Publicity, thy name is my woe

Have been planning an event for this coming November, and am right now, panicking that may not be enough people to attend it. I have a pretty great list of speakers lined up and all are rather prolific in their circles but the price tag is rather hefty although nothing close to what the schools and other event companies are charging. They go by thousands, mine is a mere $280 and people are complaining of it being expensive.

Given the recent financial crisis and impending economic forecasts of doom, everyone's tightening their belts and companies are cutting training budgets so this is a really bad time for us to do this event. Am praying so hard that things will turn out all right and that we will have at least 200 pax. I think that should be sufficient to cover the costs.

With all the worry about insurance giant AIG being rescued by the Feds, I surrendered 2 policies (am so fuming mad at AIA now, irrationally or otherwise) yesterday during lunch hour and in the process, lost close to $6,000 OF.MY.HARDEARNED.MONEY. If I can react this way to losing $6k, I can't imagine how it must be for the countless of others who lost their homes, life savings and probably jobs soon. With the cost of food rising, natural disasters and all, think the only ones who will be making money during this period are doctors and funeral homes. Sounds dire? But it makes sense. Can you imagine how many people had heart attacks and a rise in blood pressure on Black Monday? And after the Senate refused to pass the bailout plan initially? I've been reading the papers that more and more suicides are happening because of the loss of jobs, mortgages, retirement funds, etc. It's beyond bleak.

And has it trickled down to our tiny island? I think so. People aren't spending, companies are cutting budgets and those employed by financial institutions and banks are pretty much in a limbo state of uncertainty. Asia had our 1997 crisis and weathered through it and so will the US. What goes down must eventually come up. In other less despairing news, "In a speech yesterday in Milwaukee, President Bush vowed to do whatever it takes to keep the economy strong. In fact he said that if he needs to, he will take vacation for another three months." —Jay Leno (courtesy of www.politicalhumor.about.com)

I think I pay more attention to American, Malaysian, Indonesian or even Thai politics than my own Singaporean politics. They're just more interesting and the things that come out of Sarah Palin's mouth sometimes just leaves me flabbergasted that the McCain would pick such an uncouth person as the vice presidential running mate. And that grating accent... oh mah gawd. Although I don't think Obama is that wonderful, he is preferable to another George "Dubya" Bush. He's just more sincere.

I have no idea why am I talking about my event, insurance policies and how it led to American politicians but I think I should stop now before I head to the topic of werewolves. Which is rather interesting actually, given the book am reading. But will stop myself now.

Books! My first love.

Someone sent me a checklist of 100 classics of all time to see how many you actually read, loved and didn't really like. My really loved list is kind of short.

Here are the instructions:

- Look at the list and bold those you have read.
- Italicise the ones you want to read.
- Underline the books you really loved and strikethrough the ones really didn't enjoy

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In A Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

NEVER going to a Pedder Warehouse Sale AGAIN

Saturday and Sunday was the annual Pedder Warehouse Sale where it's up to 80% off designer shoes, handbags and accessories and it was utter madness!! 50% off Marc Jacobs or Louboutins anyone? I've never been to a Pedder Warehouse Sale before and was itching to see what they had on sale. Are the discounts for real? Are the stocks from eons and eons ago?

As curiousity got the better of me, I actually headed down on Saturday morning. The flyer stated 10am opening and initial thoughts was that I would go early and be done within an hour but good golly miss molly! wah lao, there was a queue already! A damn long one by the way...

MA was still in bed and was supposed to meet him at 12pm, I thought ok, I've got some time to kill and took my place in the queue. FOR ONE HOUR. Before I managed to get into that stifling little room. Now I must add that I was not hard up to buy anything, especially since MA got me a gorgeous YSL Muse for my birthday and I had just spring cleaned my wardrobe and shoe closet but the moment I passed the half hour mark, sheer stubborness set in. "I've already waited 30 minutes. I had BETTER get into that room."

Of cos I got in... and discovered, not the first time, that women go absolutely insane when it comes to designer shoes and handbags.on.sale. All niceties, manners and decorum fly out the window. I stood rooted to a spot for a good five minutes taking in the scene while all chaos reigned about. Some smart ones brought their male friends/partners to help them chope a space in the cashier queue, which was another goddamn nightmare. But surprisingly, the goodies were actually quite impressive. Stacks of Pedder Red (aka affordable), Keds (also affordable), Repetto, Christian Louboutin, Stuart Weitzman, Beverly Feldman, Marc Jacobs, and more. ALL.ON.SALE. All the char bors were going nuts! And it was a kind strange comfort to see the common love of shoes that transcends race, colour, profession and social stratas. Some of them bought like they starved all year only to unleash their credit cards for this.

The room was sooo tiny for the amount of people with barely enough oxygen for each and the number of sales persons were pathetic with every one of them save one, wearing masks of misery at the hordes of crazed women shouting "Have size 40 or not? Got gold one? Where is the other half of this pair? This one how much discount hah? Miss, I want that pair!! What else what else? Show me everything you have in size 38!" I was not one of them!

Dear On Pedder, with the amount of ka-ching you guys make, I should think you would be able to afford a larger function room with more staff and cashiers. And shouldn't you have a better system of attending to customers since you do this every year? Have you any idea of the agony of being rounded up like caged cattle separated from goods of desire by a mere table length but not having sufficient sales people to help reach them? Don't be ngiao next year please.

I sorely wanted to buy the Repetto ballet flats but the queue was another long long long line and I was afraid of passing out due to lack of oxygen so I left, EMPTYHANDED. Was so sad.. told MA later that day to remind me never to attempt another Pedder Sale. Consolation was found in a pair of $19.90 flats at Far East Plaza.