rats saga

rats - the alarm bell to my colleagues and i that we are indeed excessively snacking in the office (as if our expanding figures weren't enough proof! XD)

well, first time we found out was one night when i was staying back to complete some work, and i heard some creepy noises coming from my colleague's workstation. it sounded like some paper bag was being constantly torn or crumpled or whatever, so i peeped over thinking that perhaps he's still in office. but noooooo... no sign of anyone left in the office in fact!

so being the scaredy cat that i am, i decided to call it a day and promptly left the office. yes yes yes my balls are as tiny as Yukke's ...pick.

anyway, the next day as i was contemplating with my colleagues whether it was really a rat that i heard, my colleagues saw the culprit scurrying across the passageway! O_o!!! i mean, i swear the rat knows English and knows we're talking about it!!! So of course we called the building management people to come over, and they set up this rat trap over the weekend.

Sure enough, there was a big fat rat in the rat trap on monday. Eerrkkk, disgusting!!! Brownish grey furry fellow, with a long whip-like tail~~~yewl.

But. it.did.not.end.there.

Next day, the first thing that greeted my colleague as she entered her workstation were 2 baby rats! Gosh... and they were newborns! Just the size of a thumb, with no hair.

We panicked. This means there could be a litter elsewhere. And how did these 2 end up on the floor? Did they drop from somewhere? And how many other rats were there!!?!!?

The pest control people searched everywhere but couldn't find anything... until... one smart fella opened up the flaps of the partitions of that colleague's workstation. There was a rat nest there!!! With 2 more babies still alive!

I swear... if you didn't know they were rat babies, u'd think they look rather cute, really. But the truth is, i got goosepimples when i saw those rat babies. What's wrong with this building!!?! I'm on the 22nd floor, for goodness sake! Where are these rats from!?? More importantly, what attracted them here? Are we so unhygienic (but the colleague with the rat nest is one of the cleanest folks around!)??! But there's no exposed food around!

The saga continues... Just last week, they found fresh rat droppings. Urrgghh.. confirms it. There's still at least 1 at large! This time round, they placed some glue mats around.. uknow, those cards with some bait and strong glue on its surface. So far, no success. :(

On a totally unrelated topic...

Tatsurou recommends a movie - guess which one? :)

Fool's Mate July 07

5 Mucc Songs, as chosen by each member (each chosen song was commented on, but i only included some of the comments here):

Tatsurou:
1. 狂想曲 (he views it somewhat as the first original mucc song, and thus symbolizing the beginning of mucc. also the first time tatsu wrote the lyrics.)
2. つばさ
3. 流星
4. 溺れる魚 (tatsu feels he's injected a lot of what he wants to sing into this song. also a song that he especially likes to perform at a live.)
5. パノラマ (lyrics which are not trying to say "thanks for your hard work", but rather, "the form may change, but we'll still be working hard together from now on".)

Yukke:
1. あやとり (yukke heard it before he officially joined mucc, and he was stunned:"how can high school students make such an awesome song!?!" also the first time he got a taste of mucc's "folkie" music style.)
2. 夜 (first time yukke wrote the melody.)
3. 雨のオーケストラ (yukke's demo for this song was 'cheaply produced' in his own room, so he was really impressed by how the dramatic power of the song increased with the use of an orchestra.)
4. 優しい歌 (yukke feels both the band and himself have progressed because of this song, and that this song proves that language is no barrier in the world of music.)
5. フライト

Satochi:
1. 9月3日の刻印
2. 背徳のヒト (first time satochi wrote the melody)
3. 前へ
4. 優しい歌
5. キンセンカ (first time satochi tried writing lyrics. although it is difficult, satochi says he'd like to challenge himself in the future with more lyric-writing!)

Miya:
1. 断絶 (when miya made the song, it didn't hit him that much, but the first time he played it live, he was moved to tears. At that moment he understood the meaning behind making your own songs. he says: "自分の感情を演奏するって意味で、この曲がなかった今、ムックはないかもしれません。")
2. 謡声(ウタゴエ)
3. アカ (almost symbolic of mucc back then. some sort of retrofeel worldview demonstrated in this song.)
4. 娼婦 (miya believed many people got to know mucc back then because of this song. powerful, fast, yet with a mellow melody. it seemed like a new style then, only recently did he find out that the scales in the song are similar to those found in russian folk tunes.)
5. 我、在ルベキ場所

*****
Scenic's choices... (no particular order)
1. 断絶
2. 9月3日の刻印 (first song in a mucc live that hit me hard)
3. アカ
4. 廃
5. あやとり
...it's too hard to just pick 5 though!

What are your choices? :)

ps. many thanks to BH for helping me purchase this issue! and for listening me out in other matters.. by treating my problems as if they are hers! (in tax-speak, we call it "domestic interest"! XD)

你的笑容

I hope I'll always remember that scene of you, standing behind the door, waving good-bye to me. The wind was strong and blowing at you, and you smiled when you saw your grandma's clothes fluttering in the breeze. You looked down and saw that your clothes, too, were doing the same. Then you peered down at my feet and noticed my black-polished toenails. Why were they black? you asked, as you looked down at yours and muttered that yours were not so.

Grandma expressed again the joy of experiencing this fresh breath of air, and you laughed along with her. Your laughter was so infectious that it was still ringing in my ears long after I had left.

