I finally saw Iron Man after the exams ended....after abstaining from all form of sensory pleasure during my exam period.....and I have to say it's a bloody good flick.....not just a good comic film but a good film. period.

The Iron man suit looked great and the CGI was practically flawless.....and Robert Downey JR is a helluva actor.......you take the comic Tony Stark, get him addicted on drugs, sex and booze and what do you get? Robert Downey Jr of course!!......cool....perfect fit with the character like Christopher Reeve and Superman....

I also loved all the extra bits for the Marvel Comic fans......like Captain America's shield on Tony stark's work bench, Stan Lee( the creator of Iron man) being mistaken for Hugh Hefner (the owner of Playboy magazine) and Samuel L. Jackson as Nick "Don't call me Nigga" Fury.....

I think I'll rate it 8.5/10.....its the kinda film that makes me proud to embrace my comicbook geekery....

Oh and below is a digitally reworked pic of how War Machine is probably going to look like in Iron man 2.....niiiice....

The two pictures on top are some new pics featuring the late Heath ledger as Joker........instead of having his skin bleached permanently white like in the comics....the film version of the Joker is some psychotic criminal who scars the corners of his mouth into a permanent smile and then lathers white make-up and lipstick all over it.....I quite like it....if I were 5 years old.....he'll scar the shit outta me....

And Below was the newly released concept art of Two-face........this picture was pulled by Warner Bros ..

I'm really looking forward to the flick......One more month away!.....Anyway I also caught a host of other shows in the cinema......Indiana Jones (which was okay...but the ending was semi-lame), Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian ( Pretty boring-ass flick and the CGI Lion was a much better actor than the Caspian guy..haha), Drill-Bit Taylor ( kinda bland.....cliched kinda feel-good comedy) and lastly Kung Fu Panda.....which I thought was a lot of fun....great animation...interesting characters......If I was maybe 10 years old, I would've really eaten up this kinda film with a spoon....
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Well anyway enough about movies......on the personal side of things......I recently finished a short half-a week job the company my Dad is working at........the company was having a massive price hike for their products across the board and had to sort out a couple of thousand accounts and send each one a letter of notification and the corresponding updated price-list......so I told me dad to help me enquire abt the job cos I was getting kinda bored after the 2nd week of holidays....

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So I was given 3 days to sort out everything, match everything,sub-divide the dirrect customer lists into the different product categories and then by the different sales teams, staple the whole load of lists and then mail it out........I managed to to finish the whole thing in two days......

So the last day....I assisted the company Secretary in sorting out the past 4 months worth of price quotations and customers orders......I managed to finish sorting and filing everything properly by 5.20pm on the dot....went down collected my pay and went home with my dad......

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I like the way his company works....they pay you immediately and in cash and extra overtime(if any) better than going through some crummy job agency who deduct their cut of your pay and then another sum for your CPF.........cool.....earned 210 bucks for a few days of work.....haha....but they got their money's worth lar......the moment I start work at 8.00am.....I don't laze around or procrastinate.....I consecutively work all the way till like 5.30pm- 6pm or until I finish my stipulated workload.....only breaking for lunch and maybe a toilet break or two........plus everything was finished ahead of schedule.....so yeah.....HIRE ME!! I'M AN ASSET to any company!!!....

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The first day I went to work was the same bizzare stuff man....a dozen of my father colleagues, subordinates or even the canteen uncle telling my dad that " Your son Looks like you"....or ...."Your son don't look like you at all" ...or ...."Your son looks more like his mum".....wah lau.....of course I either have some of my dad's or mum's features lar....since.....they ....are after all.....MY PARENTS!!!...LOL....

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Hahaha...Not like my dad brought an African american kid to his workplace....then I could see some confusion arising...."Hmmm.....eerrr...your son don't look like you....he looks kinda....sun-tanned or burnt.....did you leave him in the microwave oven on high for too long...?"...hahaha

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After army,I have a strong aversion to kinda staying at home and relaxing or watching tv all day long......I used to like having such a lifestyle during my poly days...I could watch like one movie on DVD a day then watch the special features and then watch the movie again with the director's commentary........but nowadays takes me at least two days to finish watching one dvd.....and I skip the commentary......hahaha....can't be as hardcore as I used to be....

