Don't Read This: Harry Potter Spoilers!

As we all know, the final book of Harry Potter series "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows" is coming out this Saturday, and there have been wild speculations about the ending by fans throughout the world. However, those speculations are all over the place, and it makes everything so hard to find. So, to put all of them in one place, I present to you: the 13 most interesting "spoilers" out there about Harry Potter!

Warning: If you haven't read the previous six books and intend to read them in the future, then this really is NOT for you. If you have read the previous six books, then it's fine. I will hide the following list so that nobody would read it by accident. To read it, just click on the link below.

Show the spoilers!

1. Snape kills Dumbledore
2. DUMBLEDORE COMES BACK TO LIFE AND KILLS SNAPE PAGE 505
3. Hermione is a DUDE
4. Bush declares war on Hogwarts!
5. Trinity dies.
6. Snape dies
7. Syrius Black dies. Oh wait....that's what happened in the movie.
8. Everyone dies.
9. The series ends.
10. Harry Potter almost dies at the end, but realizes that the whole story was a bad dream. He wakes up back in the house of the horrible family, father banging on the closet door.
11. 299 died
12. Gollum falls into fires of Mordor with the ring.
13. Darth Vader is Harry's father.

Via Digg.com

Hah, I know some of them are rather lame, but many did crack me up. :)

By the way, this is a gentle warning to all Harry Potter fans: if you want to avoid spoilers, please avoid all form of human contacts from the time you get the book until you finish the last page. Spoilers are going to be all over the place, in your email, comment in every unrelated blog article, friends' conversations, phone calls, online chat etc. There are just way too many sadistic people who enjoy seeing people agonise over spoilers. When the last book came out, someone witnessed a crazy guy who went into the bookstore lines, read the last few pages, and yelled the ending. Another person heard people yelling out the window when he was in the bookstore's parking lot. Crazee people.

For me, the sixth book got spoiled last time because I overheard people commiserating with each other over the event. Arrgh. This Saturday I am going to join the line, cover up my ear, get the book quickly, go offline, ignore SMS and avoid friends. Nobody's going to spoil it this time.

Racism

For some reasons, living in a foreign land makes some people more vigilant towards racism. I personally haven't found lots of instances of racism in Melbourne, but some of my friends overseas have been telling me that racism is one of the major issues faced by international students in certain places. That intrigues me - am I the obtuse person who fails to detect racism surrounding me, or have I been really lucky to have eschewed instances of racism, or have people been too sensitive in their daily encounters?

A few days ago I read this post from Metroblogging Melbourne about a "racist" little kid, but after reading the story three times I was still entirely puzzled as to what made the author perceive the act as being racist.

They say racism starts from home. Damn right I say.

Working an evening shift in the restaurant on Tuesday night. A caucasian lady came in with two chatty caucasian boys. Very chatty and intelligent; I couldn't help but listen to their animated conversations about storybooks, schools and mobile phones.

My manager had taken their orders earlier, and had left me in charge of serving their table.

Food is prepared and ready, and I walked over to their table with three plates in hand. I was greeted with a very loud misnomer from one of the two boys.

"KONICHIWA!!!"

Immediately the lady turned to him and said, "Charlie, that's rude!"

With dinner plates still in my hand, I shot back.

"I'm not Japanese. What are you?"

Visibly embarrassed, the lady replied with a half-smile.

"He's a messed-up boy. A little bit of German, Welsh, Irish..." I cut her off.

"Does he speak German? Welsh? Or Gaelic?"

"No, no, he doesn't speak Gaelic, or any of the sort."

I replied casually, while serving their dinners.

"Well best you sort out these kids here. Racism starts from home."

The family ate quickly and left.

If this was in a less restricted setting i.e I wasn't working I would have kicked up a real verbal fuss, stopping short of a Western suburb-style brawl. We Metrobloggers are too civilised for that :)

In hindsight, I shouldn't have been that rude. But I do not feel any guilt. That kid was no more than ten years old, but he was looking at me as a category, not a person. And that's just fucked up. Allowing racism to fester at a tender age will only magnify the racist's stereotypical views of a non-White as he/she grows older. But allowing racist behaviour or comments to go 'unpunished' is worse.

