Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is a 2009 American romantic comedy film that has a plot based on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. Mark Waters directed a script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Filming spanned February 19, 2008 to July 2008 in Boston, Massachusetts with stars Matthew McConaughey, Jennifer Garner and Emma Stone.^[1] The film was released on May 1, 2009.^[2]

When notorious womanizer Connor Mead (McConaughey) attends his brother Paul's (Meyer) wedding, he is forced to re-evaluate his behavior as he comes face-to-face with the ghosts of girlfriends past, present, and future, along with his deceased uncle (Douglas). The experience changes his attitude and allows him to reconnect with his first and only love, Jenny (Garner).

Recommendation: 3.5/5 The word to be used – HILARIOUS! Michael Douglas as Wayne Mead, was simply just so amazingly funny and I admitted that I did laugh a couple of times in the cinema. There were also touching moments which almost brought tears to my eyes, especially the ending when Connor Mead decided to "turn over a new leaf". Worth the money despite the negative reviews. Also, not to worry, your guys will like this movie too. There are plenty of dirty bachelor comedy to keep them laughing and well-entertained. 

YES! I took a Chrysler Cab from ORQ to home.

Initial cab fare is S$5, which is $2 more expensive than the normal cab.

Instead of 20 cents jump every x km, it charges 30 cents.

Total cab fare home was $39. Expensive though but it is the experience that counts. 

Least I took once before in my life time. Plus there is like only 50 cabs available in Singapore.

I am just that lucky right?

NO. I didn't go missing in action. Nor did I go out shopping during this Great Shopping Sales. I merely just refused to on the laptop cos I was reading.

I managed to finish Cecilia Ahern's Thanks for the Memories in just 2 days.  Justin Hitchcock has moved to England to be closer to his daughter, after he and her mother divorced. He travels to Ireland to work as a guest lecturer at Trinity College. It is there that he is persuaded to donate blood for the first time.

The dedication in the front of the books is to her grandparents and includes photographs. I could see her Grandfather Ahern as Henry.

 I am currently reading The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger. GREAT BOOK! I am totally engrossed in it!Take a look at the review done by W. R. Greer.

What do you do when you meet the love of your life when you're six years old? And he's 36, but he's really only eight years older than you are? If you're Clare Abshire, you wait for each of his visits throughout the years until you meet him in real time.

Henry DeTamble is a time traveler, although not by choice. A genetic mutation causes him to spontaneously travel through time, disappearing from view, leaving behind his clothes and possessions, and arriving naked in another time and another place. For the most part, this is a curse. Henry often has to turn to petty crime to feed and clothe himself when he travels, and must run from people, thugs, or the police. Eventually Henry returns to his present time, bringing only the bodily injuries he's suffered back with him. Sometimes he travels back in time and visits an earlier version of himself. One of the places to which he travels often is the meadow behind Clare's house, and throughout her younger years, Clare meets him there and falls in love with him.

This is the basic outline for the story of Henry and Clare in Audrey Niffenegger's remarkable debut novel, The Time Traveler's Wife. This is far from a science fiction exploration of the space-time continuum, but a heartfelt love story of two people who must live with this curse as part of their lives. Ms. Niffenegger has thought through all the ramifications of the time travel, and sewn it seamlessly into the storyline. Once you accept that time traveling is a part of Henry's life he can't control, nothing that happens to him seems farfetched or out of character.

The Time Traveler's Wife follows the story of their lives mostly in a straightforward chronology, at least from Clare's perspective. She's a child and then a teenager with their secret rendezvous throughout the years in the meadow. Henry first visited her at an older age, so he knew the dates that the earlier versions of himself would visit the older versions of Clare. She kept clothes hidden for him in the meadow and sometimes hid him in a basement room of her house. He was her big secret that she always kept to herself. How could she explain the presence of an older man who traveled through time to be with her? As a teenager, she was rumored to be a lesbian since she had no romantic interest in boys.

In those early days of her life, Henry knew much about her future, but declined to tell it to her. Not that she could have done anything about it. Henry often knew things that were going to happen, but nothing he could do would stop them. They still happened. Once Clare became an adult, she knew she had to wait to meet Henry in real time, and that he would be her lover. When they did finally meet, Henry in the present was a younger man, who had not yet traveled to the meadow to meet Clare. At this point, she knew parts of his future that he did not. As Clare and Henry merge lives, his time traveling excursions become times that he is absent from her life, even if he's traveling back to meet a younger Clare. Clare explains after living with Henry for a while:

 

