The Greatest Pride of All, to hoist a nation's flag

It was without a shadow of a doubt, that no other would deserve this than her. My heart was feeling so explosive when I had that moment to glorify and accept The Greatest Pride of All. Guangzhou was between  16℃～26℃ with a dashing spark and magnetism in the air. The environment was electrifying and there goes the 16th Asian Games to begin from 12th to 27th of November 2010.


Everyone laughed when I was anxious and immediately exploded to salute as they made fun of me being patriotic and loyal as my national team passed. Little did most know that the bearer of the pole was one that I respect and give my highest honor toward her.


I'm proud of you, my dearest cousin, Jenebelle Lee Ying Shi. I will be with you the entire competition and will bless you and wish you all the best and good luck in bringing home our GOLD.


The article below explains: http://www.bt.com.bn/sports-national/2010/11/12/top-honours-wushus-lee

Top honours for wushu's Lee

Lee Ying Shi (L) dan Faustina Woo Wai Sii (R) posing with their silver medals during the 25th Sea Games held in Laos in 2009. Sixteen-year-old Lee has been given the honour to carry the nation's flag at tonight's Guangzhou Asian Games opening ceremony.Picture: Infofoto

JASON THOMAS
BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN

Friday, November 12, 2010

Sixteen-year-old to carry national flag

SIXTEEN-year-old Lee Ying Shi has been given the honour to carry the nation's flag at tonight's Guangzhou Asian Games opening ceremony.

A multi-titled wushu exponent, Lee will lead the way for the country's contingent of nine athletes that Brunei has sent to compete in five sports during the 16th edition of the Games.

With medals at the 4th World Traditional Wushu Championship, 3rd Indoor Asian Games and 25th Southeast Asian Games to her name, there probably isn't a better candidate to hoist the flag than the young Lee, who will compete in the one-day Long Fist (Changquan) event next Tuesday.

Apart from wushu, Brunei will also be seeing action in cue sports, equestrian, fencing and karate-do.

The hotly-anticipated opening ceremony in the fabled Pearl River's Haixinsha Island promises to dazzle with light and sound, with 45 boats being used just to ferry the thousands of athletes from the 45 participating countries.

As the first Asian Games opening ceremony to be held in a venue other than a stadium, the show's director has promised the event will surprise the world.

China has promised a traditional, water-themed opening ceremony for the games to kick start the country's biggest sports event since the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Organisers are keeping the identity of the final torch bearer a closely guarded secret, along with the method of lighting the Asian Games cauldron on Friday evening.

Associated Press, however, reported that the Asian Games cauldron might be lit by Chinese table tennis great Deng Yaping, current table tennis player Ma Lin, two-time Olympic judo gold medalist Xian Dongmei or footballer Rong Zhixing

"It will definitely bring us an unexpected surprise," said He Jiqing, deputy director of opening and closing ceremonies for the Games.

"The lighting of the fire will be full of Chinese characteristics. Chinese people will love it and this is something they are familiar with," he told reporters.

While the grand splendour of the opening of the Beijing Olympics in 2008 will be hard to match, the Asian Games ceremony will draw on traditional southern Chinese culture and feature a strong watery theme given its setting on tiny Haixinsha island on the Pearl River which runs through the heart of Guangzhou.

Apart from the mysterious fire-lighting ritual, the opening ceremony will feature 6000 performers, a blitz of fireworks and athletes will enter on a flotilla of boats.

Citizens in the area have reportedly been urged to switch on their lights during the ceremony to complement a hail of lighting installations to provide a glittering backdrop, though a pall of smog blanketing the city in the run-up could dim such an effect.

"We are told it would be clear weather tomorrow night and everything will be good and smooth," He said.

When contacted yesterday Brunei's chef de mission to the Games had nothing but good things to say when asked about how the international multi-sport event was panning out so far.

"In a single word; excellent!" Hj Muhd Zamri DP Hj Hamdani told The Brunei Times yesterday.

"They (Guangzhou Asian Games Organising Committee - GAGOC) have prepared very well in every area. In terms of security to... you name it, everything is in place.

"The food is, I should say, above excellent.

"Everything is available here. Southeast Asian, East Asian, European ... everything. Most of the food is halal and there is even a halal McDonalds outlet here.

"The accommodation is international standard and there are no complaints. We were also given four liaison officers to help us around.

"Guangzhou has done a good job," he added.

The wushu and fencing team have already started training at their respective venues. Karate have only had sessions at the Athletes Village and will be able to use the official training venue tomorrow.The Brunei Times

YES Troopers invade Bukit Bintang!!

