Categories
Sports

[662] Of let’s Go Blue

The Game starts in less than 30 minutes. Listen to The Game live on www.MGoBlue.com. I trust Yahoo! will be airing The Game live on its online radio too. Screw that. Watch Yahoo! NCAAF for updates. If only they show college football (the biggest f-king rivalry in the whole US but TV channels are showing f-king stupid goddamned national dart tournament!) on TV in Malaysia…

Meanwhile, listen and sing to the Hail to the Victors! (not sure whether this is legal but hell! – picked from www.MGoBlue.com via Campus Information Center)

Now for a cheer they are here, triumphant!

Here they come with banners flying.
In stalwart step they’re nighing.
With shouts of vict’ry crying.
We hurrah, hurrah, we greet you now, Hail!

Far we their praises sing
For the glory and fame they’ve bro’t us,
Loud let the bells them ring,
For here they come with banners flying

Far we their praises tell
For the glory and fame they’ve bro’t us,
Loud let the bells them ring
For here they come with banners flying

Here they come, Hurrah!

Hail! To the victors, valiant,
Hail! To the conqu’ring heroes
Hail! Hail! To Michigan the leaders and best

Hail! To the victors, valiant,
Hail! To the conqu’ring heroes
Hail! Hail! To Michigan the champions of the West!

Go Blue! And go Sparties!

And don’t forget, Buck the Fuckeyes!

w00t! – LIVE AUDIO THANKS TO MICHIGAN HOCKEY NET! (via)

update – 12 minutes to go, Ohio State missed a field goal and Michigan leads by 6 points.

p/s – WTF? on the radio just now, roughly, Christians, Muslims and Jews uniting against a common foe. Now, that’s lame.

update – fourth down and a yard to go. What Lloyd Carr did? Go for it. LOL! Crazy. Thank god for the first down. This guy is a freaking risk taker.

update – w00t! 10-yard penalty on OSU and another first down!

update – it’s on Ohio State’s 9 yard line! LOL! OSU is crumbling!

update – field goal for Michigan. I still remember how Rivas took a field a few years ago. Michigan 21 – 12 OSU.

update – Blue 21 – 19 Buckies. This is dangerous.

update – DEFENSE! DEFENSE!

update – this is cruel.

update – sob.

Categories
Conflict & disaster Economics Liberty Politics & government

[679:448] Of negative real interest rate?

Apart from Bucking the Fuckeyes, something odd came across my mind earlier.

If Malaysian nominal interest rate currently hovers around 2.7% according to Bank Negara (Interbank interest rate), as it has been for many months now while inflation for October is around 3.2% according to Business Times, then wouldn’t that mean, according to Fisher equation, Malaysia had a negative real interest rate a few weeks ago?

Something is wrong here. Am I taking the right interest rate?

Base lending rate (BLR) however is 6%, according to Maybank while ABN Amro Malaysia offers 5.5%. If BLR is the benchmark, then it’s my mistake.

Nonetheless, if indeed Malaysia had a negative real rate just a month ago, then our current capital outflow might not entirely due to the current huge rate differential between the US dollar and the Malaysian ringgit.

p/s – dirty Republicans at work. But nothing less than an ingenious political maneuvering:

House GOP Seeks Quick Veto of Iraq Pullout

By LIZ SIDOTI, Associated Press Writer 4 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – House Republicans maneuvered for swift rejection Friday of any notion of immediately pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, sparking a nasty, sometimes personal debate over the war following a Democratic lawmaker’s own call for withdrawal.

Just a day after Rep. John Murtha (news, bio, voting record), D-Pa., stoked a surging political fire over President Bush’s Iraq policies by proposing that troops return home now, Republicans brought a measure to the House floor urging that a pullout begin immediately.

The symbolic vote was intended to fail, and furious Democrats accused the GOP of orchestrating a political stunt.

Republicans’ call for vote for an immediate withdrawal of US troop from Iraq forces Democrats into a corner with no safe way to go.

Categories
Sports This blog

[660] Of Buck the Fuckeyes

I did housekeeping for this site yesterday and I stumbled across this. A great recycling stuff.