However you may change in the years to come, I hope this scene will stay etched in some corner of my mind, and make me smile everytime I chance upon it again :) :D

singapore phenomena

Perfect cool rainy weather outside for a cozy sleep-in tonight. & i really need that... am falling sick... exhausted from the week's work... even weekend gatherings are getting tiring... well, depending on who I'm meeting. If it's one of those get-togethers where everyone else is obsessed with property prices, building that perfect muclear family and accumulating as much wealth as possible, it's dem tiring alright! Narrow-mindedness is no more than deluding yourself that everyone should only be concerned about these objects of desire and that there's nothing else in this world worthy of devoting your time to.

Don't know why, cos it's not really related, but I'm suddenly reminded of a quote from a particular episode of Northern Exposure...the one where Maggie was trying to be nice to everyone but ended up falling sick:

"People are simply incapable of prolonged, sustained goodness."

Man, it's so true.

I can only take so much hee-ing and ha-ing about property prices at work. If my friends start obsessing about them as well, I think i should either truly and honestly join them in their mindset (shudder), or just stop being a nice goody two-shoes and tell them hallo wake up there's more to life than owning a bigger slab of real property and getting your first big buck from a property transaction (*ding ding*... badges of trade alarm ringing!!! XD)

Hey it's suddenly making sense... so it's not my work that's making me fall sick, it's this prolonged, sustained goodness... i need to do something bad!!!

intensity

Already, with the 8 Jun live streaming and the anticipation of what's going to happen on 69day (in the end, they didn't announce their plans for 2nd half 2007 after all...), the last couple of days were illuminated with mucc, mucc, mucc for me. For the muckers attending all 3 lives in Japan, i can only imagine the kind of intensity they were going through.

ギャラリー見たい!
Well, now that the History Of Mucc lives are over, i just hope they'll make some DVD out of it!

Received the Best of and Worst of albums yesterday. Have only listened the tracks briefly once, so may not have caught everything, though safe to say that most of the tracks in Worst of were remixed, but only a handful were remixed in the Best of (Ware, Monokuro, 9/3, Libra and Flight). There's a beautiful 9日 vers in The Best Of acoustic disc. The Worst Of sleeve is in the form of a mini-newspaper :) My first response was great surprise :) but as I read it, it elicited a mix of emotions.

Later...

Real Mucc!

From 2ch and yuj:

http://www.fujitvkidsclub.jp/StreamingTV/tv_U/chottomi.html
MUST watch this! (i can't stop watching it, hahaha!)

It was only after i watched it that i realized the REAL meaning behind REAL Mucc day. XD XD XD OMG, they are so corny!

To see real mucc rockin' to フライト is so amusing!!! :D Especially with those eyes and a mouth that is perpetually open (which Yukke stuck his head into when he hugged it... er... should i call it a 'it' or a 'he'??)

How do you convert this streaming file into a video file for keeps? For that matter, did anyone manage to record the Zepp live into a video file? Or the other 4 History of Mucc live videos on the Mucc Yahoo page as well?

add: looks like rock-mucc has left an impression on furry-mucc! :D
http://gachapin.fujitvkidsclub.jp/#sixapart-standard

ムックの日おめ!

rushed home from work but by the time i launched the video player, it was already about 15-20 min into the live already! still, it was a close-to-3 hrs worth of live streaming, shiok!

& the members were in top form!　ムックの皆さんカッコいい～ね！

the streaming was smooth, audio was great, had great company on msn, what more could i have asked for? :) :) :D

they had mostly newer songs in their main setlist... highlights for me were パノラマ, 1979 (first time for me seeing played using Yukke's upright bass, and it was solid!) & 25時の憂鬱. but it was the setlist for the 1st encore that made me jump! 断絶 and 9月3日の刻印 starting it off! i haven't seen 9月3日 for a long time, so it was really wonderful i got a chance to see it again ^~^

kudos to them for adopting the live streaming idea! 本当に、ありがとうございます！

back from malaysia!

yosh! am back from a week-long course that was conducted near KL, Malaysia. Course was excellent and although we weren't exactly in KL (ie living in a hostel-like place in the wilderness), after a while i got used to that and looking back, i guess it helped us participants get to know each other better. but it was kinda funny, cos some people weren't expecting this sort of living conditions, so the first night was preetttyy unbearable... esp when some of them are high-ranking people, i suppose? some had ants in the toilet, others could hear the amplified sounds of water flowing down the pipes in their rooms... anyway, on my part the first night i had to deal with a resident cockroach who apparently left behind an heir to haunt me during my last night there XD

our malaysian hosts were great, though! and i liked how the participants interacted amongst ourselves as well as with the experts. at the end of the course, i was almost wishing we had one more week of lessons! ^^; but no... it's back to work, work, work, sigh...

well, there's at least 1 thing to look forward to this week! *beams* yup, don't forget, fellow muckers, to tune in to the live streaming of the 8 Jun live at mucc's yahoo page, 7pm SHARP!

sidenote: Tatsurou's latest blog post on the band's yahoo blog has proven his otaku-ness without a trace of doubt! XD XD XD

tech geek update: latest toy bought at PC show today: Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2. Looked at a number of models but decided on this in the end cos of the Leica wide-angle lens, 10x optical zoom and 3rd generation image stabilizer. excited excited excited... i just hope it delivers what it promises to on paper!!!

mental note for future PC show: do NOT go at the last hour, on the last day... even if there will be more freebies at that time... there were so many people, the BO was excruciating... could NOT breathe at some points o_O;