Tuesday, August 09, 2005

Love of our bunk~

The Love of Our Bunk

Well, this entry is purely devoted to the love of our bunk that, sad to say, has inevitably moved on to where it was meant to be... right in the tender loving care of Snailz.

Ok… I know, I know. I'm being super ambiguous here. I dunnoe why, but somehow I like being ambiguous. Anyway, that aside, I shall now unveil the object that had mesmerized almost each and everyone in my bunk (Well, nothing just seem to interest Gideon, so, wth~) For the past few otherwise dull and boring days in camp, the ultra cool object of desire that has earned itself such a prestige is none other then wat is known as: *drum roll* Antworks!!

This is how the Antworks looks like.

Ok, so just what is this concaved piece of plastic container with some alien-looking gel thingey inside? And why the hell is it oh-so-intriguing about it that it has captured the mind and soul of so many people in and around my bunk?

Well, for one, the gel is, as you can see, just some gel. So it is not very interesting at all. Unless you are some weirdos who DO actually find it interesting and even bothered to taste some of it. *Eeww!!* But the cool thing about it is, you can actually put ants into it and watch them work their magic with the gel! Seriously, how cool is dat? This thing puts Sims to shame!! Now, who will want to stay glued to their computers watching a bunch of pixels chat, flirt, give back rubs, f#*K, slap, fight with each other (in whatever order) when they can actually watch ants do all the incredible stuff they do live! Talk about reality tv! Talk about real voyeurism!!

It started out with a few ants from batch 01. Ryan, being the ardent insect lover, helped me a bit... and Yuanqin, the fellow accomplice in all things lame helped me out too. Went to the garbage collection point of the White house to collect some of the huge number of ants there. Sad to say, they din last the night. Most died. Some escaped. One died while escaping thru one of the 2 air-holes located on the lid. Well, we won't let one failure put us down.

Let me digress for a while. Seriously, we realise how stupid the manufacturers are to include 'tools' that aren't exactly tools since they're extremely useless in the fine art of catching ants. Why bother to include a stupid stick to just poke 4 holes into the gel when seriously, the ants DO NOT start burrowing from them. (This is verified by many other Antworks fanatics out there that all their Antworks burrows do not start with the said 4 holes.) And what use is a stupid little dumb container with cumbersome-to-remove magnifying glass cover? Wtf is that stupid thing for? One thing good is the magnifying glass though. Not so much as to help catch ants, but definitely great to burn things with. (Read: Converging the sun's rays to one fine fiery dot that'll burn whatever you want to burn. And hence the term 'magni-burn' that I've coined.)

The stupid useless tools with the great useful magnifying glass.

And ants are darn smart creatures if you ask me. If you were to put them in a strange, new environment, they all go super hyperactive and will be running all over, waiting for any and every chance to escape. So, if you caught like, 4 ants, and you wish to put in 1 new ant, 3 might just escape when you open the lid for 1/4 of a second to put the new ant in. (K, dat was a little too exaggerated. But you get the idea.)

Having said so, me and my fellow ants-catchers (Ryan, Yuanqin, Yeowmun and Arthur) devised an ingenious way to catch these little creatures, although it may seem a tad cruel. But, wth. It works, and that itself said it all.

First, you just need to understand certain facts.

Ants DO NOT suffer from brain concussion, and any apparent physical harm, even though they have been violently shook for a prolonged period of time. (If the ant is the size of a man, it has withstood being thrown about in a space of about 3 basketball courts, with tremors reaching at least a 10 on the Richter scale. N.B. Richter scales do not exceed 9.)
A continuous shake on the container render the ants helpless to catch hold onto any surface. Thus they wun be crawling all over.
Ants will take about 10s to recover from the trauma immediately after you stop shaking.

That said, all you need is some practice to counter possible psycho-motor problem and viola~! You are an Expert Ants Catcher in no time! Ants will not be running all over!! You wun be wasting precious time catching and re-catching ants!

Back to the ants. Batch 02 are of the red kind similar to those that Jude suggested catching in the toilet outside Studio E. But this batch comes from the grass patch right in front, and to the right of the area where trainees fall-in. This batch too, can escape from the 2 air-holes as their physical size is not much different from batch 01, and also, they have darn high fatality rate. Which basically meant it's another failure.

Can't really recall when the giant "Queen" ant came into the picture. All I can remember is Weising and Joshua telling me of a giant flying ant in their bunk. And so, the first permanent resident of the Antworks is born. It lived for a relative long period of time, and burrowed quite a bit. Until it finally dug its own gel-ly grave and passed on to the world beyond. To this date, it can still be seen in Snailz' Antworks, resting in eternal peace right smack in the middle of the Antworks. !@#^$!* Can't get rid of it's dead body now. Nice.

Now is where things get interesting. The 2 new species that came after are relative large, but still only about 1/3 the size of the Queen. And the best thing is, one of these species actually burrowed!! (The other species merely attacked others, tear them to shreds and eat them up, much to the delight of Yuanqin.) And it's tunnels I'm talking about!~ Imagine the thrill when only 2 of the correct species completed a short tunnel with 2 openings in 2 days! That really gave great encouragement when all previous attempts failed miserably. And so, after this great leap forward, Arthur, Yeowmun and I set out to find new additions to our pathetic army of TWO good ants... and finally, a good collection of at least 30 is added!! (The horrifically nasty cannibalistic ant is magni-burnt out of the tunnel that it has taken over as it laid in ambush for unsuspecting burrowing ants, and thus faced justice as Yuanqin magni-burnt it to death after it's been removed.

On and off, people like Albert and Zhihan kept lamenting on how obsessed I am with the ants. But little did they know this obsession is shared amongst many others in and out of the bunk. This is evident when the people I meet changed their daily greetings to: "Eh Keith! How's your ants?" And also, closeted ants fanatics like Yeowmun and Junwei were spotted going to Raymonia's cupboard (I kept the Antworks there) to gaze at the ants first thing in the morning!! That's even before they brush their teeth!! And people like ChenGuo and Weiye are also known to spent hours gazing at ants and lamenting on why they are doing that! Ha~!

Ok, shall end here, although the amazing Antworks definitely still full of life and vigour, except that it is in the hands of Snailz the Slow now. Really beginning to miss the dear addition to the bunk. They are as dear to my bunk mates as pets are to humans now, and I'm sure my fellow ant-complices feel the same, just like a precious part of them is being ripped away from their very body. Oh ants, I hope you're doing fine with Snailz...

P.S. Snailz, do update ur blog with some pictures of how the dear ants are doing yah???

Cre8tivesparks at 8/09/2005 08:49:00 PM

1 gave a piece of their mind

1 comments

at 14/2/06 1:24 PM reverendtimothy said...: What're you talking about?! The Antworks gel tasted GREAT thankyouverymuch! Have you tried it? No? Then you don't know!

:-P Hahahaha. Nice blog, dude.