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Sunday, Oct 04, 2015 - 23:13 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

The President And The Pope

You've probably already heard it, but it's worth a revisit:

The Pope arrives in America for a state visit, and is greeted at the airport by a welcoming party. He is then led to a waiting limousine, and the chauffeur begins driving him to the White House.

Midway there, the Pope has to take a rest stop, and then temptation strikes. Returning to the vehicle, he addresses the chauffeur. "Lad, it's not often I get the chance to drive nowadays. Mind if I have a go? Nobody will have to know."

The chauffeur, being a faithful practising Catholic, searched his memory for precedents on automobile appropriation requests by the Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, came up empty, and figured that what the Pope says, goes.

And so it passed that the Vicar of Christ took the wheel, and quickly demonstrated his facility at spreading the faith - he had the chauffeur praying harder than he had in years, by going at over 120 miles per hour, well over the 70 limit.

Unsurprisingly, he was soon pulled over by a traffic policeman, who marched up to the offending limousine, peers into the window, does a double-take, and all but runs back to his car to radio his chief.

Cop: "Sir, I've a got big problem."

Chief: "What's it this time, son?"

Cop: "Er, I pulled a guy over for speeding, but it's somebody really important."

Chief: "Oh, so who's it? Some athlete or local celebrity?"

Cop: "No, no, nothing like that."

Chief: "A sheriff, or the mayor?"

Cop: "Much bigger than that!"

Chief: "Well, the governor? Or a congressman? Or some secretary of state?"

Cop: "Bigger still."

Chief: "Hot damn, son! Are you telling me that you just pulled over the President of the United States?!"

Cop: "No, far more important!"

The police chief is understandably not amused. "Well, who the heck can it be that's bigger than the President?"

Cop: "I don't know, but he's got the Pope as his chauffeur!"



It so happens that President Xi's publicity in the U.S. has not been holding up very well after being directly pitted against the rather more cuddly Pope Francis, who has been wowing non-Catholics and liberals by, y'know, being all caring and compassionate and less casting-of-stoney, much like someone born about 2015 years ago was said to have promoted. Then again, it's been observed that he hasn't actually made many doctrinal turnarounds, but good P.R. is good P.R.


Behold the virtue of your future President!


Xi has, for his part, displayed a slightly softer side by pledging US$2 billion of debt forgiveness to developing nations, and - gasp - praising freiheit und demokratie... perhaps to an extent due to "harmonious command economy stronk" losing a wee bit of lustre. Now, the point isn't to knock China, they're my ancestral land after all, so any actual progress should be saluted. Trouble is, it's probably just more of the same. Moreover, he's drawn the line at forgiving Japan and naming babies... or maybe he just doesn't like 面本 very much.

Continuing on the Pope, it's unknown if he had a hand in freeing our most famous foul-mouthed teen (most probably not), but he should be relieved that Obama won't be ordering him to reincarnate on time, unlike what the Dalai Lama's facing. And further on petitions, former WP and SDP candidate James Gomez has nominated Chia Thye Poh for the Nobel Peace Prize, in consideration of his 32 years in detention, five more than Nelson Mandela. Not that he'll win given how international committees - even those Scandinavians - generally roll, but there have been stranger winners.

Digressing into local politics, the SDP has belatedly realised that they weren't gonna win, but they may have more pressing problems on their hands, after it was revealed last week that two of their members had been arrested under the ISA, for attempting to travel to Syria to join ISIS. Shadows of the past aside, the guy could have at least realised that they have been slashing payrolls for some time, alongside heads. As for the WP, they have created their own People's Association-equivalent (without the hefty governmental funding, obviously). Good on them.

The local authoritarian regime (according to the SDP) has however met its match in the form of FIFA, who have succeeded in wresting control of the national football association out of the incumbent party's hands, not that it'll improve our on-pitch fortunes. FIFA themselves are hardly invincible, though, and may be crushed under the heel of... Coca-Cola and McDonald's. Then again, if ever there was a symbol of peace and democracy, McDonald's it. Sport, and football in particular, remains serious business, though.


Freedom Not Fried


Cha-cha-chashu-men, S$6.50


It was reported several weeks ago that the former editors of the once-pretty-popular-but-now-defunct The Real Singapore site had opened a couple of ramen stores - named, what else, Takagi Ramen Shop - on campus, I resolved to make time for a visit, but only got about to it last Thursday.

As you can see, it's not exactly Ippudo, but at the price, I'd go back. Unfortunately, PGP is a little out of the way, but I suppose I could work some ramen in once a month or so.


