This week’s Top Ten List: The Best Way to Rid your Cravings for Midnight Snacks

10. Sellotape the door of your refrigerator after dinner every night.

9. Stick pictures of delicious food near your bed so you can fantasise about it before going to sleep.

8. When the craving comes, do 10 push-ups. Repeat this set 5 times, with rest time of 45-60 seconds in between sets. After a while you will get thirsty. Drink lots of water. Then you’ll be too bloated to eat.

7. Buy one of those”Faces of Death” VCDs or DVDs. After watching, you will definitely lose your appetite.

6. Surf the net and search for images under “diseased liver” or “diseased stomach”. (Didn’t work for me, I felt like throwing up each time)

5. Ask your wife/husband/partner to bitch-slap you hard with a pineapple every time you utter the words “Honey, I feel like a snack….”.

4. Start smoking. Hey, the title of this post is not The Best Way to Rid your Cravings for Smoking, is it?

3. Sellotape your mouth after dinner every night.

2. Chew sugar-free gum while watching TV. It works.

1. Meditate for at least 5 minutes every day, repeating to yourself this simple phrase, “I am a healthy person who eats enough for a day and no more.” This is what I actually do.

Food for Thought: Nocturnal Nibblings

I’m one for “no food after 10.00 pm” because I firmly believe that your stomach needs a good night’s rest to prepare for yet another full day of digestion and apprehension after indigestion. I used to snack a lot after 10 previously (a lot here is every night, sometimes a few times each night) but now I’ve reduced this detrimental habit quite tremendously. In the old days, I’d keep stocks of instant noodles, an assortment of nuts, potato chips of all kinds of flavours, more instant noodles, etc. Having read some health articles a couple of months back (Reader’s Digest “Foods That Harm, Foods That Heal: An A-Z Guide to Safe and Healthy Eating, 1996) on the effects of eating after a specific time of the day prior to bedtime and the ill-consequences it has on various vital internal organs of your body (liver most of all), I decided to end my snacking fiasco once and for all. Didn’t actually stop altogether though at first, because I still had massive stocks of ready-to-eat grubberies in my grub storage place. So I decided I’ll stop completely AFTER I’ve exhausted my existing supply.

Which worked. Well, sort of. I still do snack on occasions, but now it’s strictly limited to weekends when I’m at home. My 4-year old son loves to snack so I’ve got a legit excuse to help myself to the old habit once in a while, shall I say it’s father and son quality time sort of thing.

Notwithstanding the above, in my post “Top Ten List of The Best Way to Rid your Cravings for Midnight Snacks“, I’m suggesting some ways which could help alleviate your nocturnal nibblings, and keep it at bay. Digest the suggestions and good luck!

Paintball – Humble Beginnings of a Revolution

Paintball.

I was never really interested with paintball until one of my old friends, David Bareng, went on and on, rambling about it everytime he wrote something on the group’s Facebook wall. Somehow by pure coincidence one of my colleagues went for one of these paintball excursion just over 3 weeks ago, and he was pretty excited about it, ended up giving me the contact number of the person who runs the place. So I just sort of nonchalantly wrote it down somewhere and chucked it away, didn’ t really bothered to do anything about it. Until one day (which was just a few days ago) that one of our friends said, Hey, why don’t we open a paintball place? Now the thought of doing business was one which I would never let go just as simply, so immediately I replied back to say, yes I think I know of one guy who runs a place like that. And I was on the case like a cat under fire. All the query and search for the one known place in Kuching where paintball exists eventually brought us to a place called Sungai Buah (that’s Buah River) at Pasir Pandak, about 25 km north of the City. That was Sunday afternoon, 28th October 2007.

The place was pretty secluded, a privately-owned joint with an area of about an acre I believe. The actual “battle field” (that’s not paintball jargon by the way) or paintball playing area was only half of the entire acre. It looked kind of small if you stand at the visitor’s entrance and equipment area. But once you’re out in the battle zone, it ain’t as small as you perceived it earlier.

My first encounter with the main equipments used in the game, such as the ever-portable marker and the paintball capsules, led my business mind to think, now where can I get these for half the price and the same quality so I can earn more than these guys when I open my own paintball joint? After that quick thought I decided to numb my business instincts and switched on to survival mode instead, for that is what I will need most out there in the “zone.

True enough. Hard running on not-so-rough-but-can-be-knee-buckling terrain, ducking high velocity flying-coloured pellets – dodging them as much as you can – and crashing into hard bunkers (these are like your on-the-ground covers to hide from your enemies) plus trying to spray your opponents with your “gun” with as much degree of accuracy as you possibly can. Fun, real fun. Especially if you manage to shoot someone right in the face/helmet.