Our life together in this too-small apartment is punctuated by Henry's small absences. Sometimes he disappears unobtrusively; I might be walking from the kitchen into the hall and find a pile of clothing on the floor. I might get out of bed in the morning and find the shower running and no one in it. Sometimes it's frightening. I am working in my studio one afternoon when I hear someone moaning outside my door; when I open it I find Henry on his hands and knees, naked, in the hall, bleeding heavily from his head. He opens his eyes, sees me, and vanishes. Sometimes I wake up in the night and Henry is gone. In the morning he will tell me where he's been, the way other husbands might tell their wives a dream they had: "I was in the Selzer Library in the dark, in 1989." Or: "I was chased by a German shepherd across somebody's backyard and had to climb a tree." Or: "I was standing in the rain near my parents' apartment, listening to my mother sing." I am waiting for Henry to tell me that he has seen me as a child, but so far this hasn't happened. When I was a child I looked forward to seeing Henry. Every visit was an event. Now every absence is a nonevent, a subtraction, an adventure I will hear about when my adventurer materializes at my feet, bleeding or whistling, smiling or shaking. Now I am afraid when he is gone.

Time travel has its advantages as well. Henry's mother died in a car accident when he was a small boy. He often goes back in time to see her, although all he can do is watch from a distance. At the same time, he's traveled back often, too often, to the fateful day that took her from his life. As Henry gets older, he learns more about his disease, and that stress and watching the flickering images on television can trigger an episode. He can't drive a car since he might disappear while behind the wheel, nor can he fly in a plane since it won't be at the same place in the air when he returns from his travel. Once Henry convinces a leading geneticist that he can time travel, he enlists the doctor's help is isolating the genetic problem and trying to control it with different combinations of drugs.

The novel is titled The Time Traveler's Wife, but as Clare realizes, her life is so intertwined with Henry's that it's his story also. The story is told in first-person narration from both Henry and Clare. Each section begins with the date and the ages of Clare and Henry, and sometimes multiple ages for Henry when more than one version of him is present. This allows us to see their lives from both their perspectives, to see Clare's fear every time Henry leaves or how his actions in the past or future affect her life in real time, and to see Henry's struggles to cope with his "illness" while trying to remain safe and keep the secrets that he shouldn't reveal to anyone.

At its heart, and a very big heart at that, The Time Traveler's Wife is a love story, one populated by realistic characters. Even with the time travel and its effects on their lives, Henry and Clare are people you intimately know and empathize with, their fears and flaws common to us all. Everyone has a cross to bear, and Henry's is unique. Ms. Niffenegger does an admirable job portraying their life together, and exploring a love built over a lifetime that courses deep through both of them. Even through their rough stretches of their life, the lifelong fear of something terrible happening to Henry while time traveling, their anguish at the miscarriages when Clare wants a baby more than anything else, the moments where they'd just rather be alone, their love for each other is never questioned and their hope is never extinguished.

The time travel, while not completely an original idea, does bring a spark of freshness and suspense to the love story. Knowing that stress can trigger an episode, Henry plans carefully and worries often during potentially stressful situations, like his wedding to Clare or meeting her family for the first time. It also adds to the suspense of the story, not knowing when Henry will arrive or leave during any important part of their life together. Although, at times it's obvious where the story is headed in the larger sense, Ms. Niffenegger is astute enough to throw in surprises with Henry's travels that either fills in lost knowledge about their pasts, or sets the stage for some part of their future. Often it's these small portents of the future that keep the pages turning in the hope that they mean something other than what they seem to suggest.

The Time Traveler's Wife is also more than a love story between two people. It explores all the relationships of their lives: their parents, families, friends, and ex-lovers. My only complaint is that, whether a realistic depiction or not, love in this novel is something from which recovery never seems to happen. Henry's father mourns his beloved wife to the point that it cripples and debilitates him. Ingrid, Henry's old girlfriend, despairs to the point of suicide about losing Henry to Clare. Everyone loves with such a passion that there is no middle ground, no loved and lost and grown from the experience.

This is a minor complaint in a wonderful novel. This book will make you glow as you share the love between Henry and Clare, it will make you laugh, it will leave you on the edge of your seat while Henry time travels, and it will make you cry. Once you're buried within this novel and fully immersed in their lives, you have to suffer their pain as well as celebrate their joys with Henry and Clare. This is a testament to the literary skill of Ms. Niffenegger.

Henry summarized his love for Clare in a letter to her after they've been for married for many years:

 

Clare, I want to tell you, again, I love you. Our love has been the thread through the labyrinth, the net under the high-wire walker, the only real thing in this strange life of mine that I could ever trust. Tonight I feel that my love for you has more density in this world than I do, myself: as though it could linger on after me and surround you, keep you, hold you.

