39.3

That must have been some fierce virus. As far as I can recall, I don’t remember having a fever that couldn’t be brought down by paracetamol. But yes, it reached a peak of 39.3 degrees C. I spent nearly a week mostly sleeping, feeling sick, trying to eat and being stressed out by the amount of medicine I had to take. It was the worst bout of flu I had ever had.

Being very ill made me feel like a child again. There were many things I couldn’t do or didn’t feel like doing and my parents were doing them for me. Towards the last day of my MC, I was feeling better and starting to enjoy my days of rest at home watching TV or sleeping. Of course it felt extremely miserable at first, as if I would take forever to shake off the illness. So any show of concern made me very touched. My dad continuously helped me change the towel on my forehead to help lower my temperature. My mum tried to cook easy-to-eat stuff to coax an appetite out of me. Even a simple ‘Take care!’ sms from friends made me feel better. I am grateful to them.

I didn’t visit forums during this period. And surprisingly I found that I didn’t miss it as much as I thought I would. I am still playing catching up now which is pretty tiring, and something that I will have to do again in August and probably in November. Having been so ill made me realise who are the most important people to me. Perhaps I have been spending too little time with them. I still love Sammi and Hocc and my music very much. But still, when I’m in trouble, they won’t be doing anything for me. I don’t expect them to anyway. In a way, this few days of illness has given me another perspective in life.

Welcome to My Family

YUNG: U SEEMS NEVER BEEN HERE, RIGHT? U FROM HONG KONG? ANYWAY WELCOME TO MY FAMILY!!! LOVE U!!! :-) :-) :-)

The above is message from Sammi!!! And she must have kept clicking 'send' cos the same message was posted 3 times, plus another 2 that said: "YUNG: HIHI:-) :-) :-)" Maybe the page took too long to refresh and she thought the first post didn't go through! And it's under her registered name at her official site so the messages must be truly from her.

Her site is so busy that usually I either can't post, the page takes ages to load or there are so many posts that probably she couldn't read everything and reply. So I am super lucky! I can just keep reading this post dozens of times a day!!! hohoh (hoi sum dou din jor) :)

Bad Girl

As far as I can remember, I have never sung "壞女孩" (Bad Girl) in karaoke before. I didn't think I could handle it. But then I tried it yesterday, thanks to caocao! Somehow it just brings back this memory which I had buried for quite some time...

My first concrete memory of Mui-Jeh was this concert that was shown on TV when I was just a little kid. It was on Malaysian TV and I think the images weren't too clear. Actually I can't remember much about the concert except one particular scene during the encore, when she appeared on stage in a casual get-up and short hair (much like her look in the "曼珠沙華" MV). Really 好型! More than 20 years later this image of her singing "Bad Girl" is still stuck in my head, even though the video that my sister had recorded had turned mouldy long ago and was thrown away by my mum.

My sister only started buying her albums from "烈焰紅唇" onwards, so we didn't actually have classics like "壞女孩", "似水流年", "妖女", "將冰山劈開" etc, at least not until I started buying her CDs subsequently. I didn't think I have that many Anita CDs, until I did a count recently and found that I had more than I thought:

情歌1
情歌2
淑女
夢裡共醉
In Brasil
歌之女
是這樣的
Larger Than Life
I'm So Happy
With
Anita Mui Forever

And that's not counting stuff we have on cassette. I'm contemplating buying back some of her older works which have been re-released recently. I remember the few months after her passing, early albums like "Red Anita" had been going for more than US$40 on Ebay!

Why do people learn how to appreciate others only when they are gone? Now I tell myself that if I like and if I can afford, then I will buy. I'm not advocating hasty decisions or rash purchases, but if after careful consideration and you still think i'ts a good choice, just go for it! Don't wait till it's gone, then you'll only live to regret.

Rockdom - We Will Rock You

So the no. 1 song on JSG is 越唱越強 by Joey Yung. Think it only took two weeks to reach the top, quite a phenomenon. I saw the MV twice and I actually like the song very much. It's one of those that 'caught' me on the first listen, not unlike how 艷光四射 did last year. I can't believe I'm even harbouring the thought of buying Joey's new album! (I had earlier said that I would just get her compilations.)

I guess a big part of me is still very much into rock despite listening to it much less nowadays. Apart from Hocc and Candy, few 'pop' artistes actually venture into the genre. I remember the closest Sammi came to doing rockish songs were '女人不再幼稚' and 'Black Cat City', both of which I like very much but unfortunately not promoted maybe because they are not so acceptable to the general listeners.

Recently, I bought Beyond's "命運派對" CD. I had it on cassette ages ago but after being disappointed by Beyond's post-1994 releases, I didn't even feel like buying back their old albums on CD. Until recently. Seems like it's time for Rock Revival.