I had a good time. So did my other two comrades, Alvin and Dominic. Dominic was a easy target because he was tall and lanky. Here are some photos, before we were shooting at each other, with our rented gears.

For those interested to shoot and be shot at, you may contact:

Operation Santubong, Mr. Jolly Alex (mobile: 016 872 7511). They operate only on Saturday, Sunday and public holidays from 10am – 7pm.

Nobel Peace Prize 2007 Winners – Who gains the most?

I was reading some text over the net on Al Gore and the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s winning the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, and the former vice president used the attention to warn that global warming is “the greatest challenge we’ve ever faced.”

It is always interesting to see how awards or prizes are most of the time given to those who apparently deserve it due to years upon years of labouring for their good purpose to fight for a just cause. And more so these winners would have done it openly and publicly and with much publicity that even those from outer space could tune in to their intergalactic satellite dishes to watch live performances of worldwide telecasted concert engineered to the very cause of saving the planet. What better reward to receive than a world-acclaimed prize of “trying to do good to the environment” which cannot fend for itself in this modern era.

Let’s not forget of course, the Kyoto Protocol. Now the US GOvernment under President Bush’s administration has abandoned the Kyoto Protocol because he said “it would harm the U.S. economy and because it did not require immediate cuts by countries like China and India. The treaty aimed to put the biggest burden on the richest nations that contributed the most carbon emissions.” The U.S. Senate voted against mandatory carbon reductions before the Kyoto negotiations were completed. The treaty was never presented to the Senate for ratification by the Clinton administration.

It’s always easy to criticise those who try to do their part in the world, be it saving the whales or the championing the fight to have clean air to breathe, and it;s never easy being those doing the fighting. For those of us who are able to do something, then it’s high time we do do something about it. We don’t have to wait for Al Gore and his bunch of merry men to air power-consuming concerts all over the world and ferry expensive artists to perform in them to get our attention on the subject, we just need to open our eyes a bit wider and read just a little bit more and find out what’s happening to the world around us. The weather is enough to tell us that something is not right. No amount of day-long lectures on Kyoto Protocol can save the world. It is up to us individually, you and me.

Listen to the Earth, she speaks through her children. The wind, the sun, the rain, the seas. Do your part to conserve her, do what is right. Don’t wait for Mr Gore or Nobel prize givers or any other media-friendly conservationists. Do it because you want to, and you know you need to.

 

Charlize Theron/Murdered Myanmar Monks

This week’s What’s Hot:
Charlize Theron. Voted by Esquire magazine as Sexiest Woman Alive. Really.

This week’s What’s Not:
Murdered monks in Myanmar. May those who authorized the annihilation rot in hell.

 

This week’s top ten list is “Habits I do not need but have to live with”

This week’s top ten list is “Habits I do not need but have to live with”:
10. Holding back a fart to maintain social politeness.
9. Subconsciously digging my nose and tasting the dig.
8. Procrastinating to go to the dentist – until you have your next ice-cold drink
7. Appear deaf when your better half laments her stressful day at work or at home

6. Unzip my pants AS I walk to the toilet
5. Talking on the cell and fiddling with the stereo while driving without your seat belts on (Warning: This is a dangerous and live-threatening habit.)

4. Unknowingly stare at a well –endowed woman’s bosom. With glee.
3. Knowingly stare at a well-endowed woman’s bosom. With double glee.

2. Forgetting what you wanted to say just moments after you were rudely interrupted by a fellow colleague/wife/girlfriend on another not-so-important subject matter.

1. Masturbating hard when you cannot have sex.

The Prophet

One of my favourite modern literatures of all time – Kahlil Gibran’s The Prophet, first published in 1926. I first heard of his work back in my university days in Imperial College. I remembered being introduced to Gibran by a good friend and also my faculty mate Ramanath Gheerawo, or Ram, as we called him. The copy of this book I have is published by Penguin Arkana, which I bought somewhere in one of those small bookshops in Camden. That was in 1994, I actually scribbled some textural idiosyncrasies down with the year of purchase on the preface page. The book describes him as a poet, philosopher and artist, a Lebanese who was considered by the millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings as a genius of his age.

The Prophet speaks of simple, daily things which most of us take for granted, living our lives through day by day without even as much as a glance to what happens around us. I bring to your attention to an extract of his writings which, until this very day, catches me in a subtle avalanche and renews my belief in what love is supposed to be:

Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say, ‘God is in my heart,’ but rather, ‘I am in the heart of God.’
And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil itself.
But if you love and must needs have desires, let these by your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own understanding of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged hear and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate love’s ecstacy;
To return home at eventide with gratitude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.