In a Grove... and stats!

Lessons have been pretty interesting these days, I wonder why...

Let's take History for example. My teacher has given us something similar to a short story, "In a Grove" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa. It is an interesting story. A samurai's corpse is found. There are three suspects for this murder: Masago (his wife), Tajomaru (a bandit) and himself (he might have committed suicide). Testimonies have been collected from the woodcutter who found the body, a travelling buddhist, a policeman who arrested Tajomaru, Tajomaru, Masago and Takehiko (the samurai). What is certain is that Masago was raped by Tajomaru; what differs is what happened afterwards and who killed Takehiko. You can read the story here.

Most of my classmates felt that it was Masago who killed Takehiko. They argued that perhaps both men loved her and wanted to protect the fact that she killed Takehiko. Others felt claimed he committed suicide to 'save face' as it was better than dying in the hands of a mere woman. Somehow, I have a feeling that my history class is very wary of woman, especially beautiful ones. HAHA.

We are supposed to determine who is the murderer and write an essay on it. This is very interesting, and different from the normal lessons that we have done. After searching it up, I found out that it was never the author's intention to have a real murderer. What he was trying to prove was that our initial guess of the murderer is shaped by our moral inclinations and biased judgements. As humans, it is very hard to see the REAL truth. This story serves to prove that. What one character says is always refuted by another. It is almost impossible to decided on a real murdered based on their testimonies. 

After reading that, I was dumbstruck. How do people ever come up with such novel methods to prove a certain point? I was very impressed by this. However, I felt stuck at the same time. How am I ever going to decide who is the real culprit? This is when the true objective of the project hit me. I was supposed to use my INVESTIGATIVE and ANALYTICAL SKILLS to help me argue for one of the character. The main point wasn't which character I chose. The objective was to see how I made use of the testimonies by the non-parties and general knowledge to prove that the character that I have chosen is the murderer. 

Perhaps I will put up my essay the next time, if I remember!

Anyway, I was interested and went to find out the statistics for my blog. Here are some:

Pageviews all time: 4,741

Pageviews last month: 153

Audience: Singapore (3,332), USA (726) - Wow, who reads my blog in the US?!, Russia (71) - I guess they google translate or something???, etc.

Post with highest views: tag (click here) Apparently someone quoted from my blog and it appeared in the straits times! HAHA. I still cannot find the newspaper article... Maybe I should do some searching now...
[updated] I FOUND THE NEWS HAHAHA!!! It's here. It was featured on The New Paper, Thursday, December 03, 2009.

"But netizen Sue Qin, writing on her blog, felt that some of the rules in the Chua household (featured on the programme) are overly-harsh, citing the ones forbidding sleepovers, boy-girl relationships and another rule which stipulates that the computer be in the living room so the parents can see what sites the kids are visiting.

She added, however, that most of the rules – like the ones against skipping school, smoking and alcohol – are “kinda expected”.

She felt that Singapore is conservative because we are made up of races which have their own strict traditions about raising children.

“While too much control is not good, too little control is also not good,” she wrote."

AHAHA, I ACTUALLY FEEL QUITE PROUD OF MYSELF. How old was I? 13? HEHE ;D

And I am going to end my blog post now! The most recent book that I've read is by Lauren Oliver. It's called Delirium. I'm giving it 4/5 stars! Overall, the story is really good, except for some sappy romantic parts which makes the book lose some of its adventurous 'feel'.