Our cheerleaders did us proud. Twice in the academic year past. They won the nationals, then went on to represent Singapore in Japan where they got third. Or second.

Forgive me, because I can’t be bothered with details. I’m rather sure I remember reading they were in top 3 though.

I watched Cheerobics ‘06 where the ACES first snatched the championships from Magnum Force, who previously dominated local championships. They won because they were functionally flawless on the day, while Magnum Force screwed up that year in an uncharacteristic manner. Perhaps Magnum Force weren’t the force they used to be, perhaps it was just one of their off days. Maybe Murphy had a hand in it. Aces won because they didn’t make a single (major) mistake while Magnum Force had better stunts but screwed up the execution.

I’m not taking anything away from the Aces, as that’s what competitions are about – you do your thing, minimize screw ups, and the case of cheerleading, you probably go on to hope everyone else screws up. The Aces deserve their win, their trip to Japan and whatever placing they got there. I’ve seen them train, and they work really hard.

Still, all of this is old news. So why am I dredging this issue up?

Because I’ve yet to see them at a single non-cheerleading event cheering for the school in their eye catching uniforms. Not IVP, SUNiG, nor any of the ad-hoc invitationals. Take the recent SUNiG (Singapore University Games) for example. It was the last major sporting event of the semester. No attention grabbing skirts. No poms poms. No paper cones. No girls encouraging the athletes. No body leading cheers. No one egging the crowd. Hell, there wasn’t a soul wore a ACES t-shirt within sight. And guess what? SUNiG was held in NTU.

If not for the fact they actually won something, I’d doubt anyone unfamiliar with the cheerleading scene would know we have a damn cheerleading team.

Cheerleading probably started out as a bunch of people trying their school on. Eventually they got organised, and some bright spark thought of the brilliant combination of skimpy uniforms, girls, stunts. Add testosterone-filled guys playing competitive spectator sports into the mix, and we have a winning formula for school spirit.

Let’s get a few definitions.

From Dictionary.com
cheerleading
-the action or skill of a cheerleader.

So a cheerleader cheerleads. Let’s look at the defination of “cheerlead”.

Aggregated from Dictionary.com:
cheerlead
1.to act as cheerleader for.
2.to encourage by or as if by cheerleading.
3.to act as cheerleader.
4.To lead organized cheering, as at sports events.
5.To express or promote automatic or servile praise: We want someone not just to cheerlead but to help us revamp our organization.

Let’s see how the collective wisdom of t3h internats defines cheerleading.

From Wikipedia:
Cheerleading is a sport and a 109 year old institution that uses organized routines made from elements of tumbling, dance, and stunting to direct the event’s spectators to cheer on sports teams at games and matches and/or compete at cheerleading competitions. The athlete involved is called a cheerleader.

It’s a 109 year old tradition according to Wikipedia. In the years since inception, it has evolved into a competitive sport in itself. The Aces wear fancy uniforms, hold up huge placards, stack human pyramids, dance to music and literally fly in the air for the judges. In a strange reversal, the crowd cheers for them in these competitions.

The Aces got into the pages of the Tribune/Chronicles by virtue of their achievements, and even had their exams deferred because they needed to fly to Japan to compete. Evidently, the school holds them in a high regard. Yet, they fly into the face of tradition and somehow not cheer for the school at any event. Kind of ironic if you ask me, considering they are called “NTU Aces” and use the NTU facilities to train. Granted their training schedule is really hectic, but is it too much even to come in 2s or 3s in a t-shirt that only the ACES possess to shout a few words of encouragement for the athletes?

I’m not asking them to come out in full force in every time, but to appear in small numbers at major sports events like inter varsity basketball. I’m not even asking them to perform. Not even to lead the cheers. They could just stand amongst the crowd and cheer as a group for the athletes. It can even be treated as a form of training for the juniors as they would need to have the guts to cheer in the middle of so many people.

Where cheerleaders are, crowds will gather, slowly but surely, they will build up the school spirit. It can only benefit the school in the sporting arena. From there, it can only get better for the Aces. They gain experience, potential recruits, exposure, and most importantly, a sense of mission and purpose.

Cheerleading was meant to build up school spirit during sports events. It has since evolved into a competitive spectator sport, but should its original roots be chucked aside as worthless and redundant? Sure, the Aces deserve all the plaudits, medals, trophies they win because they’ve worked for it. But in light of the above, these victories seem somewhat hollow.

Look for subjects with the word “Introduction to:” in their titles.

Pick subjects with assignments. Assignments are generally easy to score in and help spread out the final %.

Ask your seniors to recommend you the easiest subjects.

Make sure the lecturer setting the exam paper for that subject is still the same as your senior’s. (OMG PWND)

a hiatus for the exams. Yes, after only 3 posts. Because we have exams too.
 
 
 
Oh, and while we’re talking about exams, here’s a very old yet still funny youtube clip. The commentary is fucking lame though …

No we didn’t take it. We don’t get up early enough to chiong the gates of h3ll.
 
 
 
Till next time, and thanks for all the fish so far.

I thought we might do a series of guides for newbies to the game. This first guide is to arguably the most useful skill in your years in antiU.

