Category Archives: Article

Human Rights

Happy 49th Birthday SINGAPORE!!!!!!!!!!!

Was just walking passed the TV when I heard about Human Rights violation in Gaza and the various happenings.

I felt an overwhelming sense of gratefulness that I’m in Singapore, that I am brought up in a society as such, that there are so many wonderful and important things that is naturally inculcated.

Since its National Day, why not put up a post on it? 🙂
THANK YOU SINGAPORE Once again!

I have absolutely no pronounced idea of what “Human Rights” is. Perhaps along the line of the rights that a human being should have. The rights that a human being deserves.

So I googled and came upon this site: United For Human Rights 

Please view the video 🙂 it’s interesting

Wah…… So all that many happenings around the world, really do have a link to each other, it’s about Human Rights.

The Human Rights function started way in 6th Century B.C., through the proclamation of Cyrus, also known as Cyrus Cylinder.

Cyrus Cylinder

Then the Natural Laws of Rome in 27 B.C.

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10 things about shaping up and feeling great.

10 things I learnt about shaping up and feeling great.

1. Its not about counting the calories, its about knowing what you are putting into your body. So read em’ labels
I don’t find it a smart idea to count the calories, I am not like a body-builder-careered person or make a living out of my body person, and really imagine sitting at a restaurant on your date, punching numbers on your calculator. If I’m sitting opposite that person, there probably wont be a second time really, cos the person is so anal. and life is so boring when its like that. Yes it matters, but what the hell? Why not, just be aware of what you are putting into your body? vegetables and meat. processed moderately, processed beyond recognition, unprocessed. carbos, fibres, proteins. I think thats enough. carbs = energy, un-used energy = fats, cane sugar = fats, clean intestine = better absorption of nutrients = less smell in the ladies room. Not that I do know what’s good what’s not or what most ingredients would meant to me or my body. But it’s fun to know which ones has more whatever than which ones. N you know what, those high cocoa content dark chocolate chocolate, I’m entirely blown away by the (excessive) sugar and (lack of) cocoa content in them. How did I know? I read..

2. An apple a day, doesn’t necessary keep the doctor away.
But it sure starts your day right. I eat apple everyday. like every morning. Its a breakfast routine. See the writeup on Apple vS Coffee. Maybe because I enjoy cooking, it is therapeutic to me, I don’t have a problem with waking up to peeling half an apple, slicing the apple into four, cut off the centre and base, floating them on a place of salt water and then packing them into a take away. apple + tea. thats my 6:45am (SG time) breakfast right there.

3. Lower abs is exercise, abs is what you eat.
They say 50% of abs is what you eat. That is so true. Love handles, is really because of what you eat. but that pretty looking bikini bottom, you need to exercise.

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The Best We Know

Have you watch Glee Season 5, the episode entitled “Movin’ Out”?
I was very intrigued by Becky and her interaction with the special guy in that tour she went for.
See snippets below.

I think its very real, not just of the special people, but even of the normal people as well.
The form of interaction, sarcasm. She pretends that she didn’t like him. But its obvious, thats her entree to the kingdom of relationship.

and it just reminds me of how relationships work for normal people.
We do our best and react to situations as best as we could. Sometimes one of the ways is sarcasm.
Other times its sweetness and being dainty. For me, its critical analysis (and of course w the bullcrap detector on full-swing mode).

 

 

Thanks for coming by

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

Choose Marriage

WOH… looks like Amanda is in the “Marriage” mood. 😀 or so I say. 😀

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Site URL: http://www.mellowdramatic-lifetothefull.com/choose-marriage/

 

Choose marriage. Choose well. Choose to work on yourself first, choose to figure out who you are, choose to be healthy. Choose to believe that you are worthy of a good love.  Choose to come together not as two halves to form a whole, as if marriages were meant to repair you, but as two wholes to form a partnership.

Choose love. Choose to commit to that love, in sickness or in health, for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse, till death do you part. Choose marriage.

People throw around ‘happily ever after’ as if all marriages could be summarised as such, as if it were a foregone conclusion. It is not. It is something that needs to be guarded and nurtured, it is a sum total of all our choices. Choose well.

 

 

Thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

Marriage is not for me

This came up on 9gag and I thought its deserving of a post, just as the next one coming up.

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Heres to the writeup: http://sethadamsmith.com/2013/11/02/marriage-isnt-for-you/ 

 

My dad giving his response to my concerns was such a moment for me. With a knowing smile he said, “Seth, you’re being totally selfish. So I’m going to make this really simple: marriage isn’t for you. You don’t marry to make yourself happy, you marry to make someone else happy. More than that, your marriage isn’t for yourself, you’re marrying for a family. Not just for the in-laws and all of that nonsense, but for your future children. Who do you want to help you raise them? Who do you want to influence them? Marriage isn’t for you. It’s not about you. Marriage is about the person you married.”

