Les Oeufs Brouillés Au Caviar

I've always loved eggs, and scrambled eggs in particular. The other day on AFC, I saw a demonstration of the bain marie method of preparing this most delightful incarnation of eggs- rather than throwing the beaten eggs into a pan full of butter and cooking till set over low heat, the bain marie method involves beating the eggs in a bowl and then cooking over a water bath, the very low heat cooking the eggs a lot slower but also ensuring creaminess and very soft set curds. 

This, apparently, is the classical French preparation for scrambled eggs and is the best way, in my opinion, to achieve an unctuous texture that lends itself to a number of variations- the textural contrasts work better, even with a last-minute sprinkle of some fleur de sel, the large crystals crunch beautifully against the oozy yellow curds. Today, I decided to finish up the bottle of lumpfish roe (from IKEA, very handy) as an accompaniment to my bowl of scrambled eggs- an egg on egg thing, except with a pleasurable texture because the firm roe that bursts most gratifyingly and saltily when bitten into. 

Preparation (serves 1):

1. Bring half a pot of water to a boil. Break 3 eggs into a bowl and beat with a wooden spoon until evenly yellow. Add a splash of good olive oil. 

2. Place bowl with eggs over the water and lower heat to simmer. Stir continuously until eggs begin to curdle and the texture is creamy, like porridge. When small curds have formed, add a splash of cream, about 1 tablespoon, and incorporate well. Remove from heat, season with pepper and salt and transfer to a serving bowl. Place a dollop of roe a top and serve immediately with toasted bread. 

My fucky morning

I don't mean to be rude, indeed, I rarely am. But I shall now narrate in continuous and heavily nuanced prose my morning as I got ready to make it for an 8am lecture today.

Waking up, rather at peace with myself and the alarm clock-handphone combination that greets me in the morning (a not unpleasant medley of di-di-di and 'I've been dreaming of a true love's keees'), I saw that it was 5.45 am and I was pleased. "Let there be light," I imagine I must have said, as I struggled to find my spectacles and threw off the book I fell asleep reading the night before. My room was a fond mess from the events of last night, and I turned to Anthony as he lay dead to the world in my bed and mused briefly on the blissful orgasm of the night before. I wish, first, that Anthony existed etcetera etcetera.

After a well-timed shower, I walked into my walk-in wardrobe and tried to pick out an outfit that would work with my new Zara sweater, settling first for a strange blue tee I'd never worn before but, noticing that the vapid plain space below the print accentuated my not-so-vapid midriff, I switched to my cute My Little Devil tee which I soon changed out of because the stupid devil showed through the hot neckline of my hot new Zara sweater, in which I look Zara hot, except in white My Little Devil tee etcetera etcetera. Finally, I settled on a nondescript white tee shirt and went to wax my hair. Today, the waxing of hair was done relatively quickly. My hair has moods- using the same product and the same technique, I get different looks every day, to great frustration- this means that my hair is the variable. Today, my hair was feeling agreeable, or maybe the early hour had put it off.  

I glanced at the clock and it showed 6.20, which meant I needed to rush if I was going to make the 6.30 train, and so, grabbing my trombone, my bag, socks and some other hand-occupying objects, I fumbled in my cupboard for cologne and knocked one over, which in turn knocked another over, sending a big, expensive glass-bottled one hurtling towards the ground. It broke with a crack way too stupendous for the early hour, and the room was filled at once with glass shards, a puddle of clear liquid and the musky scent of Polo Black. 

More later, more grief, more mishap.

Ragù

I am a big fan of concentrated flavours, it is almost as if food rewards you by unlocking its deepest, most intense essence after hours of fussing patiently over a pot, liquid slowly evaporating and leaving layer upon layer of flavour in the unctuous mass that remains. It is for this reason that when, as with tonight, I am left with the option of keeping a late night (NO SCHOOL TOMORROW!), I like to put together food for the next day that requires long cooking times because, often, the simplest of preparations, with long, patient cooking, yields spectacular results. 

