Back from New York.
After spending the whole afternoon walking rounds in NYC's Chinatown and walking into any shop that looks interesting for the whole afternoon, I now know NYC's Chinatown pretty well. So in terms of greatness of the Chinatowns that I have been to, NYC > Boston > Chicago > Washington. Baltimore's is non-existent.Brought back 6 egg tarts, packets of candy (great candies which I had come to love since kindergarten I suppose), and Lee Kum Kee curry sauce (good for small scale curry making). Hope I won't finish up all the candies by the end of spring break :P
Haha and ate great food! Dim Sum for lunch and dinner treat from Victoria's uncle (who seems to like Singapore pretty well, and kept asking me to describe to his son how great is Singapore's stability and how the government takes good care of its people :P). We also gave Alex a crash course on Chinese (food) culture (or rather HK/SG food culture); well, we walked into a medicinal provision shop, showed him the various containers of abalone, bird's nest, and dong cong cao, and described how bird's nest and dong cong cao came about. I don't know he is more amazed or more disgusted (at least he didn't show :P).
And some A*Star stuff:
http://aaron-ng.info/blog/clarification-from-astar-over-acidflask-incident.html
A*Star sent this link to all scholars recently regarding the Acidflask incident 2 years ago. It contains a recent clarification statement from A*Star, the original post from Acidflask, the apology from Acidflask, and some comments.
For those people who was out of the loop 2 years back, now you can judge it for yourself. I recommend scrolling to the middle, read the original post, and then going back to read the clarification. Form your own opinion first.
And I hold no sympathy for the bloggers who are always taking on Philip Yeo in the bloggosphere. Judging by the nicks they use, the remarks they make, it is clearly provocation. These people get their joy from seeing that their comments attracted Philip Yeo's attention, and amuse themselves further by mocking his refutes, and in the end the whole thing turns into a meaningless squabble.
Philip Yeo has a reputation as being combative in nature... Everyone knows what he did in Parliament. Well, whether or not that is appropriate for a high-ranking civil servant, exploiting that and getting amusement out of it in public arena definitely cannot be considered appropriate behaviour either :I
