Well, hello!

To celebrate the official release of AAA's newest single - "CALL" - today (which I really like), I have here a video clippy of its music video. Dance-y, happy stuff, so eh.. if it's not your cup of tea, don't watch, I suppose.


AAA_CALL by AyanoEtsuko

I really like the way that this video was shot. Quite different from the usual style of having the group dance and taking shots from various angles, and then just interspersing solo parts of each member at certain points in the group shots.

I like the way that there seems to be more of a story in this video. And I like that the feeling of a story is also conveyed through the way that the camera seems to move "through" a scene instead of just being there for the members to dance in front of.

Like when how Nishi and Naoya show the flowers to the elderly butler and then in the next shot, Nishi and Naoya are still right there, while the camera zooms in on Hidaka by the side. And after Hidaka's done with his rap, next angle moves over Hidaka's shoulder to show that Shinjiro and Misako are on the other side of the room. Misako's positioned a ways behind Shinjiro, out of focus and very near the edge of the frame.

I like how this also echoes the music and is kind of a visual representation of who is on leading and backing vocals at that point of the song. After that, pan past Shinjiro to Shuta just behind him, and Chiaki sitting on the couch in the back, also a little out of focus. Again, same thing; illustrates whose vocals are leading here.

Needs a lot of thinking through and conceptualising, I'd think, but it turned out great! :D


And hmm.. I understand that Hamasaki Ayumi's new mini-album is released today as well. One of the songs on it features Naoya (AAA's very own leader and father figure, hurrah!): "ANother Song". Yes, both the A and N in the song title are supposed to be capitalised. I'm guessing it might have something to do with the initials for Ayumi and Naoya's names.

I can't understand much of this one yet... but it does sound quite pretty. :)


Another song by AyanoEtsuko

Arrived home at about midnight after having dinner with Weiquan, Jeslin, Wai Xin and Weiquan's parents at Pietrasanta.

We had four different kinds of wines tonight, and Wai Xin considers that "not a lot" of wine. I gave him the "what the hell?" expression when he said that. Then I considered that he's probably had more than ten varieties at some point in time, so yeah, four might not be a lot. But four is a lot for normal people, 'kay, 酒鬼? :p

Decided to try getting started on my Japanese homework while I'm still wide awake after my shower and waiting for my hair to dry.

But got sidetracked when I switched on lappie and opened up my browser and Twitter and saw that Shinjiro tweeted that he'd blogged. Well, Sunday, so let's go pop over to the official bloggie.

If it weren't for the little funny emoticons that he usually uses to title his blogposts, I would've thought it was Hidaka or Nishi blogging for a minute. Suddenly so many pictures.

On second thought, no self-taken, camwhore-ish pictures, so maybe not Nishi. XD (Because Nishi's posts are full of camwhore-ism. Were you ignored as a child or something?? Lol.) Guess it kinda looked like a Hidaka post for a moment.

Was kind of a long post (which is also unusual for Shin-chan), so I had plenty to read. I think I'm getting faster. But long strings of particles that don't seem to make sense slow me down. For example, I *think* I sorta get the feeling what it means, but I don't really understand what "なのに" is supposed to mean. *scratches head*

It makes it worse sometimes when Shin-chan mixes his native Kansai-ben in with the hyoujungo and my Rikaichan gets confused because it groups the characters weirdly and I can't understand it.

(Side note: "寝れへん" just sounds weird. I can't imagine how anyone would say it.)

This post is just full of randomness, have you realised? All righty, I'm off to bed now. Haha. :D

More fangirling coming up. And a bit of LOL-ing. You've been warned.


Seems like I probably won't be able to get Shinjiro's second photobook; I think it was kind of a magazine kinda thingy. It's out of print on CD Japan, and it doesn't seem like there're gonna be anymore reprints. Sigh.

Was searching around online to see if anyone who has it might've scanned it to share with the rest of us unlucky peeps, and stumbled across a Tokyohive news article about the handshake event that he had on 3rd August for said photobook.

And my brain got kinda stuck on the second paragraph:
“I tackled a full nude for this photobook. I wouldn’t want my parents to see it,” commented Atae, who says he’s gotten more work after taking his shirt off at a concert last year. He continued, “If it’ll make my fans happy, I’ll do nude work.”

Aside from the er... willingness to do nude work if it makes his fans happy (I find that statement mildly disturbing), I almost laughed out loud at him saying that he got more work after taking his shirt off.

It reminded me of that particular moment during 5th Anniversary's concert, and it was rather... shocking, lol. I still wonder whose idea it was; the artistic director's, or his own? The boy has this whole innocent, unassuming demeanour, but from time to time, he does or suggests things that make one think that he might actually be aware of the effect that his looks have.

Of course, to make this post complete, a video clip of the aforementioned shirt-shedding moment in 5th Anniversary is in order.




