Tree Kisser

What can you make out of this picture? I got in off the web.

It shows a pretty girl hugging and passionately kissing a tree.

Why do you think she is doing this?

Practising before the heavy date?

Need a hug and the tree was convenient?

A tree to remind her of a heavy romance?

Whatever it is, this is one interesting picture.

The Great Houdini

I actually knew very little of Harry Houdini, the world's greatest escape artist until I saw the movie called "Death Defying Acts" tonight.

All along, I thought Harry Houdini died when he failed to get out of a tank of water while being handcuffed. That misconception could possibly have arose from countless movies of magicians and escape artists I have seen and one of those plots could have confused me with how Harry Houdini actually died.

Harry died from a ruptured appendix when he was boxed by a young red-haired punk while in Montreal. In real life, he was the greatest escape artist ever until this day!

Guy Pearce and Catherine Zeta-Jones starred in this movie.

Are we going up?

I picked this from the on-line version of the Business Times Singapore on June 8.

This is how it read:

Malaysian export figures for April were a disappointment for all those optimists looking for slower rates of decline as proof that the recession was bottoming. Exports actually contracted by a larger 26.3 per cent year-on-year - the market consensus had been minus 22.4 per cent - as opposed to minus 15.7 per cent year-on-year in March.

Malaysia’s growth in real gross domestic product (GDP) terms contracted by an unexpectedly larger 6.2 per cent. So we are seeing a similar, if not worse, trend here. Indeed, Bank Negara governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz said as much, warning that the second quarter could prove to be as damning as the first.

Should we worry? No, we should look at it, instead, as the proverbial glass being half-full.

A number of features present itself. First, it would seem that the rate of “recovery” (for want of a better word) in the region is patchy, because less painful export declines in April occurred in Hong Kong, Indonesia and South Korea.

In Malaysia’s case, the export fall in April was exacerbated by the fall in exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG), crude and refined petroleum products. The LNG falloff was worsened by a plant shutdown for maintenance purposes.

What this also tells us is that the recent commodity price gains have yet to translate into less bad commodity exports. The price rally has yet to filter into the data, and that can only be good going forward.

Meanwhile, imports fell 22 per cent year-on-year but rose almost 9 per cent month-on-month - a gain that was largely due to higher imports of intermediate and capital goods. It would appear that corporations are slowing down their rate of inventory reduction and we could see a rebound.

Indeed, we should see a return to slower export declines because the data coming in from the rest of the world indicates a snapback.

According to the Semiconductor Industry Association, global chip sales rose to US$16 billion in April – an increase of over 6 per cent, month-on-month.

The surge has been attributed to sale improvements in a number of end-users (mobile phones, for example). The personal computer market is also coming back.

The current consensus forecast is that unit sales of PCs will decline by about 6 per cent in 2009 compared to earlier forecasts of a 12 per cent decline. Similarly, the current prediction for cellphone sales in 2009 is a 7 per cent decline compared to earlier forecasts of a 15 per cent decline.

In the United States, inventories have fallen drastically, which could signal a pick-up in manufacturing going forward.

And both China and India have posted stronger-than-expected first-quarter growth, both driven by domestic consumption and infrastructure investment.

The performance of both the giant Asian economies bodes well for electrical and electronics exporters in Malaysia. As enormous consumers, they could be the tide that lifts all ships.

Given the global outlook, which seems decidedly better, the export declines going forward will narrow.

Bank Negara thinks so, predicting that things will begin turning around in the second half of the year.

Things will get better, if only because they cannot get any worse.

So, can we start buying into Bursa?

Adrenaline Driving Excitement

I am currently copying some of my movie reviews from another blog.

We Own the Night is the first of them.

A super movie to come out of Hollywood last year. Mark Wahlberg, Joachim Phoenix and Eva Mendes really hots up the screen. There was a sensational steamy scene in the beginning of the movie between Eva and Joaquim. I believe this set off Eva's rise to stardom in Hollywood.