It was in that very moment that I knew that Kim was the right person to marry. I realized that I wanted to make her happy; to see her smile every day, to make her laugh every day. I wanted to be a part of her family, and my family wanted her to be a part of ours. And thinking back on all the times I had seen her play with my nieces, I knew that she was the one with whom I wanted to build our own family.

But instead of matching my selfishness, Kim did something beyond wonderful—she showed an outpouring of love. Laying aside all of the pain and aguish I had caused her, she lovingly took me in her arms and soothed my soul.

 

 

Perspective and experience, you can never buy them.

 

Thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

Friends

Most ‘fallen’ ministers I’ve met with said they had no-one to talk to, no trusted friends who would understand their problem.

God says, ‘It’s not good that man be alone.’

Friends are to laugh with, cry with and do life together with.

Friends are forged in fire.

Shared experience is the bases of relationship.

Be there in their ups and their downs and friendship forms.

Our destiny is locked into our friendships.

Jonathon was meant to inherit his father’s Saul’s throne, but he prepared his soul friend David for that.

How’s your friends?

 

Phil Pringles – Leadership Files

 

Thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

After 25

Not that it is entirely applicable, but this is still interesting. 😀

 

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Source: http://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicamisener/25-things-that-get-harder-after-age-25

 

While I’m not entirely familiar with all of them, this one appeals to me:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Seems like the “work” has been my freaking “dog” all these while. 😀

 

thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

The List

Chinese-Passage-Iris

Image kinda small here, download it here

The last 2 paragraph translated with my limited mandarin capabilities:

Always remember, never put a weight on people’s love and emotions. Because what you see as hard and difficult  might be very easy and simple for them to get through. What you see as incompatible, they don’t really care about. There is no compatibility in love and emotions. There is only suitability. Not everyone can find that desired one, but everyone will come upon that suitable one. When we come upon that, all the complicated list of requirements would be discarded. Noise would quieten down, become simple, and no list or requirement will suffice to qualify them. You don’t need effort or tricks to hang on to him, and he would leave you neither.

 

Standards and requirements are prepared for the one you do not love, when you chance upon someone that makes your heart beat, the standards are not standards anymore. There is no reason or rhythm to it, like you have no idea why someone would have you up and about for so many years,  those emotions and feelings have no reason. You love her, but you don’t know why.

 

 

Thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

Psychopath .. CEO

Talking about being sick, or in this case being a psychopath.

Was reading an article on knowledge magazine and lucky you it is available online.

Could You Spot A Psychopath?

Source: http://sciencefocus.com/feature/psychology/could-you-spot-psychopath

While he tested their performance and overall potential, Babiak was permitted to use the Hare Psychopathy Checklist – the psychometric test typically used to assess whether criminals have psychopathic tendencies. Babiak discovered that out of the 203 people he tested, one in 25 of them were classified as psychopaths, despite having no criminal background. That’s four times the number he would have expected to find in the general population.

When Hare took a closer look at the data, he discovered something else. “The company’s in-house evaluations of these people often said stuff like ‘this guy/gal is a team leader – innovative, bright, can be trusted, lights up the room when they step in, and so on,’” says Hare. “In fact, the higher they tended to score on the Psychopathy Checklist the better an impression people had of them.

“But when we measured their performance scores, by looking at how effective they were at furthering the company, they went right down as their checklist scores went up. In fact, when you get up at the high levels of the psychopathy scale, their performance was generally unacceptable. They should have been fired, but they weren’t because they were viewed differently by the people – they were great at managing impressions.”

 

 

They’re also thought to control our inhibitions and our attention. So far it seems his scans back this up. Inside the MRI scanner, when an individual classed as a psychopath is asked to weigh up a serious moral dilemma – like whether they should divert an out-of-control tram to hit a bus full of schoolchildren or one headed to a retirement home – their brain doesn’t seem to work as expected. Their amygdala – an almond-shaped brain segment that deals with raw emotions like fear and rage – should reel in horror at this hypothetical disaster. But the scans reveal that it remains relatively sedate in psychopaths. In fact, the more severe their psychopathy the less this part of the limbic system seems to react.