When I first watched it and saw him start to remove his tie for this piece, I thought it was probably one of those teasing kinda things where he'd probably just remove or undo small bits that don't really make much of a difference. Like the tie. And the top few buttons of his shirt.

Except it was followed by the jacket. Which got thrown into the audience area. Upon which my reaction became, "OMG, seriously??"

And then his attempt at a sexy dance (which I think Shuta might've been able to do better. *snicker* Or wait; maybe Shuta taught him the moves..? LOL.), followed by the *rest* of the shirt buttons (reaction at this point was, "OMG. Seriously." And the pseudo-innocent look on his face on that close-up shot. Dear Lord. Someone is obviously learning how to work his audience.) and well, the whole shirt comes off, eventually.

It's only about 3 minutes, and all he sings is one verse and one chorus of the whole song, but this is the one part in the whole concert with the most *sustained* screaming. LOL.

Okay, I'm just going to fangirl for a moment now. Just step away for a while if you don't like it, or close this window, please.

AAA has seven members see, so since there're seven days in the week, each one of them blogs on a different day. I still can't really remember who is on what day, except that I think Hidaka's on Mondays, Nishi is on Wednesdays and Shinjiro is on Sundays.

And it's Sunday!! Sunday = Shinjiro's blog day = whee.

Although Sunday also means "back to work tomorrow", but oh well. You win some, you lose some.

So, August means it's halfway through a-nation right now.
("a-nation" is a series of weekend outdoor concerts in August, organised by Avex. Avex usually has its best-selling artistes perform for these concerts, and the venues are all over Japan; a different venue every weekend. There're lots of booths all around the concert venues as well, for people to buy food, drinks and artiste merchandise, so it's an all-around carnival-ish atmosphere.)

a-nation was in Osaka this weekend, so since it's the Kansai area and Shinjiro's hometown, he went back to his parents' place to visit, and his blog post has a picture of him and his cute little nephew!

Behold the cuteness (over to your right). So much squeee-ness. It's so CUTE I could DIE. The little baby's SUPER cute, and Shin-chan kissing the little baby is even more squee-worthy, but overall, the whole picture is just SOOO full of oodles of warmth and fluffiness. *restrains self*

If it were a physical object, I would grab it and squeeze it and squish it and hug it and - well, I suppose you get the idea. XD

"People should not be afraid of their governments.
Governments should be afraid of their people."

If nothing else, I suppose this year's NDR proves that even the PAP is not beyond that.

I wonder if all this talk about citizenship is getting a little out of hand. And ugly.

Just a couple of hours ago, there was a Straits Times tweet that popped up; some reader had apparently written in to ask that PRs be allowed a vote in lift upgrading for their blocks.

His letter was well-worded, simple and to-the-point; he just wanted to be able to add in his voice if it ever came about that they were asked to vote if the people in his block wanted to improve their living conditions.

Here's what I don't understand. It's lift UPgrading. So it shouldn't be a bad thing, right? I don't know, but would anyone vote *against* lift UPgrading? Would anyone vote *against* having the lift stop at every floor instead of every five floors or every other floor?

But from there, the comments on the forum for that letter were just uncalled for. The guy was just asking to be allowed to vote to upgrade the lifts in his block.

So where do people get off with comments like:
"You want to vote for our government next, IS IT??"
"You come here and steal our jobs, our houses, and enjoy free protection from our sons and now you want to vote?"
"We don't want you here anyway! You want to complain so much, then go back to wherever you came from!"

Like I said, the guy wasn't *complaining*. And I don't see why anyone would vote *against* lift upgrading; if anything, he'd probably be contributing to a larger "yes" vote. And "free protection"? How does that figure? I have friends who are PRs who did NS. From what I understand, second-generation PRs serve the same kind of National Service as citizens, and one of these guys I'm talking about was a hell of a lot more fired up about his National Service than most male citizens I know. He's proudly Singaporean by now, and he still complains about NS guys (whom I presume are mostly born citizens) disgracing the uniform by not wearing it properly. So where the hell do you get off talking about "free protection"?

I don't think everyone whom you know is a citizen. There's a high chance that among the folks that these people call "friends", there are foreigners and there are PRs. You might not even know that some of them aren't citizens. I wonder if they would make all these same xenophobic remarks to their faces instead of letting all that hatred fly freely from behind a username and a keyboard. And I feel for this poor guy who just decided to ask about lift upgrading, and got bucketfuls of hate and vulgarities in reply. If I were him and saw all those comments, I'd be a lot more wary of my neighbours the next time I stepped out of the door of my flat.

But maybe that's what these people were aiming for; to make him feel as unwelcome as possible so that he'd "go back to his own country".