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Yeah plus I put on some weight during my exam period.....because my weight rarely increases during the 1 month of studying period due to the stress and stuff....so I always use this time to abuse the situation and eat whatever junk I want...knowing that the weight gain will be minimal......for the 1 mth it was so boring that I just binged on snacks....I ate 2 tubs of King's ice cream, 2 small pints of walls Ice-cream, 6 Potong ice-cream, one mango ice cream cake, 12 sticks of Split ( There was a warehouse sales at Walls' warehouse in Jurong), 5 packets of sea weed, 6 boxes of Hello Panda, 3 chocolate bars, 2 bag of gummies, 3 sticks of fruitella, approximately 2 cans of soft drinks a day, 3 packets of Farmer Brand peanuts, two packets of pistachio nuts in addition to my normal meals everyday.....

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so I was 61 kg when the exam period started.......I was 64.5 kg when it was done.....so just a 3.5 kg weight gain......not a bad deal for indulging myself in all those snacks...haha...Plus I know that I can hit 61-62 kg within 2 weeks with solid jogging and a stricter diet........65 kg is the upper limit of my weight.......65 kg and above, I'll feel sluggish, the mid-section area will feel kinda flabby, sitting down after meals will be a tad uncomfortable, my face will start looking like I am in the early stages of having mumps and I won't feel that at ease in my own skin.......the Maximum weight I ever hit was 68 kg and that was a one time thing which I quickly rectified.....hahaha

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So anyway......I knew I was going to hit the reset button and shed all the weight during the Holidays.....because once I hit a certain weight that I'm nt too comfortable at.....I'll automatically get rid of it....

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Since the Holidays, I jog about 5 km a day around my house area (40 mins), skip 1000 times ( 200 times x 5 repititions lasting 25 mins), do 500 crunches after the skipping, some toning of the arm area with weights for 30 mins and before I go to bed...I do another 500 crunches.......on the food side....I've cut off any soft drinks and fast food for an entire month so far, no snacks, not too much fried stuff, try to eat two small meals a day or just one big one....and eat till I'm only roughly 70% full for every meal.....

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So anyway I managed to lose 4.5 kg.....cos I'm now at 60 kg on the dot after the 1st mth.....after which comes the tricky part....depending on your weight, there's only a certain amount of weight you can lose before your weight plateaus and stagnates at a certain level.........after that it'll be very hard to shed any pounds......so anyway I wanna hit a target weight of 57 kg (the weight I was at after my 7 day field camp in BMT).....at that weight....running, jogging, pull-ups are no longer a chore....they're become a pleasure......seriously....after my field camp....4.8km run in boots was no longer a problem.....pull-ups started becoming fun....my lower limit weight should never be lesser then 55kg ....any lower means that I've hit unhealthily low levels of weight......

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So 3 more kg to go....its attainable......but nt that easy.....the problem is though it took me a month to lose the previously gained excess weight....now that my weight plateaus at 60kg......it'll take twice as long to lose a single kg....losing 1 kg now could take 2-3 weeks of serious working out plus the usual dietary restrictions.....but by the time my new term starts......I'm pretty sure that I would have attained the ideal weight......oh well....not gonna be scarfing down any McGirdle burgers and Onion rings anytime soon....or Old Chang Kee.......or Potatoe chips......or ice-cream..........or any damn food that's even remotely tasty.....LOL

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Anyway I was surfing this website the other day and I uncovered so many of the really Cool and bizarre toys that I used to own......wah....I haven't seen those toys in years.....nice walk down memory lane......I dunno why but My parents always had really really good taste in toys since I was young.......they never got me those lousy superman/ Spider-man china knock-offs from our neighborhood provision shops......I always got some quality stuff......many of which passed on to me like some family heirloom by my brother......hahaha....

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The Toys these days really suck ass......horrible designs, damn expensive.....zero variety.......I'm glad that I'm a child of the 80's that's when all the best stuff came out........G.I.Joe, Transformers, Thudercats, He-man, Visionaries, Dino-Riders, Jayce and the Wheeled warriors.....the cream of the crop......the best cartoon nowadays that the kids have is about a Talking Sponge wearing pants for pity's sake.....LOL...

