20/5b. Wheeeew.

I’m so glad that the week’s over. I almost died of suffocation from all the work.

It has been a rather hectic week, with deadlines, quizzes, exams and assignments strewn all over the week. I recall using breaks in between classes just to finish up assignments due for the next class, and cutting corners on some of my assignments just so that I’d have something to submit. It was sheer madness, somewhat akin to what usually happens towards to end of a typical semester, except that it’s mid-sem this time.

I’m pretty amazed by the seemingly relaxed workload of ZL & WS. They don’t seem to have much work to do, perhaps just plenty of readings, as ZL has said. Or maybe I’m just an inefficient worker, since I have such a short concentration span. Haha. Just yesterday I swear I re-read a sentence in an article at least three times just to make sure I had gotten the right meaning. All because of the awkward phrasing. Oh, here’s it anyway:

“The court ruled that unless an ad could not reasonably be interpreted as anything other than an ad urging the support or defeat of a candidate, it was eligible for an “as applied” exception to the McCain-Feingold limits on issue ads close to an election.”

I think there’s a double or triple negative within the first half of the statement, which totally confused me. And reading such statements at 11pm last night isn’t exactly the wisest thing to do, but given the circumstances (I had to hand it in this morning), there wasn’t much of an option.

Watched the girl’s basketball team yesterday with the other two as well. the girl’s team played against Furman and won 66-44. The girls led Furman throughout the game, with Furman coming close to catching up only during early first half of the game. Not much of a bball junkie here, so I can’t comment much. I shall give you photos then.

Court action

half-time score

time out cheerleading action

The cheerleaders are like so spontaneous. Each time they have a time-out, the cheerleaders will start running out and do some cheering routines and simple elevators and extensions, and on longer timeouts they will do the pyramids. Quite well rehearsed and clean execution, given that they have to always be prepared and spontaneous in such a dynamic setting.

halftime entertainment.

They have like various half-time entertainment, like this where two idiots came out and started doing sumo wrestling. And there was also this segment where they placed two baskets in the middle of the courts, and they were giving out free pizzas to whoever that can throw a volleyball into the baskets from the spectator stand. Quite cool.

my two compatriots in elon. One fiddling with another’s camera.

final score.

Yeah, and it was welcomed break amid my mad week. There will be a rugby game tonight, so hopefully I can go and take more photos!

20/5a. Exams.

Near v. Minnesota
Virginia v. Black
Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier
Gitlow v. New York
Lovell v. Griffin
Tinker v. Des Moines
U.S. v, Eichman/Haggerty
Gooding v. Wilson
Schenck v. U.S.
Brandenburg v. Ohio
New York Times v. Sullivan
Gertz v. Welch

I just finished my first exam about a while ago, and as I was walking out I was calculating my losses. I left about 17 marks undone, and I’ve got a handful of cases and significance matches wrong as well.

And I just found out that a C is worth 73 points, and that means, I have to get everything else correct in order to get a C.

I wonder if my passing equivalent is a D or a C.

Haha, WELL. It’s over. =)

20/4d. Roomie-woey.

I wonder if I should love or hate my roomie.

(And it doesn’t mean I’m taking any particular stand wrt the above statement for now.)

He makes me spend more time in the library and study more as a result. And here’s why.

You see, he is a musician. A guitarist and a singer, to be exact. He has two acoustic guitars lying around in the room, and he makes full use of them. Well, at least one of them. The other one is tucked somewhere in the closet, which I figure is one that he uses as a back up. Oh and he has this really cool device that he wears around his neck that holds a harmonica, so he can play the harmonica and the guitar at the same time.

I think he’s a musician-composer as well. I saw him experimenting with the guitar, and occasionally when I peeked at his computer, he seem to be crafting prose of some sort, which should be lyrics.

He loves to watch youtube videos of singer-instrumentalists, usually country music though. And he often surfs guitar tab webpages and then start playing and singing what he just heard.

He has a pretty nice voice. And I figured that most Americans who can sing somewhat has a very deep and penetrating voice. Somehow it just pulls through, unlike the very shallow sounds that some Asians make. It’s pretty obvious in the way they speak as well.

The thing is, he plays and sings and plays the harmonica almost everyday. I can’t recall if it’s everyday, though. And he doesn’t do it indiscriminately. Most days I’m cool with it, and I usually welcome it as free entertainment. After all, when is it that you get free live music on a daily basis?

But that also means that I can’t get any work done. While I am OK with visual distractions around me, audial distractions are a big peeve to me. I don’t need absolute silence in that; anything that rises above the average noise level and gets through to my ear drums just destroy my (already short) attention span.

Like today. I was trying to ge some reading done on my laptop after class, and he started giving his own solo performance. Somehow it just got to me, maybe it’s because I don’t have that high a tolerance level today. And not when I have a major exam tomorrow. (Okay, that’s an excuse.) So I packed my bag and left the place.