Grab a copy of The Time Traveler's Wife and throw yourself headlong into their story. It's time well spent. This is a highly recommended read, and I know it will be a gift I'll offer generously to others on my holiday list this year.

Now I am off to continuing reading The Time Traveler's Wife. 

Hmmmm… Thinking of dropping by Kinokuniya this week since there is a 20% discount for members. It has been days since I left home. -_-"

GENEVA – Swine flu is now formally a pandemic, a declaration by U.N. health officials that will speed vaccine production and spur government spending to combat the first global flu epidemic in 41 years.

Thursday's announcement by the World Health Organization doesn't mean the virus is any more lethal _ only that its spread is considered unstoppable.

Since it was first detected in late April in Mexico and the United States, swine flu has reached 74 countries, infecting nearly 29,000 people. Most who catch the bug have only mild symptoms and don't need medical treatment.

WHO chief Dr. Margaret Chan made the long-awaited declaration after the U.N. agency held an emergency meeting with flu experts and said she was moving to phase 6 _ the agency's highest alert level _ which means a pandemic is under way.

"The world is moving into the early days of its first influenza pandemic in the 21st century," Chan said in Geneva.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, the new head of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said in Atlanta that he does not expect widespread public anxiety in the United States as a result of the declaration, noting it came nearly two months after the virus was identified.

For many weeks, U.S. health officials have been treating it as a pandemic, increasing the availability of anti-viral flu medicines and pouring money into a possible vaccination program. And scientists have grown to understand that the virus is generally not much more severe than the seasonal flu.

"That helps to tamp down any fears that may be excessive," Frieden said at a news conference _ his first as CDC director.

But the virus can still be deadly and may change into a more frightening form in the near future, and so people should not be complacent, he added.

So far, swine flu has caused 144 deaths, compared with ordinary flu that kills up to 500,000 people a year.

The pandemic decision might have been made much earlier if WHO had more accurate information about swine flu's rising sweep through Europe. Chan said she called the emergency meeting with flu experts after concerns were raised that some countries, such as Britain, were not accurately reporting their cases.

Chan said the experts unanimously agreed there was a wider spread of swine flu than was being reported.

She would not say which country tipped the world into the pandemic, but WHO flu chief Keiji Fukuda said the situation from Australia seemed to indicate the virus was spreading rapidly there _ more than 1,300 cases were reported by Thursday.

In Chile, authorities have identified almost 1,700 cases to WHO.

Many health experts said the world has been in a pandemic for weeks but WHO became too bogged down by politics to declare one. In May, several countries urged WHO not to declare a pandemic, fearing it would cause social and economic turmoil. At the time, WHO said it would rewrite its pandemic definition to avoid announcing one.

But with the recent surge in cases across Europe, Chile, Australia and Japan, the agency was under increasing pressure to acknowledge a pandemic.

"This is WHO finally catching up with the facts," said Michael Osterholm, a flu expert at the University of Minnesota.

David Ropeik, an expert in risk perception and communication at Harvard University, says the word pandemic is less frightening than when emerged during worries about bird flu a few years ago.

He said the "soft buildup" to declaring swine flu a pandemic has been helpful.

"That allows people to get used to what is otherwise a scary word, understand the particulars of the disease, and that should mean reaction will be a little more information-based and a little less emotional," Ropeik said in an e-mail.

WHO will now recommend that pharmaceutical companies make swine flu vaccine. The agency typically recommends which flu strains drug companies should use in the vaccines. In a global outbreak, WHO also advises whether companies should make pandemic vaccine.

The decision to make pandemic vaccine is a gamble. Most flu vaccine makers cannot make both regular seasonal flu vaccine and pandemic vaccine at the same time. That means they must decide which one the world will need more.

Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC said it could start commercial production of pandemic vaccine in July but that it would take months before large quantities are available.

Glaxo spokesman Stephen Rea said the company's first doses of vaccine would be reserved for countries who had ordered it in advance, including Belgium, Britain and France. He said Glaxo would also donate 50 million doses to WHO for poor countries.

Pascal Barollier, a spokesman for Sanofi-Aventis, said they were also working on a pandemic vaccine but WHO had not yet asked them to start making mass quantities of it.

WHO described the pandemic as "moderate." Fukuda said people should not get overly anxious about the virus. "Understand it, put it in context, and then you get on with things," he said.

Still, about half of the people who have died from swine flu were previously young and healthy _ people who are not usually susceptible to flu. Swine flu is also crowding out regular flu viruses. Both features are typical of pandemic flu viruses.