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Ok....I said I had really cool toys but that's nt to say that I was some Aristocratix child with everything he wants.....my parents seldom buy me any toys from department stores themselves.....I only occasionally got the fresh on the shelves toys.........they usually wait for the annual super-huge Toy's sales at Alexandria district park ware house every year and then they'll buy one ass-load of toys that they will ration and let me open over the course of the year......if I behave......hahha......so I only started getting my He-man toys 2 years after the cartoon had gone off the air in Singapore.....hahahha

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Anyway this are some of the more obscure toys that I used to have......may they rest in pieces.....somewhere in my storeroom....hahaha

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There are only two things I loved back when I was kindergarten........one was my smelly bolster and the other was dinosaurs.....so Kenner toys had this super-cool range of toys that featured cave men and Dinosaurs (albeit in skeletal form) and you had to assemble the different pieces of bones together to build your own dinosaur or you could built a small base for your cave man using the bones.......This "Dynacus" dinosaur was the first one in the series I owned.....hahaha

It came with a spring-loaded prjectile tail...I'm nt talking abt the sissy-field spring loaded projectiles today.....this tail could blind you if you launced it into your eye......Perfect for a clueless 4 year old kid like myself...haha....anyway if I had been blinded by the projectile at that edge I did'nt think I would have minded it......I would've just gotten my mum to buy me an eye-patch....cos I remembered being torn between wanting to become a ninja or a pirate when I grew up at age 4.....hahaha...yeah maybe get me a wooden peg for my leg while she's at it.....



My second dinosaur was a Pterodactyl caller.....err..."Ptero"......and this one was a much larger dinosaur......it looked fantastic and the toy's wing span was Gino-normous to me back then....and it could throw rocks with its spring-loaded feet......cool....I saw it in a flea market for sale like 2 mths ago.......haha......Of Course I did'nt buy it!!.....

So back then, when you bought toys from Kenner that came in a box, they would always include this full-colored mini-catalogue of all their toys that were coming out for the season.......and I would spend afternoons upon afternoons just going through the catalogues again and again......one particular toy caught my fancy and I managed to convince my mum to buy it for my 5th birthday......

It was the biggest dinosaur in the series....the T-rex....it was pretty damn big.......it stand up to about my knee-cap today........ok......bad example....that's admittedly not too tall...hahahah.....but back then it was a 4 year old's wet dream come true......

I spent weeks and weeks psychologically wearing my mum out so that she would get me the toy for my birthday.....hahaha.....I was subliminally convincing my mother to buy the toy before they even coined the term Subliminal!!!

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Y' see.....at that age, I would get pretty excited abt my birthday once November hit....even though my actual birthday was towards the end of November.......so anyway for the 3 weeks leading up to my Birthday.....I would show her the catalogue with a picture of the T-Rex before I left for Kindergarten, in the afternoon, while she made dinner and even when she dozed off in her bed......she would feel little fingers tapping on her.......telling her to take a look at the T-rex.....I swear.....hahaha......I still remember it was damn funny.......my mum was talking to me in slurry tones, with her eyes closed and I was going on and on abt the T-rex......and towards the end she would always be spouting some incomprehensible gibber-ish like " Yar...the coke is in the fridge...."....hhahahha.....and when she started zoning out.....I would tap on her again and do my sales-pitch once more....

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I was EVERYWHERE......there was no escaping me and my toy catalogue....which I carried with me everyday like the 10 commandments itself......I was like Chucky the Killer Doll or something......eventually....little by little.....I finally broke her down psychologically and she got me the T-Rex for my birthday.....hahaha.....another successful ploy!

The next figure......My Dad actually bought for me out of the blue at Yaohan depertmental store that used to be located opposite Tang Dynasty at Jurong area.......he just told me that the toy looked cool and bought it for me without me asking.......It was like I won the lottery!!!! I dunno who the hell this "Tex Hex" is......but he was the leader of the bad guys in the Brave Starr cartoon and that was good enough for me.......

This toy was much larger then the regular toys..abt 2 1/2 times a regular G.I.Joe figure's size and came with all sorts of guns, knives and this red, stranslucent energy crystals they called Kheribium...I can't even remember what I ate yesterday but why I still remember the name of the crystals 20 years later.....I have no idea!!!...hahhaa.......the Figure was cool...he looked like the dead corpse of Clint Eastwood with transvestite boots....