In the wake of all the violence in Norway and London, has anyone thought that maybe all that talk of peace and harmony isn't just about harmony among citizens? I can't speak for everyone, but sure, I would think that PRs know that we don't have the same rights as citizens; there has to be some difference, after all. If we're all going to live together, there's a lot that newcomers have to learn, and there's a lot that others have to accept and tolerate. What the world needs now probably isn't love, but a huge heaping helping of tolerance.

And in the most recent elections, with all the outpouring of anti-foreigner sentiment, I was honestly quite afraid for a while. Until then, I didn't know that I was living in a society that had so much hate in it.

I've lived here all my life, I was born here, but by virtue of the fact that my parents aren't citizens, but PRs, I was born a PR. All my life, I've been grateful that I grew up here instead of where my parents came from; I'm grateful that it has a system of governance that despite its pitfalls (because what system has none?), generally works. I've always been grateful that this is a safe place, but recently, it feels a lot less so.

The post-National day, post-long weekend, back-to-work blues.
I did not wanna get out of bed this morning. -_-

It's been a busy long weekend; I've been out of the house almost everyday, which, if you know me, is pretty rare. I'm some kind of housebug or something; if I didn't need to, I might probably never step out of the house.

But, just this weekend alone! On Sunday: lunch with Weiquan, Wai Xin and Jeslin at Pietrasanta at Portsdown Road, and dessert after at Laurent Bernard's just next door - such a chocolate overdose that I actually felt kinda sick afterwards. I have never been sick on chocolate before. It flies in the face of all universal truths, like toast landing butter-side up. But it did happen, I tell you, I felt so full and sick-ish for about an hour after lunch.

Took the train to Orchard with Wai Xin coz he was going to work (at Orchard. On a Sunday. Poor guy.) and I was meeting my ushers at the Marche at 313 for dinner. I was so full from the late lunch (we had lunch at 2 and probably only finished at about 4-plus...) that I really didn't feel like having any dinner. In the end, I settled for a sweet crepe and mushroom soup. Stuff at Marche really is quite ridiculously expensive.

Then, to the airport, to see Cherie off. She's gonna be in Denmark for two years to work! Sounds like fun. Well, not the work. But maybe work will be fun too. :)

We hung around till about 12.30am, coz her flight was only leaving at 1.40am, and by the time I got home, it was about 1-plus in the morning.

Then, Monday! Brilliant me took Monday off, so I had a long uninterrupted long weekend. XD

I spent most of the day doing stuff around the house, then in the evening, dinner at TWG at Ion with Weiquan, Jeslin and Wai Xin. Since it was TWG and me being me, I bought more tea. Wahahaha. But just a little 50g packet of Creme Brulee Tea. Coz it smelt so lovely.

Then, back to Weiquan's place to celebrate his dad's birthday, and for wine and cheese. It was supposed to be three different bottles of wine, but the first two bottles were 10 and 12 years old respectively... I think that made them kinda potent. I drank one glass of the first one, drank a bit of the second one, and then fell asleep. Ahahaha. No matter though; I'd already tried the third one before. :p

And on Tuesday, to Malaysia for a haircut and a bit of grocery shopping with my mum and sister.

Since I don't usually read newspapers and all my news comes from online sources or social media, and I have been out and about so much this weekend, I haven't seen much of the news headlines. So I was pretty shocked when I was in the car heading into Malaysia yesterday and heard about riots in London. And apparently, it's been going on for three days already.

It's quite unbelievable, considering that my sis and I were there not too long ago, in Dec 2009. I wonder if Camden Town is affected, coz that's where we were staying, at my sister's UCL hostel.

Neil Gaiman put it quite simply, really.

But it's also heartening to see that there're also a whole lot of Twitter posts where people are getting together to clean up the streets, help check on elderly neighbours, and there's even someone tweeting that if anyone needs help getting stuff fixed around their house or shop, he and "his boys" will pop around to do it for free. :)

These days, it really does seem like the world's heading to hell in a handbasket. Hope everything gets better in London soon.

But at the end of the day, this made me laugh:

That's probably the most down-to-earth reply to something like, "You're so handsome I could die." LOL.

It's rainiiinnng. Early in the morning. On a weekday.

I usually hate it when it rains in the mornings on weekdays, coz that means the loss of a good rainy day that could've been spent sleeping in. But oddly, today, I'm not too upset about it. Probably coz it's been so disgustingly hot and humid the past few days; maybe the early morning shower will do some good.

I got excited when I saw this on my Twitter feed:

A most admirable notion, sir. From someone who aspires to do the same, I salute you. But hmm. The article says that Google's project to digitise every book published has some 15 million books in their database... I'm gonna need a lot of space. Might need to purchase me a Batcave. XD


Now to start the day proper. Here's a little Nishi and Shin-chan for you. Being cute on a pair of swings (I miss these types of swings; all the newfangled stuff at playgrounds just doesn't cut it. :p).

May these two not-so-little boys brighten your day as much as it does mine, haha.