Swine flu is also continuing to spread during the start of summer in the northern hemisphere. Normally, flu viruses disappear with warm weather, but swine flu is proving to be resilient.

"What this declaration does do is remind the world that flu viruses like H1N1 need to be taken seriously," said U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius, warning that more cases could crop up in the fall.

Now that a pandemic has been declared, some countries might be prompted to devote more money to containing the virus. Many developed countries have pandemic preparedness plans that link spending to a WHO declaration.

The U.N. is keen to avoid panic. "We must guard against rash and discriminatory action, such as travel bans or trade restrictions," said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

Fear has already gripped Argentina, where thousands have flooded hospitals this week, bringing emergency health services in Buenos Aires to the brink of collapse during winter weather. Last month, a bus arriving in Argentina from Chile was stoned by people who thought a passenger had swine flu.

China has quarantined travelers, including New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, on the slightest suspicion of contact with an infected person.

The U.S. government has already increased the availability of flu-fighting medicines and authorized $1 billion for developing a new swine flu vaccine. In addition, new cases seem to be declining in many parts of the country, U.S. health officials say, as North America moves out of its traditional winter flu season.

Still, New York City reported three more swine flu deaths Thursday, including a child under 2, a teenager and a person in their 30s.

"Countries where outbreaks appear to have peaked should prepare for a second wave of infection," Chan warned.

Guess, more "safety" precautions have to be done.

Say, wear masks on the plane; wash your hands more often etc.

We have to take care of our cleanliness in short.

SYDNEY – An Australian flight was forced to make an emergency landing on a remote Pacific island Thursday, just days after an Air France tragedy involving the same model of Airbus plane, officials said.

It rejected any link between the Air France accident and October's mishap when a Qantas A330 went into two sudden and steep dives over Western Australia, causing several serious injuries and prompting an emergency landing.

Thank god. I am taking SQ this trip!

The field of orthopaedic is dynamic and multifaceted. Subspecialty expertise includes adult reconstruction, sports, trauma, spine, foot, hand, shoulder, elbow, oncology, pediatric, and impairment evaluation.

Our Services

Sports Medicine & Injuries
Both competitive and recreational athletes will occasionally have an injury or illness that limits their optimal performance. Many of these injuries affect the muscles, ligaments and/or bones and are best diagnosed by our physician trained in musculoskeletal medicine. It is important to identify and correct the problem that led to the injury to prevent a recurrence.

Hand & Reconstructive Surgery
At JMC, our orthopedic surgeons will provide services to patients with post-traumatic, inflammatory and degenerative problems of all major joints including the knee, hip, elbow and shoulder.

Hand surgery
Our orthopedic surgeons are specially trained to care for and treat conditions affecting the hand and wrist. Surgery can correct many disabling conditions of the hand or wrist, producing a dramatic improvement in a patient's quality of life or productivity.

Conditions such as rheumatoid arthritis, degenerative arthritis or post-traumatic arthritis often can be relieved by advanced reconstructive surgeries, including hand and wrist fusions or joint replacement procedures for the wrist, thumb and fingers.

I am seeing an Orthopaedic later at JMC.

Thanks to Cousin Ailing who managed to secure the appointment for me.

The appointment I made myself is Monday, 15th June at 10.30am.

The STUPID right ankle is painful and especially painful when I stand for about 5 minutes. "Special thanks" to the people who refuses to offer me their seats despite I was bandaged!!!!!

The lady with long hair. Young girl. But pretend that she didn't see me when she did and refused to stand up to allow me to have the seat. Good right?

  She is not even better. Someone alighted at Jurong East. I was slowly making my way there when she simply rushed in, took the seat and immediately fell asleep. WOW! What a powerful "sleeping" pills she had taken before her ride. Didn't you notice she was at the Priority seat? No doubt no sign stated that you need to give up your seat to the handicapped but isn't it common sense?

 ANGRY.

 BAD MOOD.

RIGHT FOOT PAIN LA! 

为何常常和世界保持距离
关上心门不让任何人进去
为了保护自己害怕面对自己
说来说去全都是自己

把心拉近手握紧有什么事情搞不定
一个小小决定就能改变彼此的距离
把心拉近头放低有什么难关过不去
我们眨眨眼睛才发现彼此多靠近

把心拉近手握紧有什么事情搞不定
一个小小决定就能改变彼此的距离
把心拉近头放低有什么难关过不去
我们眨眨眼睛才发现彼此多靠近

把心拉近手握紧有什么事情搞不定
一个小小决定就能改变彼此的距离
把心拉近头放低有什么难关过不去
我们眨眨眼睛才发现彼此多靠近
我们眨眨眼睛才发现彼此多靠近