A rant on bus etiquette

My main modes of transport are bus and boyfriend-taxi, since I live a 50 minute walk away from the nearest train station, and don't own a car.

Apart from the occasional trip with the boyfriend-taxi, I catch the bus to and from work, uni, the city, and my nearest shopping mall. That's four different locations, serviced by three different bus routes, available from two different bus stops near my house - gosh this sounds like The 12 Days of Christmas! I should have ended with "and one garish but very visible shade of lemon yellow" (in reference to the colour of the buses, if you didn't get that!).

On most long bus rides, I am that person who leans my head against the window and promptly falls asleep, often with my mouth hanging open. But other than being vaguely unpleasant and embarrassing to look at (and I don't think people have the duty to be good-looking while catching a bus!) I try to not interfere with the comfort of other bus riders.

For example, when I catch the bus, my teeth are brushed and I do not breathe my stinky breath over the poor passenger sitting in front of me. Some balding man sat behind me the other day, sighed, and I was instantly assaulted by a gust of stale, smelly air! I thought I would be able to tolerate this (even though this man seemed to sigh unnaturally frequently)... until a few bus stops later, when his friend got on the bus, sat next to him, and they promptly engaged in a conversation that lasted the entire trip. Every time this guy spoke, the same stale, smelly breath wafted over to my seat. By this time the bus had filled up and it was impossible to move seats.

The following day, this balding man took the seat directly in front of me! Stemming from the belief that his breath could travel backwards as well (since the bus moves forwards), I quickly changed seats before his friend came on and while empty seats were still available.

Secondly... when I catch the bus, I put my bag(s) on my lap or by my feet on the floor, if it's a peak-hour bus that I know will fill up! (If it's the midday bus that only ever fills up a third of the way, if that, then I'm a bit more lax.) And believe me, I catch enough buses, at different times of the day, on different routes, to be able to figure out these patterns.

The only thing worse than putting your bag on the seat next to you on a peak hour bus that will fill up... is putting your bag on the seat next to someone else! This morning, while I sat on the bus with my bag in my lap and an empty seat next to me, some man sat in the row behind me and plopped his backpack on the seat next to me (the seat in front of him). I felt like turning around and giving him a greasy but decided against it, since I'd have to be on the same bus as him for another hour.

I just kept quiet and thought to myself "great, now people are going to get on the bus and think I'm some inconsiderate fool who takes up seats that are meant for humans, with inanimate objects, like bags!" Never mind that I was on my way to work and therefore in business attire, so it would have been very incongruous for the grotty backpack next to me to actually belong to me. But sometimes people don't notice small details the way I do.

Anyway I can really only think of two rude things that I would never do on a bus, whereas I can think of three rude things that I routinely do on buses, so perhaps I am in actual fact, the rude passenger! The annoying/obnoxious things I sometimes engage in include:

• Carrying on a loud conversation with the person next to me (if they happen to be a friend or acquaintance)
• Engaging in public displays of affection with the person next to me (back in the day where David worked in the same area as I did, and we caught the bus in to work together)
• Carrying on a loud conversation on the phone, in an Asian accent (if I'm speaking to my parents)

So, in a shocking twist my rant on bus etiquette has ended with the revelation that *I* am the quintessential annoying bus passenger! (Maybe M. Night Shayamalan will adapt this blog post for his latest movie?)

Hmm... I would hereby like to issue an apology to any fellow bus riders I have been annoying to, especially that nice Indian lady who always smiles at me at the bus stop. But this apology does not extend to Smelly-Breath-Man or Grotty-Backpack-Man! You have felt my virtual wrath!

Peace out everybody!

Nintendogs review!

People who used to follow my blog back in 2009-2010 (I believe this is a grand total of three people, including my boyfriend, who only read my blog because I made him), would remember that I reviewed the Nintendo DS game Scribblenauts. (I would put in some cool hyperlink over the word "Scribblenauts" that would take you to the relevant blog post, but I'm frankly not tech-savvy enough for that kind of thing yet.)

Today I'm reviewing another Nintendo DS game... Nintendogs!

The version I have is "Labrador and Friends" and the breeds of puppy available include the Toy Poodle, Schnauzer, German Shepherd, Shiba Inu, Corgi, and some other breeds that I can't remember because I didn't find them particularly cute, at least not in pixelated version (in real life all puppies are cute). I've included an image of the game's cover to the right so you can have a look at other breeds available.

If you get lots of "trainer points" (for being nice to your puppy and remembering to feed it and take it on walks and enter it into competitions), the "kennel" will get in "new breeds of puppy". So far I have unlocked two new breeds, the Pug and the Shih Tzu. Both breeds are pretty cute.

I believe you can have a total of three puppies in your house at a time, and there is always the "Dog Hotel" you can send your puppies to if you find that they are too much to handle. See, Nintendogs operate in real-time, meaning that if you feed your puppy, turn off your DS, then don't play again until two days later, your puppy will be starving. This real-time aspect kind of turned me off at first; I had a bit of an "I don't have time to be playing this every day!" sort of attitude. But really, nothing too drastic happens if you leave your puppy alone for like months on end, as I have done. (It's not like the Tamagotchis we all had in primary school, which got banned from schools because if you left them alone for like six hours, they would die.)