So here I am, out of my room, in the library, and enjoying the peace and quietness that I love.

20/4c. Oscars

You know, i’m so happy that Atonement won the Best Original Score for last night’s Oscar. I fell in love with the soundtrack when I watched the music. I’m just so amazed at the way the music weaved into the audio engineering of the entire film almost seamlessly, the exploitation of the various sound effects and cues for the composition of the music.

Ahhh. And i spent another 12 bucks to buy the soundtrack off Amazon. =p

20/4b. 17 Reruns

In almost every media law class, the lecturer would somehow talk about the elections or related matters. I just find it kind of amusing that he (or was it someone else?) said that last night’s democratic debate seemed almost like (yet another) rerun, debating about the same issues – health care, iraq, economy, etc etc – again. I caught bits and pieces of last night’s debate in between my regular chat session with jess, so i think the only thing i clearly remembered was the part where Clinton mentioning Obama’s borrowing of words for his own speech, saying that “that is not change you can believe in, that is change you can xerox.” LOL. I think that would be one of the ‘highlights’ of the debate, if anyone was to remember anything. I wonder if she regretted saying that, because I think it sounded really crap.

I don’t know about most other foreigners, but I feel that most people outside of US have a love-hate relationship with the Clintons. Most pro-democratic students that I hear talking on college grounds seem to like Obama a lot, thinking that he’ll be able to bring a fresh wave of change and whip the administration into shape. Like for yesterday’s assignment, almost everyone else did a campaign poster for Obama except for three, including me.

From an external perspective, there are those who genuinely believe that US government needs a clean break from the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton era that took US on a roller coaster ride, especially in the past decade, but on the other hand, I think that there are some people who wants Clinton elected for various reasons. One of the more ‘evil’ reasons, I think is because having her elected is guaranteeing ample entertainment in the news and politics realm for the next four years. Having the a female to be the president will be a first. Having a former first lady to be the president will be a first, too. Having someone with such a colourful past to be president, will, is not exactly the first, but coupled with the previous two firsts will make a fairly happening years to come, especially when people start losing track of the number of promises made. I mean, who’s counting? And who’s going to make sure that she, or he, is going to execute every single promise that has been made since the start of the campaign until the day he, or she, steps into the Oval Office?

Much grievances have been aired over the many many years about dissatisfaction with leaders and so on, and to my surprise, Clinton had the highest end-of-office rating of only 65%. Wow. With 65% as the peak of the range, I wondered who fared the worst. Hey, you elected him, remember? I wonder how Bush will fare. (insert evil chuckles here.) Just today, I overheard someone in class detailing how a foreigner asked her what she thought about Bush and she had this to say, “It’s not just you (foreigners) who don’t like Bush. We Americans don’t like him either.” That tells you a lot.

So well, let the new show begin and we shall watch hereon. I’m just beginning to love this bitchy war.

20/4a. New York Laundry (Shop)

Today was an embarrassing day. Well, not quite, but near enough to be real scare.

I’m taking an advertising copywriting class here, and on Tuesday we had a print ads assignment. We had to produce three ads, which are:

1) An ad for a space travel program, which will allow private citizens to take a space shuttle and orbit around for the world three times for $1.5m.
2) An ad to convince college students to vote for your favourite presidential candidate.
3) Find an ad that you DON’T like, and redo the ad.

I did the first two yesterday, and this is what I got. C’mon, gimme a pat on the back!
(click on them to enlarge.)

Space Travel – The Orbiter

Clinton Campaign

The first two are pretty easy, even though they were pretty time consuming. It took me the whole of four hours yesterday evening to finish them up in the library. By the time I was done with the second ad, I was tired, cold and completely out of ideas. So I left the last one to finish up during the two-hour break I have between my chemistry test and the copywriting class.

I had a chemistry test today, and I was able to finish it and leave class early, so I had like nearly three hours to do my ad. I was so glad for the amount of time I had, I tell you. I even had time to go for lunch. So when I settled in the library after lunch, I googled for ‘bad ads’, and I came across this page on commercial-archive.com that had a couple of nice and bad ads. This was the bad ad that I found:

New York Laundry Ad

I saw this one on New York Laundry, and because it was in such low resolution, I couldn’t read the fine prints and thought it was some laundry shop ad. So I happily came up with an idea, and amazingly finished up the ad in less than an hour. Boy, it was easy. And here’s what I got:

Bammm. That’s why they tell you complacency is always the worst stumbling block, alongside with failure to check your sources, reckless disregard for checking your facts, yada yada. So later in class, I was feeling a little bored with the presentations, so something just told me to google for New York Laundry. I googled it, and to my horror, I found out that NYL is not a laundrette, but an apparel brand instead. I almost died on the spot, I swear. I have already printed the advertisements, and my laptop is dangerously low on power for a high-power job like photoshop. The saving grace was, there was still a long way to go before my turn, which add up to be about 40 minutes or so.