If you're in Bukit Bintang at this moment in time, don't get shocked by the invasion of the storm troopers. The clone wars are no longer active and the Empire has already been toppled by the Return of the Jedi, say... a few years ago... or simply a Saga ago.

straight from the assembly line...

Trooper 1: can we accessorize our suit? like bedazzle it perhaps?
Trooper 2: I wanna put hello kitty stickers on mine!
Trooper 3: what the... ??? (must be some defect in that fella)

He went that way? err... but it says, Tandas Perempuan (female toilet)

Battery dead? Who's got the jumpstart cable?

Something is suppose to happen but no idea what it is yet.. so stay tune

Girl #2: eeewwww... one of those troopers made a poo-poo...
Girl #1: I'm busy looking at that hot hunk,
go change his diaper. err.. i mean suit... wait, they can poop?

Check-it-out! Abang Trafik Polis is feeling the heat from

an Imperial Storm-Trooper! LOL

Nowadays punya Yes (Storm) Troopers very canggih

(steady! this one, have to salute them and say, stylo and modern la)

Taking MONORAIL some more...

What ya lookin at? I'll vaporize you if you stare any longer

oh wait, there's a hot chick around, she could be my "light saber"

The Yes (fastest 4G Mobile Internet with Voice) campaign
from YL Comm. looks like a success.
check out http://www.yes.my/

Job killing you? Stressed mob bosses seek help

Interesting article... gotta read and laugh while understanding their world as you get an insight. I'm a neuro-psychiatric patient too. So, I know how they felt.

REGGIO CALABRIA, Italy: The mafia boss was having a dreadful time dealing with loss. But he was not struggling with the loss of lives, or even the loss of his freedom.

"Doc, it's my hair," the mobster from the 'ndrangheta crime syndicate confessed to his psychiatrist in jail. "I'm afraid of losing my hair.

"And look at these spots on my arm. See them?" he half-pleaded as he rolled up a sleeve and thrust out his arm.

"But your hair is fine. Absolutely fine. And there aren't any spots," Dr. Gabriele Quattrone tried to reassure his patient, who had tied himself into a knot of anxiety over the hair he believed to be falling from his head and the imaginary blotches popping up all over his arms.

Quattrone is one of a tiny corps of psychotherapists who have treated Italian organized crime bosses or their family members. Patients include dons haunted by nightmares, turncoats tormented after ratting, wives left frigid by rigid codes of loyalty. In exclusive interviews with The Associated Press, granted on condition that the identities of the mobsters not be revealed in line with doctor-patient confidentiality, the doctors offered rare insights into the secretive, increasingly strung-out world of Italy's centuries-old criminal organizations.

Quattrone, a neuropsychiatrist, treated his jailed 'ndrangheta patient with tranquilizers and made some attempts at nurturing introspection.

"It's the stress of 20 years of being a fugitive, of going on trial," he told the man, a top boss in Reggio Calabria, the toe of Italy's boot.

"Yeah, I'm stressed, all right. I'm stressed because I'm innocent,'" the boss retorted.

These are indeed tense times for Italy's mobsters.

A growing police crackdown and a rebellion among businessmen expected to pay protection money have left some sons of organized crime families wrestling with self-doubt, unsure they are cut out to take their fathers' and grandfathers' places in the bloody, vengeful world of the mob.

Seeking help, however, is risky business: among mobsters, visiting a psychologist is a weakness you can pay for with your life. Palermo psychologist Girolamo Lo Verso recalled the case of a mobster's son who told another therapist at a public mental health facility: "'If my father knows I come here, he'll kill us."

"If you're a mafioso, and you're anxious, you're not trustworthy and you have to be eliminated," said Lo Verso. "A mafioso is paranoid about everything," trusting the mafia code of silence ("omerta") more than the medical code of patient confidentiality.

The state's war on organized crime has put hundreds of bosses behind bars, sometimes for decades, sorely testing the mental health of spouses, children and sometimes the mobsters themselves.

Quattrone, the head of neuropsychiatry at a Reggio Calabria hospital, was once summoned to an apartment building in an upscale neighborhood. An elevator, with no buttons and an armored door, led from the garage straight to an apartment with windows shuttered tight.

In the sprawling master bedroom, complete with inlaid swimming pool, lay the mafia boss' severely depressed wife. Doctor and patient looked into each other's eyes. The husband's presence made communication hard but the woman's gaze told Quattrone everything he needed to know.

"We understood each other," Quattrone said. "She was oppressed in her role as a mafioso's wife."

Diagnosis? Existential loneliness.