It is simply inefficient and a waste of human resource to write reports and codes from scratch. The proper way to do things is to get homework from seniors who have gotten theirs from their seniors.

Once you have their homework, what you need to do is the following:

Step 1: Don’t be tempted to modify the layout and the sentence structures a little and hand that up. That’s the surest way to get caught.

Step 2: Look through the work, get a feel for it and see if you want to omit certain parts, or want to add some stuff.

Step 3: If you have another piece of work from another person, your job is 50% easier. Cut and paste parts of both works till it resembles a new piece of work. Don’t worry if it’s raw and looks like you physically cut out the parts and pasted them together with glue.

Step 4: Start highlighting/underlining/bracketing the key points of each sentence. If you’re extra geeky you can write them out in point form.

Step 5: Rearrange the points as you like and write them into sentences.

Step 6: If it’s a 2 man collaboration, get the other guy to re-deplagiarise it.

I’m sure there are more tips I’ve picked up over the years but i can’t recall them now.

Cleaning up my desktop, I found an old comic I made a year or 2 ago when they destroyed the old “pay 20cent per ride, comes every 5 minutes” bus service and replaced it with the “OMFG IT’S FUCKING FREE LET’S ALL TAKE IT, comes every 20 minutes” bus service.

You young ones probably won’t remember any of this, but back when I was a freshie, the only reason I’d be late was because I was late. Not because I had to stare at 2 fully packed buses go by.

I pasted this comic with the questionnaire on a few bus stops in retaliation to the SU doing absolutely nothing:

ShuttleBoy wants to know:

What exactly is being done? Please circle the answer from the following.

a) We have done nothing! Hahahaha!

b) We have sat down and contemplated solutions without really putting any of them into action.

c) We are holding 5 hour meetings where we blame the previous batch and laugh at the little people waiting for the bus.

d) We think it’s somebody else’s problem. We don’t stay that far from school anyway.

e) We are going on expensive outings with all the money collected from you. These outings help you. They really do.

f) We are collecting commissions from all the taxi companies for boosting their number of customers.

g) Others. Please fill in, ShuttleBoy is extremely curious: ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When will the problem be resolved? Give us an estimate:

a) Never!

b) 1 year

c) 1 month

d) Tomorrow

It was meant to be an ongoing weekly thing till they resolve the problem. Lo and behold (<–zomg english) they tore down the posters within the hour (as expected), and they solved the problem (somewhat) within the week. Shuttle boy was pacified and never made another comic.

Guess how they resolved the problem.

No really. Guess.

Let me reiterate the problem: There were 2 bus routes. There were way too few buses, probably because they cut down on the funding, probably because they wanted to give free bus services. So, 2 bus routes, way too few buses.

They solved it by taking out one of the bus routes (cos they both covered the same area, in opposite directions), and making 2 new, shorter bus routes.

How does this work? The 2 new routes were short, and didn’t go around the whole school. This allowed the frequency to increase on each of these short routes as the buses reached their destination quicker. The frequency on the 3rd, long route remained the same.

This helped in that people who stayed in hall 10, 11, 14 and 15 did not have to wake up at 7am, sit at the bus stop at 7.30am, only to finally get on the bus at 9am when their lessons are halfway done. HURRAH.

Fast forward to today. Our SUPREMELY CLEVER OMGWTFBBQ student union sees the 3 bus routes. Tsk tsk tsk go the freshies. How come our buses take so long?

HMMMM OMFG LEMME TINK go the union.

ZOMG I NOES. WE SHALL CHANGE THE ROUTES. CHANGE ASLWYAS SI GOOT.

So the union does a survey. A survey which none of my friends, my friends’ friends, nor my friends’ friends’ friends have ever seen.

ZOMG J00 NOES WAT? DA STUDENTS WANT LESS ROUTES AND MORE FREQUENCY.

I really have to put that part in bold, because here lies stupidity in motion.

What happens next is what we have today.

LESS ROUTES.

We actually went BACKWARD to the past formula that didn’t work. And Mr Indian is all so happy about it. HEY WE CHANGES LYKE U SAY. U SAY U WANTS LESS ROUTES AND HIGHER FREQUENCY. WE IS GIVE YOU LESS ROUTES. CORRECT WHAT.

Allow me to provide Mr Indian with a health survey.

Mr Indian, would you like to lose weight and increase fertality?

ZOMG YES!

Mr Indian, I advice that you cut off your balls. You would then lose weight.

ZOMG WHY DIDNT I TINK OF DAT.

Mr Indian, you say that there have been many emails complaining about the bus problems, but none give any solutions. Have you never in your wildest imagination thought that the solution would be to increase the budget, thus the number of buses?

ZOMG. DAT WUN WORK. COS BUSES DUN GROW ON TREES.

Just so you know, take a trip to NUS one day and sit at their bus stops. I have. I sit there with a gigantic grin on my face. The bus comes every 5 minutes. And the last bus ends at 11.45pm. How’s that for a bus service.

THE FIRST POST IS IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE MY SHIFT KEY IS STUCK THERES NO PUNCTUATION BECAUSE ALL MY PUNCTUATION KEYS ARE SPOILT AS WELL