Tales from Earthsea (Gedo Senki)

I want to watch this!! It's Goro Miyazaki's (Hayao Miyazaki's son) first full length animation film and it has a lovely lovely theme song... very calming... and the beautiful sketches have won me over even though i've yet to watch the film haha :) Think it's going to premiere on Nov 9 in Singapore. In the meantime, you can watch Trailer No. 1 here... or Trailer No. 2 here :P

Singapore has turned mooncake island this past week or so. i'm seeing so many mooncakes around it's starting to get a little repulsive.... goodness knows how much lianrong (and other fillings too i guess) an avg Singaporean ingests during this period... and it's amazing how with some extra packaging and creativity hotels/restaurants can turn these low cost traditional desserts into highly profitable products... alas! i too fell victim to this huge commercial ploy-- HDB staff get say 25% discount on mooncakes from major hotels/restaurants and i got myself a box of mini mooncakes with champagne truffle and ganache from Raffles Hotel... colleagues were raving about it, but when i brought it home and let my family try it... my sis just went... taste like champagne, meh? haha. i did wonder how come some colleagues and other HDB staff bought so many boxes of mooncakes of various flavors.... do they really like eating mooncakes?? how much mooncake can you eat before you get sweeted out? and can ppl usually differentiate the quality?? I'm no food connoisseur, but as long as it's not significantly inferior, i doubt i can tell the difference btwn the quality of mooncakes from various hotels/ restaurants... does a Raffles Hotel mooncake really taste way better than the 80 cents mooncake you get from a heartland bakery? i suppose it boils down to the gift-giving part of buying mooncakes... obviously where you buy your mooncake from matters... hee... and when you spend so much money on your mooncake you would want to pyscho yourself to think that this expensive mooncake tastes better.... haha... i suppose this applies for many other things too? :P

sat in a public housing seminar at HDB on Friday; some variation in work routine at last! it was interesting for me, cos i got to learn a lil more about Universal Design, which includes, but is not limited to creating barrier-free access for the disabled; rather, it strives to make facilities/designs as user-friendly as possible to a broad spectrum of users. I also realized how impt it is for planners to take such things into acct, and applaud the move :) i used to admire how disabled-friendly buses and places in the States are; am happy to see progress here in sg too! i want to refrain from making this sound like a sales speech or something, but now HDB flats will come with wider corridors; bigger switches, bigger toilets, ramps instead of steps at appropriate spots etc... it really doesn't seem like it requires too much trouble to make these provisions and it's heartening that changes are slowly being introduced :)

lastly, on a random note.... we were briefly discussing recent news events in Japanese class today... and someone raised the coup in Thailand. so apparently in Japanese, the katakana for coup is not simply coup; rather, it's based on the original French coup d'etate... i guess it makes sense, since French should be as 'foreign' as English for the Japanese... why should i assume that all Katakana words are based on English? (though most of them are..)