Sunday, 8 January 2012

even hollywood gets it right sometimes

I'll say it now: I love British accents. I think they're really cute. I am of course talking about the generic BBC accents, not the Scottish or the Irish ones, and not the cockney slang of the East End. Not that I dislike Scottish or Irish accents, just that they can be a bit strong for me at times. Yes, I do admit to having a slight fetish for British accents.

Christmas in the UK was a very different experience from Christmas back here at home. Christmas in the UK remains what it should have been all this time: a family holiday. Christmas in Singapore has been bastardised by capitalism, and has become a commercial holiday. What I mean is this.

It's not very fun to be in the UK for Christmas if you're a tourist, I'll grant you that. The city is quite literally dead. Public transport in the form of the tube and buses have completely shut down, and you would be hard pressed to even find a cab. We woke up on Christmas morning and walked down the street for something to eat. The severity of the shut down of infrastructure did not quite hit us until we saw that Starbucks was closed. That stirred the vague inkling in the back of our conciousness that the world had stopped moving. This inkling then exploded into a fully conceptualised feeling when we chanced upon a closed Macdonalds. The world's most reliable 24 hour fast food chain was closed, and it was then and there that the full severity of the situation hit us: the world had come to a stop in the UK.

Christmas is and remains a holiday to spend with your family and loved ones in the UK, not some giant shopping feste that Singaporeans are so accustomed to. This I feel has some meaning to it at least. What we have here in Singapore just feels like a perversion of the holiday.

For some reason, UK has a ridiculously high population of cute and incredibly beautiful girls. Even the Asian girls looked better in the UK. I mean, there were some obviously PRC girls who didn't look quite half bad. I realised that in the big cities like London and Tokyo, the people there are actually thinner and better looking than in the suburban areas or the smaller cities. I don't know why.

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I started watching New Girl. I didn't even know what the plot was about. I just watched because Zooey Dechanel was in it. Although I am wont to deny it, I actually do have a type. I mean, I do go for the traditional beauty I guess, like those models on the covers of magazines and such, but I have an inclination for a certain look. I can't quite describe what it is (a linguistic failure and limitation on my part), but suffice to say Zooey Dechanel, Anne Hathaway, and Kat Dennings all fit snugly inside. And although Natalie Portman doesn't quite fit in the same caste, I still have a certain soft spot for her.

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I respect Darwin and his works. I suppose I can't say with absolute certainty that he was right (damn you epistemology, you have permanently scarred me). But I do like to say I believe he was right. But if we reduce his theory of evolution, and simplify it to the brink of over simplification, Darwin believed men's purpose to be carriers of their gene, and that their only purpose was to reproduce that gene. In essence, the purpose of our existence was to reproduce. Which if you think about it, makes life pretty meaningless.

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