Gassy and carbonated drinks are unhealthy. Oh really ah?

Here’s another health message from your friendly neighbourhood superhero.

 This one involves drinking carbonated drinks such as Pepsi, Coca Cola, etc.

The article can be found here, but I’ve copied the relevant parts below. The more relevant parts in bold.

Concerns centre on the safety of E211, known as sodium benzoate, a preservative used for decades by the £74bn global carbonated drinks industry. Sodium benzoate derives from benzoic acid. It occurs naturally in berries, but is used in large quantities to prevent mould in soft drinks such as Sprite, Oasis and Dr Pepper. It is also added to pickles and sauces.

Sodium benzoate has already been the subject of concern about cancer because when mixed with the additive vitamin C in soft drinks, it causes benzene, a carcinogenic substance. A Food Standards Agency survey of benzene in drinks last year found high levels in four brands which were removed from sale.

Now, an expert in ageing at Sheffield University, who has been working on sodium benzoate since publishing a research paper in 1999, has decided to speak out about another danger. Professor Peter Piper, a professor of molecular biology and biotechnology, tested the impact of sodium benzoate on living yeast cells in his laboratory. What he found alarmed him: the benzoate was damaging an important area of DNA in the “power station” of cells known as the mitochondria.

He told The Independent on Sunday: “These chemicals have the ability to cause severe damage to DNA in the mitochondria to the point that they totally inactivate it: they knock it out altogether.

“The mitochondria consumes the oxygen to give you energy and if you damage it – as happens in a number if diseased states – then the cell starts to malfunction very seriously. And there is a whole array of diseases that are now being tied to damage to this DNA – Parkinson’s and quite a lot of neuro-degenerative diseases, but above all the whole process of ageing.”

So moral of the story: Drink more alcohlic drinks, safer than drinking soft drinks..Right..

Breaking News!

I’m in a particularly very ‘boliao’ mood, so the post that follows is going to rather full of rubbish..

 The SMU Adverts

You know whenever the time for applying for universities is around the corner, the major 3 unis will try their best to portray how hip and happening their respective university is.

So NUS this year had a campaign that tried to differentiate ‘THE THEM FROM N’US’. A pretty catchy line i would say.

NTU’s had people posing as the ‘Scientist’ or the ‘Artist’ and asked people to choose whom you wanted to be.. OK only la..

I was quite attracted to the adverts released by SMU. You know the one where promising and talented future students would feature together with a prof.. and all are like jumping up in joy or something?? Eg: Soya Bean Tan, National Chess Player, SEA gold, SMU scholar..

Well, a picture paints a thousand words.. so here’s the advert..

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Actually it used to be quite good cause they will sort of show-off scholars, SEA games medal winners, and other notable achievers. But overtime, seems like they ran out of people to show case and the bar started going lower.. Things like “Class Chairman”, “Student Councillor”

Pretty soon, we can see things like , “12 year Rafflesian, Elite” or “Rich Man’s Son, White Horse”

Ok la, I jealous can.. that my face never appear on newspaper.. haha

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JBJ forms a new party, The Reform Party

Yeah, so it’s been announced that veteran politician JBJ, who just cleared his bankruptcy has formed a new political party called the Reform Party.. Hmm, now the people in white have to find a way to shut him up.. I know of one possible way..

 The gahmen can go and sue JBJ again because of his new party name, The Reform Party.

Their spokesperson can go say smthg like, ” What does JBJ mean by naming his party, The Reform Party? Does he imply that there is something wrong with our curent govt? So he is actually belittling us and making malicious and defamatory remarks by naming his party the Reform party. Sue, Sue, Sue.. “

Well i did say i was feeling bored..  

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And lastly.. The whole of Singapore is abuzz with the fact that a water-spout (the closest we get to a tornado) was spotted.

So much abuzz that we missed out on the news that people actually found water on Mars.

Check out the following picture to see if im right or not..

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Well i did say i was bored..

Vote for the New 7 wonders of the World

Vote for your New Wonders of the World here.

Out of the 21 contenders, I have been to a grand total of – one. The Opera House. Not exactly a global traveller heh?

Personal aim/goal/wish: To have gone to atleast 15 out of the 21 by the time I’m 30.

So I got about 9 years to visit 15 places, better start saving..

Lagging

Wah, Wodpress or Youtube is damn laggy la..

I loaded- or atleast tried load up this video from youtube 6 days ago. You know when you load videos from Youtube they will say something like, “This video will appear on your blog shortly”.. And it took 6 days for that..  And this is not the first time either too..

Anyway, can’t remember what i wanted to write about.. but meanwhile just checkout this video..

 If you thought drifting was cool..

Why do men need Post-It notes

Now this is a good advert..

How NOT to get rich quick

And so there was the Multi-Level Marketer who wanted to ’share’ with me the secret to getting rich and make money work for me. So that I could be like him and have a 5-digit salary while still schooling. Though he left out the no friends part..

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And then there was the Property company that called me to say I had won a plot of land in India just because my handphone number had a certain 4 number combination. Problem was that I have to buy more land to collect my prize of free land.. And she called me on my handphone furthermore..

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And then there was the Financial Planner who was really concerned about my financial education and who really wanted to meet me just to educate me on my financial education. Yup, no strings attached at all.. This was the most legitimate of the lot, but most irritating..

