My First CGA Exam And Other Trials Of The Great White North

Sorry I haven't been posting much lately.

The exam is next Thursday, and I'm sorta in Panic Mode right now. Well, maybe not that bad. But for a course that's supposed to accomodate a full-time job, I'm instead taking full-time to study for it. As you may have heard before, I've been having trouble with this financial accounting course, since I'm rather on my own without the classroom setting. So now my strategy is to do as many of the practice problems as possible. That is, the practice problems with solutions to check answers. There's no point in doing the other problems.

There's probably a lot of attention from you folks towards my city of Vancouver, from the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Turino, Italy. (Well, my city's actually Coquitlam, but since nobody knows where the hell it is, I just say I'm from Vancouver.) I caught a glimpse of the ceremony, when they were unveiling Vancouver as the next Winter Olympic site, and I was amazed at how accurately they depicted our city. Yes, we are indeed a bunch of eskimos that occasionally emerge from our cozy igloos to go ice fishing. Fortunately our igloos have sufficient electricity to run my computer to post to this blog; I just have to plug it into the snow. How convenient is that?

Unfortunately, the Olympics people didn't show the whole picture of Vancouver. Ice fishing is the only way we sustain ourselves. When the Penguin Spirit tells us that a long, severe winter storm is coming, we hunt polar bear to provide enough food to ride it out in our igloos. I still have the scars from that parting swipe that big sow took at me when I downed her just before the Big Blizzard of 1997.

I'm glad the person who arranged the ceremony got to the TRUTH. I was afraid that he/she would have bought into the lies of that money-grubbing Vancouver Tourism Board, who try to lure in unsuspecting tourists by falsely depicting us as a flourishing metropolis, set between the majestic Coastal Mountains and the vast blue Pacific Ocean in a pleasantly moderate climate. Don't fall for it! That just isn't the case with us Vancouverites!

Okay, I think I've beat that dead horse to a bloody pulp, so back to the Olympic closing ceremony itself. Near the end of the show, our mayor was honored with the Olympic flag. You can't help but notice the irony of the Winter Olympic flag being waved by a man bound to a wheelchair from a skiing accident. But still, I'm proud of Sam. Handicapped or not, I sure hope he does a good job running our city, since we've only elected him recently. But then again, any Causcasian person who manages to fluently speak Cantonese has got to be good.

Uh oh, Penguin Spirit say we have another gale-force blizzard coming, so back to hunt for me.

Back to School...For Real

You're all probably sick of me bitching about my fruitless job search.

Well, seeing how with my MBA alone is probably going to keep being this useless, I've decided to do something about it rather then to continue bitching. I've decided in a change of strategy and REALLY specialize in accounting. So I'm going back to school to get a Diploma in Accounting, and get hired by an accounting company while I work towards Chartered Accountant (CA) certification.

So today, I went back to my old university (before Miami), The University of British Columbia (UBC), to submit my transcript from my MBA. Some people nickname it "Coca-Cola University", on the account of UBC selling out to Coca-Cola, and vending exclusively their products on campus. Nevertheless, the campus itself is a beautiful place to spend a summer with my nose stuck to a textbook.

Knowing that I committed myself to being a student here, it certainly felt more nostalgic than the last time I stopped by. I also had more time to walk around campus and visit my old dwellings and haunts. The feel of a campus community gently wafted back from my memories. Especially when I went to have a bite at the pub's burger bar, and came across the tip jar with a quirky note taped to it, scribbled with the words: Please help us send our manager to Oprah so he can promote his gripping memoir of sex, drugs, and burgers.

There were a lot of new buildings, some of which were still having their foundations poured when I was an undergrad. Conversely, while passing by the Student Union Building, I saw another building which I faintly remember, being torn down by a bulldozer. Upon the toppling of a support beam, I let out a cheer, perhaps coming closest to fulfilling a childhood fantasy of witnessing my school burn down.

