The Thank God It’s Sunday Linky

So on Saturday we rose at 5, left home at 6 to get to Penang just before noon even as the dog moped, and got to bed after midnight and my grandma’s birthday bash; Rockstar came back from Sunday school last week coining the acronym TGIS and so let’s do that…

1) Russian boy and his sparrow friend.

Hey little fella, who’s your pet human?

My mum felt strongly that I should grow up with animals, because they would teach me something books and other humans could not really. And so after her regular hours as an upper secondary school English teacher and after-hours free English tuition to kids in lower-income households/ reading at St Nicholas’ Home For The Blind, she would clean hamster cages in the night as my two rodents in a cage morphed into 16 in a wall of cages. (Pet shop guy swore they were both female. It would seem Kenny was a late developer.) I can imagine this is every parent’s nightmare.

Hamsters tend to be far more fragile than dogs or cats; you don’t hold them properly and they fall, they die. They hop off the bed wrong, they die. The aircon/fan is on too strong after you give them a bath, they die. It occurred to me one interesting thing about the way my many pets shaped my personality was the way in which they trained me to “think.”

Hamsters have absolutely no respect for heights, and a rabid fascination of forbidden places. Their best “stimulation” was to be allowed out of their cages and then of course when you have to put them back in you have to go searching all over the room. They turned up in mattresses, the old sewing machine I used as a sometime-table, in the toilet, out in the yard befriended by my semi-wild giant rabbit that ran free in the garden and attacked repairmen and such – interestingly the one with the rabbit could’ve made a total break for it and we would never have seen her again, especially with all the stray cats around. But she was smart enough to stick close to Honey Bunny. (What? I was nine.)

Every one of my hamster adventures is absolutely true and unembellished, I swear. Searching for my lost hamsters provided a weird problem-solving stimulation and a motivation like no other. I found every one of them (though one managed to disappear two whole weeks and the one down the toilet developed pneumonia and eventually died).

So conclusion to the yarn is simply why I have a real soft spot for stories of kids who develop relationships with animals.

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2) Proof more people love animals: Massachusetts police force salute old police dog on final trip to vet.

Proof animals are people too

This respected member of the force had to be put down due to kidney failure.

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3) Sorry Mrs Jackson.

pic from The Daily Beast

Billion dollar lawsuit re negligence in Michael Jackson’s death draws to a close. Amid the Mrs Jackson Is Believed To Have Been Trying To Set Up Nest Egg For MJ’s Other Sibs Who Are All Left Out Of His Will stuff, what really struck me was how the MJ estate with its USD 400mil debt at his death has since become USD 600mil – USD 1bil profit. In this market. What I really want to know is who these whiz kid portfolio managers are and why no one has given them a medal. I mean, this was an estate that included giraffes and things isn’t it?

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4) The Man Who Ran The Silk Road.

pic from Huffingtonpost.com

The original Silk Road of course gets its name from the lucrative historical Chinese silk trade that was responsible for many transcontinental trade routes. The virtual Silk Road, which I suppose got its name from Original Silk Road, was a website for trafficking drugs and illegal immigration/ identification papers and possibly even killers for hire, which the FBI has now shut down. Way to Real Life Nikita. Just waiting for the movie to come out. Bet discussions for rights include numbers with very many zeroes in them. Maybe Twilight Guy will play the lead. Go, Team Edward.

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5) 22 Coolest Tweets According To Twitter (and 19 you’ll never see again):

“Four More Years”.

What I really like is the picture. POTUS chose this picture, of all the several million pictures he could’ve picked, when he got re-elected. Although what I’d really love is to find the guy who responded Why, are they  breaking up?

Conversely,

Hahaha

HAHAHA

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6) MIT develops self-assembling cubes. Because what the world needs right now are cubes that stack themselves. (Sorry MIT, I really mean congrats on your self-assembling cubes, because there was a time someone probably snarked about penicillin too.)

Clever Cubes pic from Daily Beast

So proud my almost- 16 month old stacks cubes. Somewhere there are parents whose kids go to MIT who are also proud their kids stack cubes ;D

I should’ve ended my yarning right there, but noooo I have to go on and add that right this instant, at 11.33 on a Sunday night, I’ve decided it would be just swell if The Rockstars grow up with both tech and hamsters. (It must be the tiredness – we’ve been partying with Grandma and now we’re hung over). Come morning and in a few years’ time my offspring searches and holds me to it and it shall be my turn to wash hamster cages (well at least move rodent babies about with chopsticks*).

I type that flippantly, but I’m not totally kidding. Tech is the world our kids’ll grow up in, and where we once had to learn to write lightning-fast for essays in 3 hour exams, today quite frankly typing is another mode of delivery of your best ideas (in fact I lose a lot, in a delivery with pen and paper, compared to typing). Rockstar is a very slow typist – as evidenced by his interactions with one of my closest blogger friends – in fact it was one of the things he mentioned somewhere in one of their comment chains, either on this blog or on hers – that it takes him so long. So I was pretty impressed, the day Rockstar came home from school recently and substituted his regular nightly Youtube TMNT fare for something called “Dance Mat”. It’s something on their Virtual Learning Environment (if I recall correctly – he accessed it, not me, and I only glanced at the screen once when he explained it) that gets them used to typing more efficiently, with all their fingers. And he subbed his TMNT time for it that night, that’s something. 

So anyway I believe the kids need to get techie. And you then just throw a few hamsters in the mix. Dones.

Have a good week ahead dears. <sheepish> we’re starting ours a little hungover. I have nice pictures, I do. And I can tell you exactly where they are in Kings’ camera too. So here are a few hurried pics from my iPhone til I can put the good stuff up.

You can tell from the maniacal look on Rockstar’s face that he thoroughly enjoyed one of the best buffets in town. Broke out in song. Our relatives were treated to a rendition of:

A healthy life needs a healthy di-et, 
So check the label before you buy-it,
There are better ways to cook than to deep-fat fry-it,
So think before you drink or cheeeeew…..

Resting, it’s a necessi-ty,
Gives you a chance to gro-oow,
A healthy life needs a healthy di-et….. 

And then one of my uncles walked over and offered him that deep-fat fried Keropok Udang. Ay, but there are now various elderly going A healthy life needs a healthy di-et…………!