It doesn’t seem to be just one isolated portion of the brain that’s affected either. “The Orbito-Frontal Cortex (OFC) is supposed to attach emotional salience to fear stimuli,” says Kiehl. “In other words, it helps make sense of the basic emotions formed by the amygdala. When the psychopaths were asked to rate moral violations, this circuit also demonstrated much lower levels of activity than non-psychopathic prisoners. Not only were they not picking up on the emotionally charged content, but their brains didn’t seem to be equipped to attach meaning to it either.”

The result of this faulty circuitry is that they either fail to empathise or understand an emotion in the first place, or don’t know the appropriate way to react to it – something Kiehl has witnessed first hand.

 

 

Go read it, its pretty damn cool. 😉

 

Thanks for coming by

 

Be Bless
Love,
Amanda

Prawn and Broccoli Recipe

Prawn and Broccoli Recipe

Inspired from the BKK dish (the picture below isnt how the dish cooked from the recipe will turn out to be).
You need: 
1. Broccoli
2. Prawns
3. Carrots
4. Fish Sauce/Oyster Sauce/Salt
5. Garlic
6. Oil (1 table spoon)
Quantity: 
Agak Agak.
It is Agak Agak, but okay, its the idea of matching, if you a head of Broccoli, thats perhaps about my fist sized – 10cm in diameter, you know that going into 10 or 12 prawns is abit too much. 6-8 is sufficient. So 1-head of broccoli matches 6-8 prawns 
Carrots, dont use baby-cut carrots, it is “recycled”. Say a carrot that is about 16-17cm in length and 4-5cm in width, which is huge, a 7cm by 4cm is good enough.
Fish sauce, if you have it, Oyster sauce (which is very convenient to get) is fine too. 3-4 table-spoon is sufficient. But of course proportional to items 1 – 3. For the more health conscious, or dinning with diabetic peeps, 1.5 leveled-teaspoon of salt is enough (almost more than enough) to give it taste. Point to note the salt will “react” with the prawn to bring out the taste. It’s pretty awesome if prawn is fresh.
Garlic, Be generous, the elders say it kills bacteria of the greens, others say it brings another angle to the taste of the dish overall. I just know that Garlic is good for the body. 2-3 cloves is enough. 4, 5 will be pushing it.
Shortcut: 
1. Boil water, put Broccoli in a metal container, pour boil water into the metal container, close up metal container and let Broccoli cook itself. come back in 5-7mins time to check on Broccoli, Broccoli should look cooked by then. Pour away boil water, Douse with tap water to help retain colour (and some say vitamins). Pour away tap water. Leave it. No need to bother about drying, just leave it.
As is, Broccoli takes time to cook. So having “boil” it, all it has to do when it gets into the pan later is to absorb the essence of the dish. *sLuRP!
2. After de-shelling the prawn, give it’s rim a slid, it helps the prawn to “bloom” a little when cooked. Looks better although not exactly shortcut.
Those that are bothered, may remove the “intestinal vein”, some prawns have 2, the bottom and the top. It would then bloom even prettier. 🙂
But yar… fingers will smell of prawn. *yucks* but well, do it once, do it good.
3. Carrot, cut thin thin slice, diagonal strips are always good. It takes time to cook as well.
4. Not a fan of dicing garlic? Cut of top and bottom of garlic. Place a big knife horizontally over it. Apply pressure on top on the knife so the garlic is flatten. There, its easier now. My mom would just dump the whole flatten garlic in and it gets dissipated as we stir while cooking. 😀
5. If you prefer your dish to be a little wet (although entirely unnecessary) dilute the sauce. 3-4 table spoon of sauce to 1-2 table spoon of water. In a bowl, mix well before pouring in.
Steps: 
Prep
1. Slice Carrots. avoid getting it wet. Douse it with water and dry!! only before putting into pan.
2. Slice Broccoli. you may consider using small knifes to slid the heads out from the side, and further divide the stems into smaller pieces.
3. De-shell prawn. Wash.
4. Dice garlic.
Here comes the fun!
5. Turn stove on to Medium heat if you are un-confident. High heat is fine too (assuming Broccoli is pre-boiled)
6. Drop 1/2 a tablespoon of water into pan to see that pan is hot enough. The water evaporates when it is hot enough (not very necessary as it is more for deep frying stuff).
7. Pour in oil.
8. Put in Garlic, stir till it looks golden brown, 10-20secs is good enough too.
9. Put in Carrot, stir till it looks somewhat cooked.  (Raw carrots is edible too, dont worry)
10. Put in Prawns, stir for a short while, till its pinkish, as though the whole prawn gains heat.
11. Put in Broccoli
12. Stir
13. Put in sauce
14. Stir
15. Cover pan 10-20 secs is good enough.
16. Dish and Serve.
There you are. Agak Agak. By the feel, looks and intuition 😉