Classes will start in May, which is when I'll move into campus. The only concern is that single housing is not available during the summer, so I'll have to at most share a common suite with other students in a quad. Since I don't know anyone who's going back to school, let alone living on campus, I will be moving in with total strangers. Hopefully, my indication of preference for co-ed roommates on my housing application will diversify the risk, so that rather than ending up with hermits and complete assholes, I could end up with bitches, hermits, and complete assholes. I can't wait to relive my college experience!

Well, I certainly can't wait to once again stick it to The Man by keeping my own personal stash of Pepsi.

A rare moment on this popular lookout at UBC
when there are no couples making out.

Screw Valentine's Day

Here we go with another "special" day.

That is, in the same manner that you call the kids in special ed "special". It's just another day supposedly dedicated to another dead Christian martyr guy, tragically forgotten amidst the commercialism and consumerism. After all, who says "Happy Saint Valentine's Day" anymore? It's another day devised for greeting card companies, confectioners, plush toy manufacturers, florists, jewellers (especially the notorious DeBeers cartel), and the retailers to make an extra buck by ostentatiously hawking their crap under the guise of love. At the expense of making the single majority of people in the Western world depressed.

And why do we need to dedicate a special day for love anyway? Is it because we, as a society, don't love enough the rest of the year? If love in our lives were to be plotted in a graph against time, would we just see low-level "background noise", and then a spike where the it is February 14th on the horizontal axis? Or worse, is it because there too much hate going on? If either of those is the case, then that makes two ways that this "special" occasion has pointed to something disturbingly wrong with the world that we live in.

And so, that leaves most of us, including me, asking, "Where is the love?" Or the next best thing, "Where the fuck is Cupid, the personification of love?" He's certainly not there for me, which leaves me to conjecture that he's been either killed by bird flu, or "accidentally" shot by Dick Cheney on a hunting trip. And so, here I sit, alone in the house and typing away, watching the sun set in the sky and my life, while the rest of the world start to couple and hug, kiss, spoon, screw, ballroom dance, make crepes, or whatever the hell they do in their mushy, amorous ways.

Although I seriously doubt hunting would be among the activities.

Six Degrees Of Jürgen Prochnow

I lack the gift of instant slumber.

Unless I am absolutely exhausted mentally and physically, I actually lay awake, sometimes even for hours, waiting for sleep to claim me. During that time, I am lost in thought and hoping that soon, those turning wheels in my head will dissolve into cloudy abstractness that marks the blurred frontier between the living world and the dreaming world. Perhaps it is my subconscious, but when I approach that stage, what seems to be totally random thoughts materialize.

Last night was particularly the case. For some reason, my train of thought led me to the mental exercise of linking actors Jürgen Prochnow and Malcolm McDowell in the same way you play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Don't ask me how this happened. In the same way that you don't recall what you dreamt once you wake up, I have no memory of that strand of thought - only of the weird places it led to. Anyway, here's how I solved the conundrum:

1. Jürgen Prochnow was in Judge Dredd with Sylvester Stallone.
   
2. Sylvester Stallone was in Assassins with Antonio Banderas.
   
3. Antonio Banderas was in Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams with Ricardo Montalban.
   
4. Ricardo Montalban was in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan with William Shatner ("KHAAAAAAAN!!!!")
   
5. William Shatner was in Star Trek: Generations with Malcolm McDowell!! BA-DA-BAM!!!

Oh great, now all that thinking has put me back to square one.

Finally Some Sun!

HOLY SWEET MOTHER OF CRAP!! A HYDROGEN BOMB JUST DETONATED OVER MY CITY!!!!

WHAT THE...!? It's just sitting up there...what is it?? I think I remember... A huge-ass meteor? No, it's not falling. An alien spaceship? Probably not...it should've been gone to take Tom Cruise back to his home planet. Wait a minute, I think I remember! It's... It's...what did they call it? Ah yes, THE SUN!!! Holy crap it's finally out!! Sorry about that false alarm, to Christian and non-Christian people alike.

It's been piss-raining for more than a month. There is an old French expression, which I came across in the French dictionary while looking for names for private parts when I was an elementary student. How did it go again? Ah, yes. Il pleut come une vache qui pisse. Which literally means "It's raining like a pissing cow."