Buck the Fuckeyes______________________________
OOOO SSSS U  U    SSSS  U  U CCCC K  K SSSS
O  O S    U  U    S     U  U C    K K  S
O  O SSSS U  U    SSSS  U  U C    KK   SSSS
O  O    S U  U       S  U  U C    K K     S
OOOO SSSS UUUU    SSSS  UUUU CCCC K  K SSSS
_______________________________Ohio State Sucks

Go Blue! Not to forget, go Sparties!

While doing some overdue proofreading and reading some oldies, unfortunately, I found some discrepancy in my numbering system. You see, I enter all these numbers manually and sometimes, I messed it up. In this instance, post number 467 currently comes up immediately after post 446. So, I need to do some minor correction and hence, the weird numbering for this post. This unusually system will continue until the problem is rectified. That means, 20 more posts and then we’ll go back to usual programming. Hooray!

Why wouldn’t I simply realign the numbers? Like I said, I did it all manually and making such correction is a pain in the neck. Or ass.

I blame all this on Ohio State. And Bush. Senior and junior. And on climate change too.

Heh, let’s see what happens if I tag Buck the Fuckeyes into Technorati.

erratum – the numbering has been corrected.

Categories
Photography Travels

[659] Of it’s a green world out there

Another photo from Malacca. This one was taken at my grandma’s place. It’s an old Malacca-style Malay house. After so many years, it’s a pity that I only began to appreciate the Malay architecture only after I returned to Malaysia from Michigan.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

The orange columns used to be less fiery and they were coated with light green. In similar way, the original photo is less striking. Reason is, I did some manipulation in Photoshop; I contrasted the colors a bit. Too much manipulation to my own “purist” liking.

And see the two huge black spaces? They aren’t the result of cropping. The lower space is a wooden beam while the upper one is actually the house ceiling. Not quite a ceiling but I can’t find the right vocab for it. In fact, if you observe closely the upper black space, you’ll see how wooden beams have been laid out to support the house.

The opening is not a hole either.

Still, the whole thing looks a bit too dark. Oh well. Buck the Fuckeyes.

p/s – went through my folder and found a sharper image for yesterday’s subject.

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

I like yesterday’s orientation better though.

Categories
History & heritage Personal Photography Travels

[658] Of wildflowers by the road

I love flowers but I don’t quite go ga-ga (and wah piang! Boy, that exclamation left a deep impression on me) like girls do. Why do I like them? It’s just they’re part of green behavior kind of stuff. By they, I mean, the flowers, of course. Live flowers, not dead fresh flowers to be precise – I have a slight irritation with people that love to pick flowers. Hey, I’m a mad treehugger. What do you expect?

I paid Malacca a visit yesterday. While I was there, I noticed a few species of wildflowers which I can’t name. They grow near some bushes by some road near the town of Tampin.

I also learned that the Malaysian Prime Minister is due to visit that part of Malacca today (Alor Gajah if you’re wondering) while the Durbar is set to be held in the state later this year. There’s a better article about the Durbar at Malay Wikipedia. Maybe I’ll transwiki it later.

Back to the topic:

Mohd Hafiz Noor Shams. Some rights reserved

The focus is off by noticeable degree. In fact, I had no choice since my camera is unable to focus properly while the object is too close to the lense – yet, another reason why should get a new cam. The reason that I had wanted to get the object as close as possible to camera is, I wanted to fill the photo with the four clusters.

Much to my surprise, it was quite hard to manage. So, I settled with what I think the next best thing – focusing on the second nearest cluster of flowers and then fill available space with the nearest cluster.

Finally, could somebody identify the flower? Each cluster is as large as one’s thumb. My thumb anyway.

And yeah, Buck the Fuckeyes!

p/s – added a fellow Malaysian Wolverine into my blogroll. Poke her!

pp/s – Roni, one of the guys that I used to play hockey with at Michigan, writes songs!

ppp/s – Australia made it to the 2006 World Cup. What’s next? Penn State winning the Big Ten title? Wait a minute…

p4/s – Malaysia and Singapore might squabble like kids, but Mexico and Venezuela have refined the benchmark.