Perhaps one of the most satisfying and versatile dishes you can prepare is Ragù, or at least some familiar variation of the traditional Italian meat-stew that is easy and comforting- not necessarily authentic, but still delicious. Ragù is the tomato-based meat sauce that, spooned over pasta, makes a hearty meal for any time of the day- it is a breeze to make and can be frozen for several meals after. 

Often, making this can be such a hassle, because sauces like this often start off with the traditional combination of finely chopped onion, carrots and celery, and involves sourcing for obscure meats like pancetta or prosciutto, and then a ridiculously long cooking-time. I have developed, out of sheer laziness more than anything, really, a recipe that keeps only the long cooking-time while simplifying mostly everything else; being terrible at chopping vegetables, I have dispensed, somewhat flagrantly, the carrots and celery, important though I think they are, making up for the loss of base-note flavour by slightly caramelising the onions and tomatoes and also by adding a good amount of balsamic vinegar and a tad more fennel seed than I would normally be comfortable with. I find the combination of beef and pork a beautiful marriage and use half beef half sausage here- raw sausage is actually quite readily available now in good supermarkets, though you can make your own by grinding some lean pork and maybe seasoning with sage, allspice, ground chili powder or paprika; but, my sense is that if you're going to bother with grinding your own meat, you might as well go the whole hog and chop the damned vegetables up as well.

Here is my personal recipe, fairly no-frills, cooking-time excepted. 

Ingredients

450g fresh minced beef (ideally, you can get chuck steak and grind it yourself)

450g raw sausage (or you can grind the equivalent of lean pork, perhaps seasoning with paprika and sage)

1 large onion, diced

1 fat clove of garlic, diced

2 cans diced tomatoes

2 cans tomato paste

2 cans tomato sauce

a good handful of fresh basil leaves

2 sprigs of Italian parsley

2 sprigs of Sage

1 1/2 teaspoon of fennel seed or star anise

1/2 cup water

4 tbs balsamic vinegar

1 cup red wine

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/2 cup heavy cream

1. In a large, thick-bottomed pan, heat up 1 tablespoon of olive oil and, when warm, throw in the onions and stir fry until it colours lightly. Add the garlic and cook for another 2-3 minutes or until fragrant. Add the meat and stir constantly, cooking until the meat is coloured and reduced from large chunks to mince. Add the balsamic vinegar and stir in, cook for 2 minutes. 

2. Throw in the water, tomato stuff and the herbs and fennel, stir well and bring to a simmer over medium heat. Leave like this on low for about 2 hours, stirring occasionally, making sure to scrape the sides down. The idea here is that the liquid will evaporate in 2 hours, and some of the tomato will begin to caramelise slightly. The 2 hour thing is why I do this after dinner the night before; if you're doing this for dinner give yourself some time ahead, obviously.

3. After 2 hours, raise to medium-high heat add the wine in small glugs, leaving each addition to evaporate before the next. Leave like this for another 45 minutes to 1 hour. 

4. The sauce should now resemble something not too unlike sambal- it will have very little liquid, look dry and uninspiring. Bring it back to life and into a whole new, unctuous, smooth incarnation by, off the heat, vigorously stirring in, first, the butter and then, when completely incorporated, the cream, mixing very well to make sure it's all in. Imperatively, taste, and season well- salt is your best friend, as is black pepper, don't stinge on either. This sauce will not be robust without good helpings of salt. 

5. You're done! If you've gone through this much effort to make the sauce, do it a favour and use good parmesan cheese. 

Voila

I love this sauce- the idea behind it is that the long reduction takes ALL the liquid in the rather copious amount of tomato product used while retaining the sweet-tart flavour of tomatoes and slightly caramelising it at the same time. When, near the end, you have the claggy mass of meat and tomato concentrate which has had a long time to sweeten and deepen, the butter and cream , apart from binding it all together, give it fantastic mouthfeel- smooth and moist. And you can do all this without actually being in the kitchen for more than an hour in total! The flavours actually deepen in the fridge overnight; leave uncovered in fridge until cool then cover and chill.