Yes, that pretty much described last month's weather. In fact, we broke a record for the most rainfall in a month, and would have broken a 50-year-old record for most consecutive days of rainfall, had it not been interrupted by a couple of hours-long sunny breaks. Way to go, God.

Well, You can at least make it up to us by generously providing us more of this lovely weather, so we and the corpses of all the drowned wildlife have a chance to dry out. Yes, I know it means the nights will be colder and the dry wind will bite harder, but that's why You created lip balm, right? Well, that and for the purpose of looking for cute girls with chapped lips (on their MOUTH, you perv!), and offering them the lip balm on your own lips because you forgot to bring the rest of the stuff with you.

Oh look at me, I'm mumbling to God now.

Saturday Night Idiocy

Okay, now I'm going to gripe about a popular sketch comedy show called Saturday Night Live.

Tonight's show had Steve Martin as a guest, so it was funnier than usual (or actually funny at all). But that's not the only thing that's special about this particular show.

Regular cast member Fred Armisen has an "okay funny" recurring segment called The Prince Show, whe he plays artist Prince. Tonight's show also featured this particular sketch. However, not only was Steve Martin the guest cast member for tonight, the show also had the REAL Prince as the musical guest!

Now if you were the writer, and you know that the real Prince is going to be doing a gig as musical guest, and you are also going to slot The Prince Show segment into tonight's show, how are you going to connect the dots and seize the opportunity to make for an unusually exciting and hilarious comedy sketch? That's right! You feature the real Prince into The Prince Show with Fred Armisen, generating huge laughs and cheers in an offbeat, self-deprecating role.

Did the writers get it? NO! The Prince Show went by as usual, totally ignoring the fact that the real Prince had just played his gig in the previous segment before the commercial break.

Now I'm not saying that I should be among those writing for Saturday Night Live. In fact, this kind of idea is not new at all to the show. Back in the last decade, when the show was at its peak of its funniness, The Rolling Stones was the musical guest in one particular show, if I recall correctly. So on their Weekend Update segment, they had Mike Myers play Mick Jagger, and the real Mick Jagger play Keith Richards!! THAT was funny!!

Perhaps the writers did ask Prince to appear on The Prince Show, but he declined, even though I think he would be cool enough to accept the invitation. If that were the case, they should never have put The Prince Show segment on this show at all. It just leaves viewers like me angry and wanting answers!

These people couldn't even write a funny sketch if they were given a monkey that smells its own farts.

New Synonym For "Retard": "European Newspaper Editor"

What the hell were they thinking?

It wouldn't be so bad if they published cartoons of the generic Muslim with a bomb for a turban, but one of their most revered figures, second only to God?? At the very least, this is an act of ignorance, specifically of Islam's strict forbiddance of any depictions of their holy figures. Sure, you could cry First Amendment, freedom of the press, blah, blah. But freedom of the press does NOT constitute freedom from the responsibility to publish with respect towards other people and their religion. (Incidentally, how about freedom of religion?) And now, the whole world's going to hell even faster with the entire Muslim population pissed off.

So what does the editor of Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that started this all, has to say for himself? "[The purpose was] to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues." (Source) Oh great. So you're telling us you were testing the waters in a bloody shark tank!? Don't get the rest of the world involved, dumbass! We've got our own problems to deal with!

Ironically, Soren Aabye Kierkegaard, a Danish philosopher, pretty much sums it up when he says: "People demand freedom of speech to make up for the freedom of thought which they avoid."

To make things worse, the rest of the EU is now following suit in publishing those cartoons. But the one country that I'm going to single out among them is France. No, not because I share the Americans' view that they're a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys. Remember when most of the North African community in France rioted last year, because of the accidental deaths of two teenagers from the Arab/Turk/Black community while being chased by police? You'd figure the French government would know first-hand what it's like to have a pissed-off Islamic population. Non, monsieur. I guess they'll need a recapitulation to learn their lesson. Instead of "Death to Denmark!", Muslims all over the world will be chanting "Death to (insert European Union country here)!"

The next time I see someone trying to push open a door marked "Pull", I'll say to them, "What are you, a European newspaper editor!?"