The wife was depressed because she could hardly ever get out of the house and had a driver and a car with tinted windows on the rare times she did. The psychiatrist prescribed anti-depressants and checked up on her for the next few months.

Quattrone scoffed at the notion her husband would ever consider psychotherapy himself. As Tony Soprano put it to his therapist in the TV show: "I understand therapy as a concept. But in my world it does not go down."

Lo Verso teaches at Palermo's University of Studies, which will soon offer a masters course in Mafia psychology, the first of its kind. The therapists draw psychological profiles from treatment of mobsters and their relatives, turncoat testimony in courtrooms, lawyers' dealings with Mafia clients, and countless pages of intercepted conversations between bosses that wind up in indictments.

Group therapy sessions conducted in prison also provide fodder for Lo Verso's research.

At group talk in Reggio Calabria's maximum-security San Pietro Prison, inmates turned up perfectly groomed — doused in cologne, hair neatly combed, nattily dressed — and sat in armchairs arranged in a circle, recalled Paolo Pratico, a Calabrian psychologist who organized three sessions.

The prisoners showed eagerness to earn "good conduct" points toward early release. But to a man, they refused to admit that the 'ndrangheta even existed. Rather, they insisted they were victims of a miscarriage of justice. If the mafia does not exist, they argued, how could they be convicted of mafia association?

Many mobsters stay silent when Quattrone visits them in prison. A few complain of nightmares. They see "terrifying" images, but not of the people they've killed. One jailed mobster's sleep was haunted by thoughts of his terminally ill 12-year-old daughter.

"I can't sleep because I hear the voice of my daughter," the mobster lamented. "It's not fair that I can't see her. I can't accept that."

Sociologist Alessandra Dino, who has interviewed wives of Cosa Nostra turncoats and pored over transcripts of turncoat testimony to prosecutors, believes few mobsters have "crises of conscience."

"They have a mechanism of neutrality, where deviance equals normality," said Dino, who teaches at Palermo's university. "Murder becomes philanthropic because it is somehow related to helping the group they belong to."

Lo Verso said he has concluded that "the mafioso identifies himself totally with Cosa Nostra, which is his family. He has no individuality."

The therapist recalled a woman who was leaving her Cosa Nostra husband. She came to him for a psychiatric evaluation in a bid to gain custody of the couple's children. The woman, in her 40s, was beautiful, elegantly dressed and accompanied by her lover.

The pair would go away to romantic hotels for the weekend and sleep in the same bed. The man would undress and get sexually aroused, but the woman kept her clothes on and never showed any sign of sexual excitement.

She had the Mafia hardwired inside her, Lo Verso concluded — noting that, like many Mafia wives, she was the daughter of a mob boss, well familiar with Cosa Nostra's code that the wife never betrays the husband. In short, she remained married to the mob, all the more striking because she suspected her husband of having a hand in her father's slaying.

Quattrone said over the last decade or two, he has seen a slight shift, from mobsters who would not have anything to do with psychologists to those who will consult them if they think the problem can somehow be "masked" as a physical illness.

A 'ndrangheta family from the Calabrian countryside came to Quattrone after their young daughter started having panic attacks. "She can't have a mental illness, she has to have a physical problem," the girl's mother and brother told him.

Quattrone ran a battery of tests, and did find an unrelated physical ailment.

"The family was very happy to hear she had something. ... Because if it's a mental illness, the family risks being seen as untrustworthy."

Alberto Cisterna, a prosecutor in the national anti-Mafia office in Rome, is a Calabrian whose schoolmates included future 'ndrangheta bosses. He is fascinated by the growing body of psychological studies of mobsters, since "psychology figures a lot" in persuading a boss to turn over evidence.

In the rugged Aspromonte mountains of Calabria, Cisterna said, paramilitary police go out every night looking for fugitive mobsters, often in their families' farmhouses.

"You don't go looking for them at high noon, you go at 4 a.m.," Cisterna said in an interview. "The kids are bundled up in blankets and put in the street ... Everything in the house gets turned upside down."

After repeated raids, Cisterna said, "the wife will either begin to hate the state, or they'll hate their husband who subjects them to this."

In Taurianova, a 'ndrangheta stronghold, students at a vocational high school discussed how the crime syndicate affects their lives. Daniela, a soft-spoken 16-year-old from the nearby town of Rizziconi, talked about a childhood friend, the son of lawyer now in prison on charges of murder and of belonging to the 'ndrangheta.

The boy often asks her to go to his house and keep him and his mother company.

"Sometimes he cries and cries and says, 'I don't want to end up like my father,'" Daniela said. - AP