Test Drive

My cousin (he of the new baby boy who slept through his own manyue function last Saturday) persuaded me to join him in popping down to the Nissan Infiniti showroom to try out the Q50/Q70, and despite not having touched a steering wheel in a decade since I passed my driving test, I accepted.

The salesman only discovered this after the fact (and reminding me that the brake should ideally be operated with the right foot), but since we made it back in one piece, it's all good. Really though, not having to shift gears manually made driving less taxing than I remembered. Too bad about the S$130k++ pricetag, he'd have a much better chance at a sale had it been some S$50k (US price); but then again, I'm the sort of guy who'd get a quirky beater for US$3000 or under - if I had the option - and proceed to drive it into the ground.

It should be said that test-driving a car is surprisingly rewarding, if you're into that sort of thing - there's complimentary snacks, coffee and petrol vouchers to be had. According to my cousin, diesel is a superior fuel that has unfairly gained a bad reputation for being associated with clunkers. I'm no petrolhead, so I'll defer to him on that.

Quite coincidentally, this comes in the midst of the ongoing emissions scandal, which erupted after it was discovered that software in Volkswagen cars had been programmed to function properly only during testing, though if it's any consolation, other carmakers were greasing their results too. This environmentally-friendly tag ain't easy to achieve. Volkswagen shares are tanking predictably, but as another recent pharmaceutical pricing scandal has taught, this isn't actually an impediment to making yet more money. At the end, it's all about the timing.

As it so happens, our designated fixer-upper minister has taken up the hot potato transport portfolio, and kicked off by more or less declaring war on private cars, with support from cabbies (not that it'll save them in the longer term). Honestly, though, despite hopping on the big data bandwagon with... personalized ride-sharing (so much for the cabbies), attitude shifts are not going to be easy given infrastructural limitations. It's one thing to say that, oh, people bike in Tokyo, New York, Sydney and London, when one can barely cycle any significant distance due to foot traffic and lack of dedicated lanes here. The introduction of more Coordinating Ministers sounds promising, I'll give the incumbents that.

Last but not least, combat lasers on fighter jets is on. Battle mechs, here we come.


Mercy Drive (Burn In My Light)




A Couple Of Stats

The latest university ranking release has seen the usual short-lived tizzy of excitement at our flagship offerings being up there with the likes of Yale and Princeton (that's what they said), and unavoidably, also grumbling at the actual proportion of supposedly heavily-subsidized international students. The chief editor of The Online Citizen has gone as far as to write to the Ministry of Education to clarify the matter, raising the discrepancy between the official statement that "the overall proportion of international students at our local universities is 16 per cent", against the Times Higher Education's quoted figure of 34% for NUS, and 33% for NTU.

With the disclaimer that I am not speaking for the MOE, it is possible to note that that 16% figure was given for undergradute programmes. Using publicly-available enrolment figures, NUS had about 26.8k full-time undergrads and 1.2k part-timers in 2014/2015, for a total of 28k, plus almost exactly 10k graduate students. The obvious explanation, then, is that the difference comes from the grad students.

Of course, there then remains a roughly 6.5k gap in the enrolment numbers between the 31.5k stated by THES and the 38k total, but if we assume that however it is gotten, the approximately 75%-25% split between undergrads and grads remains constant, a ballpark of 80 to 90% of graduate students being internationals would reconcile the stats... which I'd personally guess is not very far from the truth, not that I have much against it.


Upgrade, Automate

I had cause to ask my hosting company to migrate my domain over to a server with mySQL5 (as promised in their current plans), which they sagely warned would break the site (and explains Monday's slight dip in visits recorded). To their credit, they responded very promptly to the request, even if it ended with me having to subscribe to the next tier, since this apparently caused them to include database entries into disk space usage, pushing the total to just over the 5GB limit.

Actually, mySQL 5.0 came out as early as 2004, but I can well understand why admins are often loathe to upgrade legacy systems (I'm sure there remain plenty of Windows 98 intranets, to say nothing of the mainframes) - the .htaccess file had to be fixed to prevent cgi scripts from downloading instead of executing, for one, file permissions were not migrated, nor old CPAN Perl modules installed when they still allowed it. Fortunately, they kept the build folder, which allowed me to salvage most of what was needed, before re-implementing the remainder. That's the price for access to user-defined SQL functions, I suppose.

After this, I figured that I might as well fully automate my Kingdom of Loathing farming too. Of course, I've been botting in KolMafia for years, but this still required me to log into the GUI, and click through some stuff for each of my six characters. Those minutes do add up. Now, it's all batched through a scheduled task on my home PC. Hmm, perhaps I can just get it to play my Dota for me too?

And one more heads-up: if the Windows 10 validation isn't happening, one can simply download the upgrade manually.


Eternal Return (Dragon's Dogma)





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