The game advises you that if your puppy feels neglected they will run away, but this has not happened to me yet, so I suspect it's just an empty threat. Anyway the aforementioned "Dog Hotel" is a handy way of effectively 'freezing' your puppy's hunger and thirst statuses if you need to take a break from your DS for a long time.

I currently have three Nintendogs, and at the risk of sounding like a boring mother who won't talk about anything except her children, I'll give you a quick summary of my puppies:

• Henry is a tan coloured Shiba Inu (I actually want a Shiba Inu in real life!) who is very good at Agility Competitions, fairly good at Disc Competitions and pretty bad at Obedience Competitions because under all that agility he is actually a pretty naughty and hard to train puppy.
• Lucy is a white Toy Poodle who is pretty good at everything. She is also quite friendly.
• Batman is a black Pug who annoyed me from the very beginning because of his refusal to wear his ribbon as a bow tie. Ribbons are "Accessories" you can purchase to pimp up your puppy, and generally speaking, boy dogs wear their ribbons as a bow tie, and girl dogs wear their ribbons on their head. The whole point of purchasing Batman the pug was so that he could actually look like Batman the superhero (I had a vision that he would be entirely black, then wear this yellow bow tie, geddit?) But Batman the pug had other ideas in mind and preferred to wear his ribbons on his head. I have absolutely no problem with this subversion of puppy-gender roles, but, you know, he doesn't look like Batman the superhero.

None of my puppies are particularly good at Obedience because I find obedience training incredibly banal and boring because it's so repetitive! Even teaching the puppies their name is painful. Not to mention embarrassing, if you happen to be doing this in earshot of anyone.

Competing is the only real way of earning money in Nintendogs, which you need in order to buy puppy food, water, milk, treats, shampoo, brushes, and other puppy essentials. However if you're no good with the competitions there is another way to not-starve, and that is by taking your puppy on frequent walks (they can go on as many walks in a day as long as they take a 30 minute break between each one) and selling the items that puppy will find along the way. Preeeety cheap-ass.

Hmm, that's really all I have to say on Nintendogs, so I'll just end this game review with a bunch of random ratings of arbitrary salient points...

• "Gameplay" (not really sure what this means except perhaps the degree to which actually playing the game is fun and challenging) - 8/10
• "Visuals" - 7/10 (it's pretty pixelated and the competition commentators always look like Bill Gates)
• "Sound" - 5/10 (the music played in the competitions is pretty boring... until you get to the Championship level! Then it plays cowboy music. Other than that the constant yapping of the digitalised puppies gets a bit grating sometimes)
• "Plot" - 2/10 (there is no real plot to this game because it's meant to be a "slice of life" kind of storyline... just going through the daily motions of walking and feeding your puppy, bathing it, and entering it into competitions)
• "Replayability" (my gamer boyfriend tells me this refers to the ability to replay the game and still find it interesting after you've finished it the first time) - 10/10. Nintendogs does not really end because you can always start fresh with new puppies. Also, there are always new items and accessories to collect, and surprisingly, the other characters in the game have not yet run out of stock things to say to me when we meet whilst taking our respective puppies for walks.

In conclusion, Nintendogs is a very entertaining and even addictive game for anyone who likes basic gameplay and a proliferation of puppies. It's a tiny bit Tamagotchi but with the added bonus that your Nintendog cannot die. Highly recommend!

So, occasionally there will have to be a non-food related post

Like this one.

Nobody thinks about food 24/7. Times you might not think about food include:

• When you're not Asian
• When you're watching a colonoscopy on TV
• When you're delivering a baby

Otherwise, whether you're sitting an exam, donating blood, or having sex, it's perfectly normal to think about food. Sometimes even necessary.

To extend the metaphor, I might call this post the entree, but there is quite a marked lack of appetizing food on offer, so this is probably the stage where you choose which restaurant you'd like to eat at. Which, if you're like me, can take upwards of one hour.

The topic of this post is: numbers I do and don't like. While I don't buy into new-age fortune-telling enterprises like numerology, certain numbers do appeal to me, while others just don't. Like colours, or family members, or... FOOD.

I distrust prime numbers. I feel their lack of factors makes them somewhat arrogant. Additionally, who wants to split 17 spring rolls between any number of people besides 17?

I like numbers which are multiples of three. Perhaps stemming from my upbringing in a family containing only my mother, my father, and myself, I have always found it easy to divide things by three. And if you're two people just cut one in half.

Even numbers (multiples of two) are acceptable, but even MORE acceptable when they are also multiples of 12. Perhaps because in primary school, learning your 12 times table was something of an achievement. Therefore, numbers like 36, 48, 60 and 72 convey a sense of intellectual superiority.

I approve of square numbers, for similar reasons. 25, 49, 64, 144... Hells yeah, I got an education.

Multiples of 5 (and 10) are definitely superb. No explanation needed here.

Multiples of 7 and 8 not so much. As a kid, I was probably more concerned with airing my knowledge of my 9 and 12 times tables to focus on 7 and 8, so I'm not always entirely clear what multiples of 7 and 8 actually are. Though I do know that 7 multiplied by 8 gives us 56, which seems to be a nice, solid, number.

And decimals, fractions and percentages... well, they are RIGHT OUT. Perhaps I should've been clearer about this. I am talking about integers. Positive integers. As someone who elected to NOT study maths in high school, decimals and all related abominations completely elude me.

Stay tuned for the entree.