The boy who drank stars

We had met once, me and the boy who drank stars. It was on a heartbreaking night, the kind of night where the sky is epically cloudless and festooned with constellations, and blue light drapes softly like satin in an oil painting on trees and buildings in the dark; all one can do is stand still and breathe and take in the quiet. Even in Singapore, where the abusive, hollering day lashes out and leaves night time battered and whimpering for reprieve, madness and grief cry themselves to sleep every once in a while.

It was on such a night that I took a walk for the first time in months. To clear my head, or rather to fill it with more thoughts, to think, mainly and not be disturbed by the whiz and the click of sitting at home, mind getting vapid and anaesthetised by the wheeze of air-conditioning and stale pornography. Stepping out of the house into the little park downstairs, the quiet seized me, and I heard the sound of my thinking come back to me, slowly at first, then in a rush of chatter so severe it left a ring in my ears. 

The night is so quiet, I can smell the faint smoky scent of morning rising from the street, in the distance a car is whispering over tarmac, need to finish that paper by tomorrow but I'll get it done, put it aside, but that point you couldn't make, it's not convincing- no, you'll figure it out, a motorcycle is buzzing past somewhere behind me, crunch, my sandals chew grass, mm I didn't quite understand how the movie ended and it bugs me, did he die or not, he had inched closer to me as if to make his shoulder touch mine but I moved away because we had agreed to be impossible, which annoys me, frankly, because we would be perfect, ah fuck, there are things far more important than holding hands and shoulders kissing in this world, politics, politics are far graver, and I haven't read the papers in a while, and it irritates me but the news is depressing and politics is depressing and stale and staid, you haven't been writing much either, what are you doing with your time, what are you going to do with your life, don't keep shunting it aside, it won't solve itself like you tell people it will, I want to feel affection for somebody and be able to touch him, so many things I want, who doesn't want these things.

My heart grew heavy, thinking, it sank deep into some overgrown, teenaged cocktail of sadness and irritation, surging upwards, and I sighed. 

"I am too old to be sighing like this, pathetically," I muttered to myself, and sniffed, amused. 

And then, I saw him, sitting on a bench, arms folded, looking up into the sky. Handsome, even in the moonlight, perhaps more so because of it; a little finger in my mind could trace the fine silhouetted outline of his forehead, his nose, lips and chin, gently angled like a figure drawing, and my heart jumped at how pleasing his face was. His eyes were closed, but as I drew closer, he opened them, and they were magnificent eyes, large and smiling, and I realised he was smiling at me.

"Hi," he said, and I found I liked his voice, it was young and handsome like him. Emboldened by the late hour, perhaps, I returned the greeting. He looked at me appraisingly, head slightly cocked and smiling, as if he had been expecting me. 

"Why're you up so late?"

"Needed to take a walk, clear my head."

"You can't clear your head by walking, all you end up doing is thinking some more."

"Is that why you're sitting here?"

"Partly. Mostly it's because I'm bored and like watching things drift by."

"But nothing drifts by at this time."

"Mm, you did," and he laughed quietly, and grinned, happily. Or mischievously. "But no, I like looking into the sky at night, it helps me come to terms with mortality."

"That's very deep."

"And pretentious, yes. But you should try it sometime, especially on nights like this one where the sky's really clear. You don't have to be religious, but the stars in the sky like that give you a sense of eternity."

I sat next to him and looked up, then back at him as he spoke again. 

"You see, you just look up and try and take it all in," he looked up and stared deeply into the sky.

"The stars?"

"Mm, the stars, because there's nothing in the sky but stars and night for miles and miles, and the more you take in, the deeper you can go. It's boundless, it's fantastic."

He paused for a while, and I kept looking at him. It was fascinating how freely all this was coming from him.

"And then it looks and feels like it's too much to see, but then a little part of it fills you up and you keep going."

"Like drinking," I offered.

"Yes," he turned to look at me, pleased by the idea, "like drinking. Great metaphor. It really does quench that part of me that looks for meaning, for calm. I look into the sky, because it's the only thing here that doesn't end somewhere, and there's so much possibility out there that for a moment I feel like nothing here matters all that much."

