music)
“Shaw’s heroes are men of moral passion.” (English)
“Differentiation and integration are fundamental to the dynamic maturation of the human organism.” (Social Relations)
To check the operation of a vague generality under fire, take the typical example, “Hume brought empiricism to its logical extreme.” The question is asked, “Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?” Our hero replies by opening his essay with, “David Hume, the great Scottish philosopher, brought empiricism to its logical extreme. If these be the spirit of the age in which he lived, then he was representative of it.” This generality expert has already taken his position for the essay. Actually he has not the vaguest idea of what Hume really said, or in fact what he said it in, or in fact if he ever said anything at all. But by never bothering to define empiricism, he may write indefinitely on the issue, virtually without contradiction.
Of course, some people are naturally conservative; they avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don’t want to have to go out on a limb when they don’t know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be partially junked and replaced by the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around the point.
The artful equivocation is an almost impossible concept to explain, but it is easy to demonstrate. Let us begin with the question, “Did the philosophical beliefs of Hume represent the spirit of the age in which he lived?”
The equivocator would answer it in this way: “Some people believe that David Hume was not necessarily a great philosopher because his thought was merely a reflection of the conditions around him, colored by his own personality.
“Others, however, strongly support Hume’s greatness on the ground that the force of his personality definitely affected the age in which he lived. It is not a question of the cart before the horse in either case, merely a problem of which came first, the chicken or the egg. In any case, there is much to be said on both sides.”
Just exactly what the equivocator’s answer has to do with the actual question is hard to say. The equivocator writes an essay about the point, but never on it. Consequently, the grader often mentally assumes that the right answer is known by the equivocator and marks the essay as an extension of the point rather than a complete irrelevance. The artful equivocation must imply the writer knows the right answer, but it must never be definite enough to eliminate any possibilities.
There is a third method of dealing with examination questions—that is by the use of overpowering assumption, an assumption so cosmic that it is sometimes accepted. For example, we wrote that it was pretty obvious that the vague generality was the key device in any discussion of examination writing. Why is it obvious? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t obvious at all, but just an arbitrary point from which to start. This is an example of an unwarranted assumption.
In the long run the expert in the use of unwarranted assumption comes off better than the equivocator. He would deal with our question on Hume not by baffling the grader or by fencing him but like this: “It is absurd to discuss whether Hume is representative of the age in which he lived unless we note the progress of that age on all fronts. After all, Hume did not live in a vacuum.”
At this point our assumption expert proceeds to discuss anything which strikes his fancy at the moment. If he can sneak the first assumption past the grader, then the rest is clear sailing. If he fails, he still gets a fair amount of credit for his irrelevant but fact-filled discussion of scientific progress in the 18th century. And it is amazing what some graders will swallow in the name of intellectual freedom.
This op-ed first ran on June 12, 1950.

princetonians! *sigh*
Nude Olympics return to Princeton on Dean's Date
Jill Mills
Princetonian Staff Writer
    An old sport has once again been revived at Princeton.
    Last night, the Nude Olympics returned to Princeton University. Since the first snow fall of the year occurred over Winter Break, University officials decided to hold the Olympics, banned in 1999 but brought back this year for the 30-year anniversary of the event, at 5 p.m. on Dean's Date.
    Despite the lack of snow on the ground, the University justified the event because of the extreme cold. For effect, the University's service staff brought in ice from campus dining halls, the ice rink, and the cryogenics laboratory, housed in the basement of Sanford Hall.
    While the University banned the Olympics five years ago because of cases of sexual assault, public drunkenness, and frozen testicles, the Olympics resumed as good as new behind Cannon Club, which suspended operations in 1969 and now houses the University's writing program.
    While Borough Police showed up at around 6 p.m., according to several athletes, as nude participants made their way to the eating clubs for dinner, they were unable to arrest anyone. Several policemen were reported taking photographs of nude participants, however, according to one credible source.
    Event organizers Alana Evans and Alex Dane instituted several new events for what they hoped would be a new and improved version of the Olympics. Events, in which the Class of 2004 contested against the Class of 2005, included a keg toss and the naked dash, which led up to the biggest event of the night, the Pentathlon, in which junior Hans Garron took the lead early in the first event, the trench swim, and held on through the hill jump to take the win.
    Other events were held earlier in the evening. In the wheelbarrow race, the junior duo of Shannyn Allison and Xochi Sanchez managed to edge out the senior team in a photo finish. However, in the Eliminator, in which male members of each class had to hold their genitalia in a glass of ice cold water, senior Austin Starkweather took gold, pushing the Class of 2004 to the overall win.
    After the contest, a visibly shrunk Starkweather celebrated his victory in style.
    "Dude, my unit is friggin' freezing! At least there are plenty of hot chicks around to warm me up," he said.
    At the time of print, Nassau Hall was still speechless in regards to last night's events.
An idea is born
    Evans and Dane, both juniors, decided to lobby the administration to bring back the Nude Olympics after threatening to transfer to Wesleyan.
    "I think the human body is a beautiful, beautiful thing," Evans said. "And, quite frankly, there is no outlet for physical expression on this campus."
    Evans, a former dancer with Body Hype and Expressions, teamed up with Dane, a Yugoslav immigrant who formerly worked on the underground teenage sex scene in Eastern Europe, and pitched her idea to University President Shirley Tilghman.
    The president was initially opposed to the idea, but then admitted she would add support for the event and bring it to the Trustees if the organizers could validate the event with an historical explanation.
    Though the Nude Olympics were officially founded in 1970, Dane insisted that the actual 30 year celebration of the event was 2004, as there were four years in which the event was postponed because of no snow.
    At a champagne brunch in the spring of last year, an inebriated Board of Trustees "ate up the idea," a visibly proud Evans recalled.
    "It was weird, a bunch of them started pouting about how you only go to college once, and depriving us of expressing ourselves and enjoying life was a deprivation of our rights as American citizens," Evans said.