Whatever it is, I'm glad I put the boy in his place. It didn't matter if he understood it or not; what matters most is that I didn't put up with it. Nobody should. The lady had better sort him out.

But whatever it is, I still win. Afterall, I'm not the one with the clownish name Charlie.

What is racism?

If a friendly waiter or a butcher in the market tries to catch my attention by saying "Ni Hao", are they being racist by identifying me as a Chinese and try to make me feel good by using my language?

Of course I am not the author, so the kid may have been really rude in the way he shouted out the "Konichiwa", but even if that's the case it would have been an attitude problem, not a racism problem.

Some people who commented in the original blog say that by identifying people and "stereotyping" people by race, the kid is already learning to disrespect and discriminate - but what constitutes racism is not "recognizing / categorizing people by race"; it is judging people and make presumptive generalisations based on one's race. Shouting "Konichiwa" is not making a judgement.

So what do you guys think about this story? It intrigued me enough to make a whole post in my own blog.

uʍop-ǝpısdn

(: ˙unɟ ǝʌɐɥ oʇ ǝʇıs sıɥʇ oʇoƃ ˙ʞɔǝu ɹnoʎ ʇɹnɥ oʇ sıɥʇ ƃuıʇıɹʍ ʇsnɾ ɯɐ ı ɥɐǝʎ puɐ ˙unɟ ɹoɟ sıɥʇ ƃuıʇsod ʇsnɾ ɯɐ ı ʎɐʍʎuɐ ˙ʇǝʎ sɐ dǝǝls ɥƃnouǝ ʇǝƃ oʇ ɯǝǝs ʇ,uɐɔ ı puɐ ʎɐpoʇ ɹǝʇsǝɯǝs ʍǝu ʎɯ pǝʇɹɐʇs ı

Travel Notes (1) - Back to Melbourne!

After 13 days of travelling and convening, finally I am back to Melbourne! I am physically drained and deprived of the Internet throughout the journey, but I have only three words to describe my journey:

Amazing, amazing, amazing.


Stay tuned as I share the stories and thoughts in the coming days. :)

Best Safe Sex Promotion

Now we know why AIDS is still so prevalent despite the free condoms.

From: pics.obra.se via Digg

Leaving for Adelaide

I am leaving for Adelaide tomorrow. Getting ready for five days of driving and sightseeing! :)


p/s: There might not be update here from now until 8 Jun, but if I can get my hand on anything online I will still put in a line or two.

The Old "My Little Moments"

I started this blog since 2003, and this blog has been my "cyberspace home", an icon of my online presence. But if you think that my cyberspace existence only began since 2003, you are wrong.

Check this out: The old "My Little Moments"!

Back in 2000, Eric and I were in a craze of making "personal homepages". In that era the word "blog" was still rather unheard of in human civilisation, let alone in the rustic town of Alor Star. In 2000, personal home page was the in thing. I was in Form 3, still chubby and bouncy, and out of narcissism I decided to make myself known in the inter-web. I borrowed a HTML textbook from Chyuan Wei, and I learnt all the HTML tags like <a>, <i>, <u>, <table> etc from scratch. Then, I wrote the whole home page in Geocities using notepad and created the graphics with some free softwares which I have already forgotten. After one to two weeks, the result was what you see in the homepage.

After successfully creating the fancy homepage, somehow I managed to abandon the whole project. The whole homepage degenerated to a faint memory of my bygone enthusiasm. After a few years, I even managed to forget the password to the whole account. It has been 7 years since I last updated the page, and I seldom mention the existence of this homepage to my friends. For some reasons, Geocities has been such a great site that it preserved my site all the while, despite me not maintaining it for seven years. Eric's old homepage, on the other hand, has unfortunately succumbed to the closure of the hosting company, an event which is not terribly rare in the Internet industry.

So you are in luck. Have a good look at Chang Yang's® Personal Homepage. Meanwhile I will forgive you for laughing at my deplorable language. ;)


Thanks to Heng Liang, I am reminded of my old homepage today. After some password-recovery processes, I managed to obtain a new password and now I am a happy owner of the said Geocities account again! Haha I don't know, I might update this site when I am in mood in the future.