The story is simple. A son of the current police chief, managing a club financed by a Russian drug lord battling with the police force, is forced to choose side with his family after his brother was shot and his father was killed by the drug lord.Succeed he did.

Pulsating and tense through out.

One great movie,this!

Strangers No More!

This is very interesting with a wonderful ending to boot!

A few years after I was born, my Dad met a stranger who was new to our small Texas town.From the beginning, Dad was fascinated with this enchanting newcomer and soon invited him to live with our family.The stranger was quickly accepted and was around from then on.

As I grew up, I never questioned his place in my family.In my young mind, he had a special niche.My parents were complementary instructors: Mom taught me good from evil,and Dad taught me to obey. But the stranger...he was our storyteller. He would keep us spellbound for hours on end with adventures,mysteries and comedies.

If I wanted to know anything about politics, history or science,he always knew the
answers about the past, understood the present and even seemed able to predict the future!He took my family to the first major league ball game. He made me laugh,and he made me cry. The stranger never stopped talking, but Dad didn't seem to mind.

Sometimes,Mom would get up quietly while the rest of us were shushing each other
to listen to what he had to say,and she would go to the kitchen for peace and quiet.(I wonder now if she ever prayed for the stranger to leave.)

Dad ruled our household with certain moral convictions,but the stranger never felt
obligated to honor them.Profanity, for example, was not allowed in our home... Not
from us,our friends or any visitors. Our long time visitor,however, got away with
four-letter words that burned my ears and made my dad squirm and my mother blush.

My Dad didn't permit the liberal use of alcohol.But the stranger encouraged us to try it on a regular basis. He made cigarettes look cool, cigars manly and pipes distinguished.

He talked freely about sex. His comments were sometimes blatant,sometimes suggestive, and generally embarrassing.

I now know that my early concepts about relationships were influenced strongly by
the stranger. Time after time, he opposed the values of my parents, yet he was
seldom rebuked... And NEVER asked to leave.

More than fifty years have passed since the stranger moved in with our family.He has blended right in and is not nearly as fascinating as he was at first. Still,if you could walk into my parents' den today, you would still find him sitting over in his corner, waiting for someone to listen to him talk and watch him draw his pictures.

His name?.... . .

We just call him 'TV.'

He has a wife now living we us....We call her 'Computer.'

What a perspective!

(Taken from the WWW-source unknown)

Why Go To Church?

If you're spiritually alive, you're going to love
this! If you're spiritually dead, you won't want to
read it. If you're spiritually curious, there is still
hope!

A Church goer wrote a letter to the editor of a
newspaper and complained that it made no sense to go
to church every Sunday. "I've gone for 30 years now,"
he wrote, "and in that time I have heard something
like 3,000 sermons. But for the life of me, I can't
remember a single one of them. So, I think I'm wasting
my time and the pastors are wasting theirs by giving
sermons at all."

This started a real controversy in the "Letters to the
Editor" column, much to the delight of the editor. It
went on for weeks until someone wrote this clincher:
"I've been married for 30 years now. In that time my
wife has cooked some 32,000 meals. But, for the life
of me, I cannot recall the entire menu for a single
one of those meals. But I do know this ...They all
nourished me and gave me the strength I needed to do
my work. If my wife had not given me these meals, I
would be physically dead today. Likewise, if I had not
gone to church for nourishment, I would be spiritually
dead today!"

When you are DOWN to nothing.... God is UP to
something! Faith sees the invisible, believes the
incredible and receives the impossible! Thank God for
our physical AND our spiritual nourishment!

All right, now that you're done reading, this is what you should do.

So, every time when you hear Satan knocking at your door, simply say, "Jesus, could you get that for me?"

The Beauties of Hollywood

To make this blog more attractive, it certainly needs more pictures.

So I will be adding pictures of beautiful actresses, wonderful scenery and others to pep up the blog.

To begin with I will feature four beautiful Hollywood actresses namely Julia Roberts, Charlize Theron, Elizabeth Banks and Radha Mitchell.

I consider them the best when they are in their prime though all of them continue to emit such charm even today.

Here goes. Hope you like the selection.