gibberish
i swear i will lose my eyesight from my blog voyeurism. i stay awake in the wee hours of the morning with the faint glow of my gooseneck lamp and read all the blogs in my favorites folder, most of the people I don't even know, or know somewhat.
sudden realisation that we're j4s this year. what the f@ck?

grades and photos
GPA for Fall 2003: 3.90
My favorite photos from the Boston and New York trip are at www.ofoto.com
Login e-mail address: simweelee02@yahoo.co.uk
Password: reddoor62

update
too lazy to write about events so here's an email i sent to some people.
Hi there

I have so much time to kill in New York so I must as well write an email to y'all and tell you about the wonderful Christmas/New Year holiday I had *gloat*.

Ie-Tsen, myself and two other people (if you know Lip Yoong and someone else from Cornell) went to Boston for Christmas and it was glorious. Okay, maybe a little exaggeration there but it was good nonetheless. Boston is very historic and quaint but it does have its modern bits too. The Boston guidebook described the night scene as "a few notches below pathetic" though so we didn't get to gyrate our hips and swig the Bacardi. We did however visit a gay club on Christmas eve but left soon after we entered because we were uncomfortable (read: naked man on stage!). Visited Harvard (kicking myself for not scoring having a perfect score on the SATs, starting my own charity, and finding a cure to AIDS), the Freedom Trail (a bunch of landmarks around Boston that symbolize American Independence), went shopping (blew way too much cash. Hope I don't get stranded in New York), and ate a lot (I mean a lot! We roughly had two meals a day but we had two GOOD meals. I had really authentic Italian pasta in Little Italy, lotsa Malaysian food at a restaurant called Penang (they're everywhere, it's scary. They even have one in Harvard.) We went on a ferry ride across the Charles River at sunset and the view was spectacular (photos to come).

Okay, enough of Boston. Let's talk about New York City baby. It's New Year's Eve. The city is crowded. Everyone doesn't speak in an American accent. The city holds its breath for a miniscule ball to drop. And Wee Lee was smack in the middle of everything. We arrived at Times Square at 2pm and already it was crowded. We made a beeline for the bathroom, eased ourselves and then waited impatiently for the next 10 hours to watch the infamous Times Square Ball to drop. There was reportedly 650,000 people at the event and we were so close to the ball though we did pay a steep price (no toilet for 10 hours, no food, COLD). We were directly opposite the MTV studios and if you watch TRL enough you'd know that they have an open studio so we were watching Hillary Duff, Clay Aiken, and a band that looked like A Simple Plan (no sound mah, cannot hear) while freezing our butts off. But I've done it. Neh neh ni boo boo. I was at Times Square when the ball dropped. I got a free orange hat. I may or may not have made a TV appearance. Hurrah.

Other places that I've visited at NYC are Columbia University (miniature Harvard, spectacular still), Fifth Avenue (wah so expensive, Ie-Tsen went crazy), the WTC site (only constructions site now), Wall Street, Central Park, Macy's and Chinatown. Great Malaysian food here. There's another Penang, there's a restaurant called 'Nyonya', and there's 'Taste Good' all Malaysian.

Right now I'm in the New York Public Library and it is really awesome. The architecture is marvellous, I feel like it isn't real. Very intricate ceilings (one Michaelangelo like mural), chandeliers, and free internet access. Hurrah.

Okay, I hope the computer doesn't eat up my entry. Hope I didn't offend you by bragging too much. Later.

Regards

Wee Lee