But WAIT......my dad even bought me the Skull-rider horse (below) the figure rode in the cartoon as an acessory.....WAS I DREAMING?!......I thought Aliens had abducted my father....cos I don't think my father ever offered to buy me toys without some grovelling on my part....but this time he volunteered......hahaha.....That memory is almost burnt in my head.....hahah

I dunno what the hell is the Skull-rider supposed to be........but it was the evil-horse or the evil guy from the cartoon so i loved it too...like it was mah own child....haha

Anyway like I previously mentioned....I only liked the bad guys in cartoons....I thought they looked cooler, I thoght they had the best lines in the show and had the most fun hatching evil schemes and what not.......so I would always collect only figures of the bad guys and especially the leader of those baddies......it did'nt matter.....as long as the toy was a bad guy and the leader of the outfit I'm totally begging my parents for that toy!


This figure below is Donctor Scarab...from the bionic-6 cartoons which came out when I was in K1 and the whole series of figures were made with both plastic and Cast Iron metal......in fact this particular figure....his whole tummy area was made with die-cast metal...

Fat+ Bald+ Evil+ metal pot-belly + nasty surgical tools?....I'm SOLD!

This are the bad guys below:

....And...The Good guys......I have a couple of figures here and there from both the good and bad side.........as for doctor Scarab.......after 2-3 months or so.....I think I managed to wrench both his legs off some how and Dr Scarab's decapitated body is probably at the bottom of some dusty box I haven't opned in at least a decade....

Next is the visionaries.....This one below is called......Cindar I think.....anyway the vsionaries were like these really cool medieval version of G.I.Joe and the first toys to incorporate holographic stickers in the toys.......each figure had a mystical creature on their chest plate (which you could snap out) and their stuff.......and when you shifted the figure in different angles...the Gorilla would roar or something.......plus in the cartoon, each character had a really catchy rhyme they read out that would unleash the avatars in their chest plates and staff....

These are the complete series of the bad guys....I think I had quite a few of them....and yes.....they've been maimed and crippled beyond all recognition by now...

Next up....is the Dino-riders.........One of my favorite toy-lines EVER!!....I got these pterodactyl figure....which was a standard dinosaur figure that had some wing-flapping action and you could attach the guns, armor and brain box on the figure and the toy came with a reptillian pilot and this trap to snare the dinosaur.....

I watched the dino-riders cartoon religiously last time on Tv Satu the malaysian channel which I was somehow able to receive on my television......totally loved the show....I had to endure those damn malaysian Nespray Milk commercials with this small girl singinging her "Ibu Ibu" mother's day song for every commercial break during the cartoon.......and on fridays I even sat through the televised prayer sessions from a Malaysia Mosque that would appear in the middle of the cartoon.....I remember the first time I impersonated anything....was when I did my impersonation of the malays chanting their prayers that I had picked up......complete with serious expression, closed eyes and everything....and I think I did a pretty good job cos my parents and brother would always be laughing hard everytime I did it....
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This toy below is again my Holy Grail back then...but I think it was too expensive or something......I never did get my hands on this toy.......but back then I had like an infatuation with T-rexes or something.....hahaa...oh and I remembered the reptillian commander on the top plaform was this frog in a space suit called Kruulos.......I have a photographic memory of completely useless information I tell you!

Ok.......Then we hav Silver Hawks........this series of vac-metallized bird-like toys who faced off against weird mutants led by the evil....MonStar......Monstar from the stars= Monstar....oh how clever.....LOL

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Monstar was the leader of the baddies so of course i gravitated towards him and this figure had this really cool feature...he could chnage faces......if you squeeze his legs together....his chest plate would lower open and his furry looking alter-ego head would flip in to reveal this spiky robotic head.....

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The First drawing i ever got from a friend......was this kid who used to do color pencil drawings of the Silver Hawk characters for his classmates and I requested for a picture of Monstar back in K1.......I have a vague impression of the drawing........it wasn't very good....to say the least...looks like somebody spilled pasta sauce on a piece of A4 paper and wanted to pass it off as a drawing....hahaha

I also psychoed my mum to get me Monstar's giant Sotong-like vehiclethat he could fly on......this toy was literally a giant sotong and space craft hybrid where you could tigthen his tentacles on a figure between them by pulling this lever on the back of the craft.....one thing I never figured out was why the sotong would be red instead of shite and purple.....Monstar probably marinated the squid Japanese style or something....

