i have made further improvements to my blog. many thanks again to austin, my colleague, who is somehow able to stare at the gibberish which is css and make sense of it. i have added a hit counter to the bottom of the page. i am proud to annouce that i first added the code at about 3pm today. just half an hour later, the stat counter stood at 11, no less. i kid you not. of course, 10 of those hits came as a result of my frenetically hitting the refresh button, first to decide upon an appropriate colour for the stat bar, and then to discern if the hit counter was, indeed, increasing as a result of my hitting the refresh button rather than via the visitations of random blog afficionados. the remaining hit was probably my wife, whom i had called to notify of the changes.

which is not to detract from the erstwhile burgeoning popularity of my blog.

i have also changed the colour of the links, to what i thought was a classy, pastel blue. reminiscent of pristine horizons and... other nice blue things. like the boxer shorts which my mum-in-law bought for me from fos in kl, and the water in toilet bowls after you put in a clorox blue automatic toilet bowl cleaner tablet with teflon surface protector in the cistern which is supposed to last for 2000 flushes but in reality starts fading after two dozen. a theraputic shade of blue, all in all, and suitable to combat the psychological aspects of computer-related RSI and carpal tunnel afflications of my readers who are unable to tear themselves away from my blog.

so i thought, till i asked another collegue of mine (melvyn, the sex-crazed pastor. see previous entry on sex dolls.) for his opinion. his prouncement : "nice. a suitably gay shade of purple." *cough*colour-blind cretin*cough*

overall i am pleased with the effort. for although i am blessed with numerous and varied talents, artistic creativity is not one of them. which brings me nicely to my story of the day.

this is a true account. i was one of those students that all art teachers hated. (to be fair, that statement would be more accurate without the proviso 'art'. but anyway.) i don't recall passing any art class in my entire (and otherwise distinguished - to some extent at least) academic career. i only ever recall embarking on two art projects that didn't turn out to be unmitigated disasters.

one was a black monster i constructed on drawing block in primary school. he had - it, rather, had red teeth (blood-stained, you see). and was otherwise, well, black. i remember this monster most distinctly because i had to go out to purchase several sets of magic markers. this is worthy of another story in itself. in brief, i was forbidden from using more sophisticated artistic implements to express my creativity as i had previously, and rather emphatically, demonstrated my ineptitude with both crayon and paint. and colouring a big, bloody(-toothed) monster black, takes up a lot of ink. more ink than a single magic marker contains. and each set of magic markers only contains one black one. part of a marketing ploy to decimate the life-long savings of artistically deficient children who, as a result of their cognitive inadequacies, are forced to draw in monochrome, no doubt. the conniving, magic marker making bast*rds.

also worth a mention by way of creating a backdrop to my real story is my inability to draw circles or curves of any sort. my aesthetic renderings are limited to straight lines. which is not quite as pathetic as it sounds. i able to (quite skillfully, to be sure,) join these lines together, whether seamlessly to form geometrical angles of varying degrees, or in intersectory patterns. in multiplicity. but, yes, i lack the ability to render arcs and festures and sweeps and whorls of all kinds. which explains why i never did very well in art. except for the black monster, which definitely embodied some curvature. come to think of it, i think my mum drew the outline of it in pencil, before i went to work with my black marker(s).

anyway. my second creative success was the by-product of pottery class in secondary school. while my classmates, not subject to such limitations as i, created cups and jugs, i tried something different. well, actually, initially i tried to create a square cup. i quickly found the enterprise too taxing. and so, to complement my square base, i fashioned a disparate collection of other, smaller, rectangles. struck by creative genius, i flattened these, and stuck them onto the perimeter of my square base at right angles. imagine an overturned table, albeit with multiple legs, of differing lengths and widths. i had a few oblongs of various sizes left over. these i stuck, perpendicularly, to the first lot of perpendiculars.

the end result, if you are hopelessly confused by now, was a - albeit more angular - version of this :


still under the influence of this unexpected outpouring of creativity, i named my piece by carving letters into the base : 'stonehenge'. my art teacher took one look and fell in love with it - i think he thought it a very bold and neo-modernist reinterpretation of the original. he went so far as to invite me to send it to the kilns for baking. a piece of my art, preserved for posterity in the art department. i was so overcome with emotion that on my way to the kilns, when i saw a little carving tool, i was unable to resist from improving upon my masterpiece.

i think this utensil had a name, but such details are beyond me. suffice to say you poked it in, turned it in a circle, and it would create a hole. overcome by enthusiasm, i proceeded to carve little holes in all the standing monoliths of stonehenge. and in the base. it was at this point that my art teacher visibly began to regret his offer to bake my artwork.

in any case, it matters little, someone's pot (a round one, undoubtedly,) fell onto my objet d'art in the midst of the kiln-ing process. shattering it into a million pieces. or, at least, so i was told by my art teacher afterwards. perhaps its structural integrity had been weakened by its being holed like swiss cheese. to be fair to my art teacher he did, very kindly, offer to allow me to spend my recesses over the next two weeks repairing it.

i think not.

and now you too, know why i am so proud of my blog. gay purple text and all.