I have two Japanese bands to thank for my liking for rock music - The Alfee and X Japan. One has disbanded and the other still going strong after more than 30 years! Guess not too many people have heard of their names let alone their music, but more about them later...

Save Me

You could get a gold record for selling 25,000 copies of an album in Hong Kong. If you managed 50,000 copies, you get a platinum record. But these figures aren't being used anymore. Simply because sales have plummeted so badly that there's no point in using them, considering that only three albums out of those released in the whole of 2004 sold more than 30,000 copies.

What a sad state of affairs!

Nowadays, people seem to have a different way of thinking. We are listening to songs more often than ever, but few seem to buy albums anymore.

Being still very much into the culture of buying albums, I am probably considered a rare species. I'm sure some singers/musicians take great pains to come up with the concept, image and sequence of tracks in an album. I don't want to come to a point in time when singers don't release albums anymore and I have to download new songs instead of buying a proper album.

Save the industry please!

Euphoria and Disaster

I was so glad to receive A's 報平安 email early Friday morning. Read that the phone lines had difficulty coping with overwhelming number of calls but fortunately the Internet was undisrupted.

Shocking news indeed! And it had to happen one day after the successful bid for the Olympics 2012. What do the terrorists or whoever expect to achieve by doing this?

Suddenly I thought: what if I have to walk home from my work-place? How long would I take? More than 2 hours? And there could be much worse things. Shudders.

Whatever it is, life still goes on. You are resilient and strong, you will be fine.

Lazy (Lan)

yung!

You have been lazy! 懶! I thought you wanted to improve your guitar skills? How come you haven't been practising for the past couple of weeks? Not to mention working out chords for other songs.

Ok, so you tried playing "出生入死", "未來", "絕對" and "明星夢" the other day. But painful right? Serves you right for being so lazy. Don't make excuses that you now need to spend time on French. I'm sure you can make time for both.

Buck up and practise hard!

Wild City

It occurred to me that all along, I have been mistaken that the New Talent which I caught Hocc by chance was 1996's competition.

It is a well-known fact that she sang 女人心 (Woman's Heart by Anita Mui) & 鐵幕誘惑 (Masked Temptation by Aaron Kwok) and she came in first, that was how she received Anita's costume (worn by Anita in the 1982 competition.) The one which I watched showed her singing 狂野之城 (Wild City by Aaron Kwok). She won 最佳台風獎 (Best Stage Performance) then.

For a long time, I had thought that one was the HK region contest and the other was the worldwide contest in the same year. But now I realised that the more logical explanation was that one was in 1996 which she won and the other was in 1994 which she only got the 台風獎 and so didn't get the chance to meet Anita. That would also explain why nobody else seem to have the clip of her singing 狂野之城.

Silly me! I wish that I had the sense to record it at that time (I remember that I even caught the 'repeat' of the repeat the following week) and that I could watch it again. It was the first time I had ever heard her sing, even though it was something like 5 years late (if that was really the 1994 contest). I used to grumble about TVBJ always showing old programmes at that time (they are more up-to-date now), but it was a good thing that they did, or I may have taken a lot longer to discover the potential of Ho Wan Sze, or perhaps never.

Life-Long Learning

For too long, life has mostly been about studying (and now working), hanging out, rotting at home, and occasionally travelling. Then there’s Sammi and Hocc but I think there should be more to life than this.

I’m enjoying picking up the guitar again after a super-long layoff. I definitely still have much to learn! Don’t be lazy!

And I’ve been thinking of learning a new language for some time. My Malay by self-study got nowhere after two chapters, but now I’ve got a new target – French! Having to go to a French-speaking part of Canada (plus the influence of a certain Ms C, hohoh!) provides some impetus and I hope I can sustain it.

Ok, I finally got started by buying myself a French for beginners book with the help of Ht. I was desperately reading as much of it as I could before our first ‘lesson’ yesterday. We began with pronunciation, simple phrases and two very important verbs 'to have' and 'to be'. Basically stuff to get a conversation going. My question is, why are French nouns divided into masculine and feminine ones? (Who decided which is which anyway?!) It makes learning French a lot harder because you need to know whether things are masculine or feminine or else you may get the article wrong. Then there are the six conjugations of verbs, some of which are very different from one another. Arrrrrgh!

I will be extremely amazed at myself if I can get very far by struggling along on my own. Of course I have a great teacher in Ht but I will need to buck up myself. And I seem to be perpetually tired such that whatever I try to revise doesn’t seem to stick in my head for long. Perhaps a brain that has become used to working-life needs time to adjust back to student-life. Well, I have one month to cram in as much as I can!

Let's Sing a Song!

Have not been to KTV for such a long time. Gu’s friends are pretty good at singing; they are like seasoned pros! And Hammie (can I call you this?) has a very loud and powerful voice. Very good for singing fast songs like “Mini & Me” and “Ging Oi Nei”! Great fun, yeah!