Most of us would think that spoilt brats who are arrogant about their inherited riches have no right to be arrogant. After all, they weren't the ones who slogged for the money that they flaunt in your faces - what right do they have to be arrogant? However, we cut the arrogant intelligentsia a little slack. Their intelligence is surely a cultivated effort, and it's worth giving them some credit for it. Therefore, it's okay for them to be arrogant: they have a right to be.
Yet intelligence could be inherited too. Intelligent people could just be naturally gifted; they just happened to be lucky when God was giving out brains, that's all. So why should they have a right to be arrogant? They are as lucky as the next spoilt brat you meet, that's all.
So it seems like nobody has the right to be arrogant, because any edge that one possesses is out of sheer luck. But that's only if you adopt the philosophy that we can do nothing to alter our fates.
Whether people have the right to be arrogant or not, that doesn't stop people, right or no right, from being arrogant.
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I was recalling a hilarious incident. Let's call this somebody X. X was sitting with me, and after an extended period of awkward silence, he took out an asthmatic inhaler, and started toying with it. Clearly, the socially accurate thing to do was to inquire about it. Unless I had wanted to be all mind-gamey and pretend to be oblivious to it.
Me: "Hmmm, I didn't know you were asthmatic."
X: "I'm not really asthmatic. If people asked me whether I was asthmatic, I'd say no."
Me: "So why do you still carry around an inhaler?"
X: "Because I am prone to bouts of asthmatic attacks."
Me: "So you are asthmatic."
X: "Well, technically, yes, but if people ask, I usually say no. I don't like people to think that I'm asthmatic. It's something I don't usually mention about myself."
It makes me wonder, so what the fuck was he taking out his inhaler for? OBVIOUSLY he wanted to be asked about his supposed asthmatic condition! Yet he claims that it's a weakness that's best kept under covers. Can anybody shoot himself in the foot deeper? Has there ever been a worse attempt made at seeking attention? I simply cannot endure such stupidity.
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I went running at 2pm. It was blazing hot. Why did I risk heatstroke? I wanted to get a tan that's from genuine sporting activity, not lying languorously on some deck chair in skimpy things. I don't know if it was because I hadn't been running for four days running, or because of the heat, but my legs felt awfully leadened. In any case, I still finished 5.5km so yes, whether I ran like a sedated grandma or not, I still finished 5.5km. That was yesterday. Today while I was running, I was trying to think of how to run 10km, with only a 350m and a 550m loop on hand. Can any one of you ingenious people come up with some combinations for me? The closest I could come up with was 10.05km, with 17 rounds of 550m and 2 rounds of 350m. Meh. I'll probably lose count. I don't have enough fingers.
There must be a way... Of course, I could always draw up a new route with Gmaps Pedometer, but... but... I like familiarity!
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I baked a carrot cake. Sometime ago I had made some kind of a promise to try baking a carrot cake, so I did.
The frosting is so fugly; but at least it tasted good. I used this recipe. Despite using cooking oil once again, the taste wasn't as pronounced as it was in the vegan white chocolate macadamia cookies I made. I also substituted about two tablespoons of wholemeal flour, because I thought it may complement the earthy taste of carrot cake. But it was really because there wasn't enough all-purpose flour left, and I desperately wanted to try out the wholemeal flour I bought. No pecans on hand, so I left them out.
I finally tried the brownie thingy at Taka's basement. It was good. I got their top-selling brownie.
I also tried the diseased-looking potato-encrusted sausage from Seoul Street Snacks. It was bad. Do not get it. I recommend the barbequed pork sausage though. That one is deliciously greasy.
I tried the Ruby Strawberry Cheesecake from Cedele. It was good. I shall try every single one of their cakes eventually.
The reason why I'm trying out all these foods is because I figured life is too short to keep hankering after foods that I keep saying I'll try, but never get around to trying. I will stop short at trying out the new yogurt dessert things though. Like The Yogurt Place. It's a fad that I'll gladly sit out. Come on lor. Why don't I get a tub of plain yoghurt and mix it up with strawberry preserves and muesli and sell it to you at half the price that whatever that place is charging?
Sigh, this is what happens when one's a DIY-er. I hope you guys see that this baking thing is a fad, just like how I was obsessed over sewing a while ago. Not that I dislike sewing now; it's just that the clothes I hanker after require too much skill. And I don't exactly have state-of-the-art equipment as well. I hope this baking fad will pass. It's getting me fat. Bah.
3 comments:
Here's a mathematical way to figure out your running problem:
Consider that you're basically trying to solve the equation 5.5*x + 3.5*y = 100 for (positive) integer solutions of x and y. To make things easier, we'll multiply this by 2 to get 11*x+7*y=200.
Since 7 and 11 are relatively prime (share no common factors) we can find an integer solution by finding the x and y that that satisfies, 11*x + 7*y = 1, which happens to be, x=2, y=-3 (you can find this using the euclidean algorithm. So if it were possible, you could run 400 laps of 550m and -600 laps of 350m and hit exactly 10km. Of course, running negative laps isn't very realistic, so we should look for solutions where both x and y are positive.
So for this we employ the use of Sylvester's Theorem, which says that if m and n are relatively prime, any k > mn-m-n is achievable. Since 200 > 77-11-7 we know that there are positive integer solutions to your problem (yay!). Now how do we go about finding them? Consider that 11*-7 + 7*11=0, so, in effect we can replace seven of our 11's with eleven 7's.
So we take our -600 laps and divide by 11 for a result of 54.54 (repeating) or since we want to make this number positive, 55. So by doing 55 of these exchanges we can come across a solution that works for us. Likewise we could also do 56 or 57 of these exchanges since 400/7 is about 57.14285. So this means that 11*(400-7*55) + 7*(-600+11*55) = 200 or x=15 and y=5, other solutions include x=8,y=16 and x=1,y=27. So any of the following runs will give you exactly 10km:
1*550m + 27*350m
8*550m + 16*350m
15*550m + 5*350m
The other way you could have done this is by graphing the equation y=200/7 - 11/7x and looking for where both the x and y value happen to be integers.
Yay for carrot cake and that heck of a load of icing! Too bad you didn't have pecans though - it would have been yummier... By the way, walnuts work as a good alternative if you ever decide to giuve the cake another shot.
eryanv: You lost me at Sylvester's Theorem, but yay, you rose to the challenge and figured it out! I'll keep the figures in mind when I go running later. Thanks :D
jonathan: I didn't have walnuts either! I'll keep it in mind. It's amazing how you can't taste the carrot in carrot cake, huh?
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