Fortissimo

After racking my brains over the puzzles on my handheld Sudoku Pro 1, the Today newspaper's weekday puzzle seemed insultingly easy.

Also Ben and I learnt from each other today. He learnt slicing, eliminating possible places for a given number, and I learnt (d'oh) to eliminate numbers by observing the square, row and column. Wonder why I didn't notice that earlier. And Ben's more or less a first timer la -.- .

We started reading the horoscopes, and when we got to Kaiyan's one it read that a loved one would pay more attention to him, and I said Which would be him, and pointed to Bernard. And well I nearly got strangled for that but what's new... As we were exchanging horoscope readings and friendly spikes, Bernard suddenly asked to see Mr Muscle, obviously eliciting gay comments from the others. But the others insisted the horoscopes be read finish first, and then he could see his Muscle Man. Meanwhile Ben had for some reason commented that for all his muscles and 6 pack (We were proud of Kaijie who beat him cos he had an 8 pack... no no no I don't have... I'm fat and unfit) his Fat Man/Little Boy looked quite small, and well, we sort of agreed by silent assent. It's best not to give a loud wholehearted YES in response to this sort of comment, but anyway, I searched for the page with Mr Muscle, while muttering Now where is your man... And for some reason Ben thought that was very bad of me. Uh?

After scrutinising it for a couple of seconds, Bernard passed it back and said 'Ehhh I've seen bigger.' distastefully. To which Ben KY and me stared at him and I couldn't help but blurt out 'You've seen men with bigger crotches???' And Bernard hastily said 'No no no bigger muscles!'

Ohhh...

After UGC Ben and I were supposed to go cut hair together but he said he was too lazy/tired/whatever-other-synonyms. So oh well, I go to Tampines lor. Before going to EC though I go to Times to check the fountain pens out. I intend to get one fountain pen and one calligraphy set.

Anyway when I get to EC its empty and I'm shown to a seat immediately. The hairdresser addresses me in Chinese, to which I reluctantly answer. As you can see though I've got my terms ready, and fluently enunciated 弄薄不要剪短. If all you see are funnily accented characters for goodness' sake set your encoding to Unicode.

So the barber starts her job.

And gets through it without a hitch, and without me suspecting that I will come out of that chair looking like a total cuckoo.

When she starts to vacuum my hair however, her friend walks in. Probably a colleague. She smiles at her, and keeps her head turned, vacuuming through the same line while showing what looks like a wistful smile at her friend, so that I begin to suspect that even uncut hair would get sucked off.

She turns back and after a while, for some reason put more pressure than needed against my head. Suddenly my whole head is caught up with the suction and I'm jerked backwards for abit before the suction lets up.

And for once I'm totally satisfied with the work on the back portion of my hair. Normally they do funny things like cut it real short or high slope it. Then I would be speechless, and they would normally take it as a sign of consent and give a cursory flash of the other side of the back before restoring the mirror to its slot.