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And then there was the Online Investment firms which promised 20-30% returns over a year by investing in oil, gold, rare metals etc..yada yada the usual mumbo jumbo.  No questions asked. Just one slight problem: They ran away with most people’s money after a while.

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 And just when you think you might have seen it all, along comes one that makes you wonder.

You see in China, it is getting harder and more expensive to find a proper burial grounds. And the fact is that it is getting more costlier to bury your loved ones – and that too on a limited lease.

So some enterprising fellow in China came up with the latest scheme to get rich quick. Buy loads of empty plots, hold on to them for a while, then sell them for a quick and assured profit. This company even has decent advertising and the backing from some deputy mayor of someplace saying buying burials plots is a good way of making money.

Too good to be true? Yup, turned out to be a bogus and many people lost their life savings.

I know you guys are too lazy even to click on this, but that’s the link to the story.

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Some people many have indeed earned money thru these schemes. Good for them. As for me, after a brief encounter that ended up in smokes, think I’m done getting rich the quick way. I rather get rich the old fashioned way.

I’m guessing things like conscience, honour, karma, integrity are being thrown out of window nowadays. How do these people sleep at night knowing that they cheated so many others money??

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Anyway, some things said by people I know which get into my ‘Quotes’ list.

1) If its too good to be true, then it is not true.

2) If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck and smells like a duck.. Then it is definitely a duck

3) These schemes are in conflict with the Rule of the Universe. Why? Because they want to create something out of nothing.

Rest in Peace

Taiwanese fighter jet crashes; 2 pilots, 2 Singapore soldiers killed

TAIPEI : A Taiwanese fighter jet crashed on Friday morning during an exercise, killing its two pilots.The aircraft crashed within the grounds of a military base in Hukou, some 50 kilometres south of the capital Taipei.

Two visiting Singaporean military personnel were also killed, and two others have been hospitalised.

More Details here.

Don’t wish to list any names here, but my heart goes out to their families. Especially more since I only left the force recently and the people involved could have very well been people whom i know.

R.I.P

Axis of Evil is da bomb!

Getting home tired after work for pretty much the last 2 weeks, I rarely have time to go online much less write about something. (Maybe my lousy sleeping habits have something to do with this too). Which kind of explains my decreasing frequency of posts.

And even if I the rare opportunity to come online, I will be too tired to even think of something to write a proper article. No inspiration..

So I’ve decided to follow Amylia’s style, where she’ll just pick a topic on ( _ _ _ _ _)* and talk how cute/smart/intelligent/cute/great/cute they are.

* Insert ‘Prison Break’ character, some Hollywood sitcom/reality show, or something picked from someone blog.

So today my topic will on this group of comedians making the waves called the ‘Axis of Evil’. Cool name hey?

The members of this group have roots from countries like Iran, Egyptian, Pakistan etc.

So seems like they purposely named themselves after the speech given by George Bush, in which labelled Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the world’s Axis of Evil.

Sure the US has many comedians, but these are like the first people to actually attempt to arrest the stereotypes by – playing into them and making fun of themselves. Quite like the British Indian comedy of ‘Goodness Gracious Me’; but that’s for another day.

Read the article on CNN about them.

Check out some of the clips I found on youtube about these people. No where near Russel Peters, but enough to get you laughing.  

Quite a bag of laughs if you ask me. And I was thinking, we need more people like them. I guess the world doesn’t need people burning each other’s flags or killing or injuring each other.

Why try to use force to change things when a bit of humour makes the process much easier?

Unfortunately nothing is that easy or straight forward is it?

Future of Public Transport in Singapore?

Something quite cool I found on the net. Have been searching for this image for quite sometime..

 Ya.. I know the picture is too small to make out the individual station names.. Click ‘Save As’ and then enlarge it or smthg.. I’m too lazy to think of another way.. Haha..

But imagine Singapore’s rail network like this in the year 20xx.. Cool Stuff..

Pearls before Breakfast

The following is an excerpt from a Washington Post article dated Apr 8.

HE EMERGED FROM THE METRO AT THE L’ENFANT PLAZA STATION AND POSITIONED HIMSELF AGAINST A WALL BESIDE A TRASH BASKET. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.

It was 7:51 a.m. on Friday, January 12, the middle of the morning rush hour. In the next 43 minutes, as the violinist performed six classical pieces, 1,097 people passed by. Almost all of them were on the way to work, which meant, for almost all of them, a government job. L’Enfant Plaza is at the nucleus of federal Washington, and these were mostly mid-level bureaucrats with those indeterminate, oddly fungible titles: policy analyst, project manager, budget officer, specialist, facilitator, consultant.

Each passerby had a quick choice to make, one familiar to commuters in any urban area where the occasional street performer is part of the cityscape: Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Does your decision change if he’s really bad? What if he’s really good? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn’t you? What’s the moral mathematics of the moment?

Full article here. It’s damn long though. 

In a nutshell, the above mentioned violin player (violinist?) was not exactly a starving artiste, but a “internationally acclaimed virtuoso” who commands more than several thousand an hour.

  It goes on to say how people sometimes are so caught up in their jobs and in what they do, that they forget to look around them and basically cherish what’s around them.

This article generated a lot of thought in me, but not too sure how to put it down it words. Maybe it will also provoke some hidden thoughts when you read as well.