In those times, I just stuck it out and switched on my laptop, and reworded the ad, while trying to keep calm and not fidgety because of my complete stupidity about this brand. Thank god it was done, and I decided, heck with it, just present both to the class.

On another note, almost the entire class, less four people (including myself) did an ad for Obama. I was just wondering, does Obama really has such a huge reach to the young voters in the country? Everyone’s talking like he’s the change factor, and with him it’ll be a clean start for the US government, with fresh perspectives and policies. Everyone seems to be ridiculing Clinton, someone even came up with “Even Bill doesn’t want Hill” for his ad campaign. I thought it was pretty clever, but it must have kind of stink in the other camp. C’mon, give them a break, must we always rake up the skeletons and old debts?

20/3d. Cham ah, chem.

Questions you never thought you’ll ask in chemistry lessons:

Why is it that oxygen attracts electrons?

I don’t understand how to you derive Mg(OH)2 from Mg and OH. How do you get that?

How do you get 14 (atomic mass) for nitrogen?

20/3b. Bowling balls and other bores.

Truth be told, this is the first weekend I actually stayed in Elon. For the past two Saturdays I’ve been spending the night at my mom’s. The international office brought us out for a bowling session today! It’s part of the series of events that they planned for us, so we decided to just make it and make the best out of it.

Unfortunately shortly after I stepped out of my dorm room, my nose decided to take a jog by running non-stop. I caught a cold and was sneezing non-stop en route the to bowling alley, so I decided to drop out of the game and watch them bowl instead. WS decided that her wrist didn’t feel like handling heavy balls today too, so she accompanied Akane & myself to be the self-appointed photographers. That leaves ZL to be our sole representative from Singapore. “As usual,” as he would say.

Everyone seemed equally competent in the early moments of the game, with really comical demonstrations by some like Carole & Ruben, and some really distinguished performances by the Germans, Marcel & Christian, and the ICC reps, Paul & Francois. Distinguished not by professional standards, but by our standards when the average score was probably about 70 or so. Our Singaporean representative did pretty ‘average’, due to the wide disparity in the scores. When asked why so, he said that he hasn’t played since he was 14. And he added, “At least I played!” Oops.

Well, WS & I got pretty bored watching them after the first game, so we went off to play pool by ourselves. We were pretty pathetic at our game as well, with the first game ending with a premature pocketing of the black ball, and the second game unfinished because they were done bowling.

After the game, we headed back to campus, and I suggested that ZL & I go over to WS’s apartment to cook for the night. So we asked Francois for a ride to Lowes for some marketing, before going to Target to pick up a pot and catching the shuttle back to school.

We had instant noodles in mind, since I brought so much from Singapore, so we were shopping for ingredients to go with the noodles. Initially we got some chicken thigh fillet to put in the chicken, but when we saw the roast chicken, we threw the chicken fillet back into the freezer and went for the roast chicken instead. We got quite a huge portion of asparagus and broccoli as well to go into the noodles. We need our fibre!

I ran back to get the instant noodles, and proceed on with the 15-min walk to WS’s place in the evening sun, and boy, it wasn’t even 6pm yet. The sun here sets really early, which is something that I still can’t really come to terms with. You see, the sun determines my meal times, and because of the early sunsets, I end up usually having dinner at 6ish, 7ish, something that I seldom do back home. There were even days which we have dinner at 5 odd, and there was once we had at 4. Dinner usually ends up at 8 or 9 back in sg, and because of the early dinners, I usually end up really hungry in the morning.

So well, we cooked, and we ate, and we did WS’s housemates a favour by doing all the dishes there, including those that were piled up in the sink when we got there. It was quite a fair bit, but of course, to secure our future visits to the place, we have to invest some time and effort in it. =D

Alright, I think i’m running a fever, so I’m gonna rest now. Pray for me.

20/3a. Snow!

It’s snowing now!! OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS. It hasn’t snowed in NC for 2 years, and this is the 2nd time it snowed this year! WOOTS!

Hope lessons get canceled.. =p

20/2c. CMU & Hell

I was chatting with Mingyang, and we were complaining about how cold it was. Apparently he’s at -24 Celsius, while i’m complaining at what feels like -1 Celsius. Lol. And then out of nowhere he pointed me to a website that said this:

Top Ten Subtle Differences Between CMU and Hell

10. It doesn’t rain in Hell.

9. Everyone has heard of Hell.

8. It’s more fun getting into Hell.

7. You can’t fail out of Hell.

6. At least you can sleep in Hell.

5. Hell is forever, CMU just seems like it.

4. People smile in Hell.

3. You only have to sell your soul to get into Hell.

2. You know there are hot women in Hell.

And the #1 subtle difference between CMU and Hell…

1. You wouldn’t tell a friend to go to CMU.