And......my final and biggest toy that I had from this series was the life-sized replica of Monstar's Pet Bat......it was HUGE and when you squeezed the legs.....the wings would flap spastically....

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Oddly...My dad bought this toy for me at Sungei Road (where old folks sold junk, stuff they picked up, broken keyboards on the streets...)when he brought us to buy some elctrical plugs and tools and somewhere amongst all the junk was this Bat in mint condition.....so My dad got it for me but I made my mum wash it in dettol before I would play with it....

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The funny thing is.....if you look at the pic below....the Bat had this retractable line with a claw attached at the end of it and you could pull the cord all the way out of the bat's mouth and when you pushed the purple button on the Bat's body......the line would retract super-quick into the bat's mouth......well first time I tried it.......The plastic claw at the end knocked one of the bat's front teeth completely off......damaging it....and I just stood there horrified looking at my mum with the toothless bat in my hands...

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That very day.......after leaving many a broken toy in my time....my mum finally dubbed me "The Destroyer"......for destroying nearly every toy I ever had.....LOL.......I think I played so rough back then that I probably needed Nasa or some place had to field-test my toys to ensure they could stand up to me...haha

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May those poor leg-less G.I.Joe and He-man figures and my headless Mr.T action figure forgive me for my youthful indiscretions....

Now here are some of my brother's toys that he passed on to me....My brother's favorite toy-line was this really gross and hands-on line of toys called "Mad scientist"........you could have your own monsters......pay with goop and weird ass plasticine....
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These are some of the figures we had....we had the blue ogre creature below....complete with really foul-smelling plasticine and the mould for the creature...

And next.....we have the glow in the dark alien compound.......the texture was quite thick imagine snot from yor nose that had the texture of muar chee....yeah that's about it.....

And speaking of snot.....we had this figure where you could load the glow-in-the dark booger juice and have Sammy Sneeze the alien ooze it out of his nose in big gushes.....LOL

And my brother got this next toy for one of his birthdays.....one of the most disgusting toys I ever played with.......it was some latex, rubbery goblin hand puppet thing that came in a plastic cage and it literally looked like shit.........

The hands were horribly soft like braised chcken feet and the skin was this really shitty brown and the version we had, had this really sick, purplish tongue.......

You see the two white nozzles underneath the goblin......your supposed to make the goblin's glass eyes bulge outta their sockets by using two fingers to push them out.....hahahha.....that was the puppets only action feature....you could make his eyes bulge so that it looked like it was choking to death.......with its tongue out and everything...

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Lastly I had almost all the toys from the BeetleJuice movie series......and those toys were bizarre....here's a sample:

And my mum even bought me Beetlejuice's convertible which came with its own snake pit at the back of the car....

LASTLY......I got the ultimate BeetleJuice Toy EVER....I had the life size mask....complete with synthetic hair, moss covered fless and this controller connected to the mask which was shaped like the thorex of a huge ugly beetle and when you pushed the button down .....the top part of his scalp would rip off and out popped this three ghoulish worm creatures....Cool

I remembered rollerblading ard Rail mall, where my parents used to have their bike shop at like 9.30pm while my mum was tallying the accounts in the shop.......and on the day of Halloween.....which nobody celebrated.....I was wearing this exact mask, holding a plastic/foam axe I head bought at K-mart and rollerblading around the row of shop houses........I scared the crap outta this elderly own man, Mr. Woo I think, who was the father-in-law of the owner of the Russian restaurant there and was also working there.....hahahahah......what a sight in the middle of the night!!...having Beetlejuice rollerblading past your shop house with a black foam axe saying hello to you........

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Ok enough of all these stuff about toys........This post has made me seem many times more geeky then I normally am......but I would like to state for the record that I no longer play with toys anymore and only indulge in the occasional figure for display purposes.......hahaha.....otherwise I've remained sober and successfully battled my addiction to plastic T-Rexes for more than a decade now....hahaha

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Alright.......I'm really beat after writing this post.........I'm gonna go watch the 3 hr long movie Gandhi now to cultivate my love and respect for my fellow indian brothers....hahaha....plus this week: The Incredible Hulk...........hope its good....

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ADIOS!!