Christiano Ronaldo is a Pumpkin Pie

I haven't done a football-cake inspired comparison in a while although I've been thinking about this particular comparison for a few months now.

Pumpkin pie: kinda yuck, kinda leathery looking.



Christiano Ronaldo: kinda yuck, skin kinda leathery looking.

C.Ron wondering whether his manhood is still intact after 4-1 drubbing by Liverpool over weekend. It isn't.

Portuguese Ikan Bakar; Uptown

Portuguese Ikan Bakar at Uptown, or: What I Ate While Being Serenaded by Guitar Toting Hippie at Food Stall.



(Shout out to Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which in my opinion is the most awesome movie title EVER. That is totally unrelated to this post, as per usual. I apologize: I am evidently a failure at staying on track. I was talking about the Dr. Strangelove movie last night while explaining my very convoluted and evidence-backed dissertation on the central theme of Watchmen to goosey, who is, unfortunately for him, the favoured receptacle for my half-baked ideas on life, the universe and everything. So now I have the movie in my head, because the war room scenes in the Watchmen were just like the war room scenes in Dr. Strangelove, minus crazed character with phantom hand. Also now I am talking about Watchmen again. I apologize again! I have an obsessive personality and inability to STFU! Also I blame this on the book, which I started reading last night. Actually I blame this on a colleague who somehow persuaded me to buy the book during lunch yesterday although I had made up my mind to be patient and wait for a copy from goosey's brother.)

Anyway! This guitar toting hippie sang, specifically, Hotel California and Wonderful Tonight and Belaian Jiwa and a bunch of other old songs of which my faulty memory does not permit recollection. And maybe it's because these were the songs that I used to coerce my father into playing for me on his guitar every night before I went to sleep (I am very capable of making up my own bedtime stories, but am not too proud to request for help on the bedtime song front) when I was young enough to get away with such extravagant coersion, but as soon as he started playing his songs and I got my ikan bakar the night became a little bit balmier and a little bit prettier. It is surprisingly romantic being serenaded by an aging bohemian while eating in an outdoor food court of questionable cleanliness on a sultry KL night with my kind of comfort food, baked fish and rice, in front of you, and a gooselike significant other all to yourself. I very much recommend it.

Must mentally step away now from hybrid happy place of my bed in my bedroom in bungalow in Brunei at 12 years old seeing father's silhouette in doorway holding guitar, and random food court in Uptown with fish and goosey, and return to the excel spreadsheets that are chanting my name in ominous tones.

Spicy Prawn Olio Spaghetti; Bianco

You know that feeling when you're pressured into eating something you don't really want to eat but then feel compelled to not only pile on copious amounts of whatever you are eating but also lick the plate clean upon finishing? Usually occurs when grannies, elderly makcik auntie types and temperamental chefs, all of whom cook the food in question, are around?



Yeah that's sort of what I felt when I ate this pasta. I actually wanted to try their kung pao chicken pasta which was the special for the month, but when I ordered it, the waitress was like, "Really? Really you want to try that? The chicken? Are you sure? Are you absolutely sure?" like I was submitting a Final Answer to the Million Dollar question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire or I was about to read out my "I Do" vow in a wedding to a mass murderer who would surely kill me on my honeymoon or I was about to sign my soul away to the devil or something.

So I got understandably freaked out by her creepy questions and in my state of freaked-out-ness somehow ordered the dish that she recommended in lieu of the kung pao chicken. And then because she recommended it and kept coming over to check if I liked it and how fast I was eating it, I felt pressured to scarf the whole thing down although I felt fairly ambiguous towards it.

Which really brings to head a couple of key issues:
a) the trick to getting me to do something is to confuse me and make me doubt myself. Definitively ordering me to do something will not work, and if she had ordered me to order the spicy prawn olio pasta I would have been like NO who do you think you ARE, my MOTHER?! (though not even my mother orders me around precisely because she is aware of the trick that I am in the midst of revealing)
b) did the kung pao chicken really taste that bad or did she just want it for herself?

Makes you wonder, right?

Meat Buffet; Carnaval Churrascaria

Have been severely neglecting blog as of late. In fact if blogs were children I'm sure I'd be hauled in for some blog neglectment charge and have custody yanked away from me and end up as a distraught working mother who isn't able to juggle the responsibilities of career and childcare. Then again if blogs were children I'd also be a single parent raising a gluttonish plain faced toddler with an extraordinarily precocious vocabulary so maybe there's a reason people don't use that analogy.

Anyway! Went to Singapore, ate gratuitous amounts of food, and caught up with my mother and assorted other family members. Because I forgot to upload Singapore pictures, however, this post will not be about the food consumed in Singapore.

Instead, here are pictures from Goosey's favourite restaurant in the world. Before you get any misleading ideas about how fabulous this restaurant probably is to deserve such a lofty title, you should know that the only reason it is his favourite restaurant is that it is: a) all you can eat, and b) an all you can eat MEAT BUFFET. Which means you have many chunks of meat, on skewers, presented to you at your table (so you don't even have to walk, which makes it BETTER than a regular buffet, at which one is regrettably forced to keep getting in and out of one's seat in order to get more food).

I can't remember how many different types of meat I had because I am unable to say no to most foods and so just said yes to all the skewers of meat offered to me and thus completely lost track of what I was eating, but curiously enough given that the place was practically an abbattoir, I remember that their garlic bread was particularly good. Or maybe my stomach just couldn't differentiate between chicken and beef and lamb anymore and became unusually grateful when it met up with some carbs.





This rampant carnivosity reminds me of that line in Watchmen (yes I apologize, I cannot stop talking about this darned film, mostly because it left me intrigued and dissatisfied as to its overall message. Did it INTENTIONALLY blur the lines of morality to the point of complete obscurity or was there a message that was lost in translation from comic to film? Was it condemning or condoning violence as a means to an end? What the hell IS it saying about humanity and which character was the closest thing to an everyman protagonist and once you pin down which character it was you then open up a whole new can of wormy questions about what the film says about mankind, because pretty much every character was royally and sociopathically messed up and devoid of compassion. It's like the whole movie went round and round arguing with itself and beating itself up--and oh, the violence and gore and how it was juxtaposed with all the hippie counterculture music that was the soundtrack, cue more brain confusion--and I'm left dizzy and wanting to watch it again), where the Nite Owl tells Rorschach, "No, no, Ozymandias" (who, by the way, for the smartest man in the world funnily seemed to have overlooked the fact that the poem that was partially transcribed onto the base of the Egyptian statue in his lair in the Antarctic, "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, look on my my works, ye mighty, and despair!", is an ode to hubris and the impermanence of glory. Which means that, duh, you are asking for trouble if you have it engraved on a symbol of power in your evil hideout) "isn't a bad guy, he's a vegetarian!" And Rorschach is like, well, Hitler was a vegetarian.

That aside actually has nothing whatsoever to do with the pictures I posted. I just wanted to talk about Watchmen, which, despite my very long and bracketed rant, I am very much intrigued by. In fact most of the time, if I like something, I will be intrigued by it and want to argue about it or with it endlessly (other examples of this: feminism and my boyfriend, respectively). If I have no bone to pick with it, I probably do not like it. Curiously contrarian perhaps, but you have been forewarned.

Now I have gotten the Watchmen off my chest and can resume my day. As you may resume your activities also.