I looked up and saw stars. My mind struggled at first for words to describe it. Arrayed, splayed, arranged, twinkling, and then it began to feel vulgar, as if to suggest that they had been placed there, that they were deliberate, that the stars twinkled playfully for my amusement, a flat, mawkish little picture painted by some silly, sentimental artist. Then, as if something had prodded the sky, the stars began to roll forward, layer upon layer, thickening and deepening, rushing earthwards and I thought, "how far it must go, forever can't begin to describe it." Nothing in life prepares you for looking into the night sky, because life is all about what you can and cannot do before you eventually die- the night sky teaches infinity and the beauty of being insignificant. I sat there, drinking stars, as it were, feeling it challenge everything I thought about brevity, life, possibility, god. 

"They say God placed the stars in the sky," I said. "But that's demeaning, isn't it, in the face of how beautifully random and infinite they are."

"I don't know. Maybe." 

Looking up, I thought the stars captured God, the essence of his vastness, his impossibility and infinity. Maybe God was conceived in a moment like this, long ago, by two people gazing up into the sky from an open plain. 

I sat there with the other boy for a long time, not thinking, just stargazing, and I felt my mind clear like it had never done before. Then, sated, I got up, touched my companion on the shoulder, and walked home, lingering in the quietness of everything until the first thoughts began to break through again.

Ah, that there were comment boards on CORS

ModuleMod
TypeVac.HLBPNo.of BiddersNext Min.
BidYour 
BidBid StsAccount TypePlace Bid

UPC2201 Chemicals And Us
(Grp 1): Bundled Lecture: Group 1, Tue, 1000-1200, Weekly, at 3B/SR5
(Grp 1): Bundled Tutorial: Group 1, Tue, 1400-1600, Weekly, at 3B/SR5
2318954 / 1192 ptAcceptedGeneral Account

USS2105 University Scholars Seminar
(Grp 1): E-Seminar: Group 1, Wed, 1800-2000, Weekly, at 3B/SR2
(Grp 1): E-Seminar: Group 1, Thu, 1800-2000, Weekly, at 3B/SR2
2375700 / 197127 ptOutbidGeneral Account

USE2209 Historicizing the Black Pacific
(Grp 1): E-Seminar: Group 1, Mon, 1000-1200, Weekly, at 3B/SR2
(Grp 1): E-Seminar: Group 1, Thu, 1000-1200, Weekly, at 3B/SR2
2335  1500 / 1191 ptAcceptedGeneral Account** Vac : Vacancy, Bid Sts. : Bid Status, HLBP : Highest/Lowest Bid Point

_________________________

COMMENTS (latest posts on top)

God     : And, hark, that whence turn 666 this bid, I shall smite thee off the face of this planet.    
Sally     : Okay, I'm going to bid 700 in closed bidding tee hee.
Windboi: ARGH. If we had all stuck to pretty numbers like 1 or 2 or TWENTY, this wouldn't be happening.
Jagger  : How are WE driving the bids up, you're just too scared to go higher.
Windyboi: WTF now it's 127?! STOP DRIVING THE BIDS UP stupid stupid stupid
SnrFTW:  By not being stupid like you.
Sally      : How you accumulate so many points?
SnrFTW :  Poor year ones, I wish I could bid for USS, then I'd throw in 1500. Because I can.
Windboi :  It is precisely people like you who will die next semester when you run out of points. 
Sally      :  Hahax ya, I threw in 500 points just to be safe.
Anon     :  If you really want it you must pay for it. Stop whining and go bid.    
Windyboi: GETTING all these damned points.
Windoboi: now we're bidding 100X more. Wasting your stupid points only. And where are you even
Windyboi: Eh will the fuckers bidding for USS stop pumping in points; go see the damned archives, it used to go for 1 point can, and

Moving Forward Part 1

Part 1

 Frost3d and I had been chatting online for a couple of weeks now and, in a strangely pleasant way, I was getting very fond of someone I had never before met in real life. The conversations were rocky at first, timid on his end, because he knew who I was and I didn’t even know his name, but we gradually warmed up to each other, and I just thought of him as Frost3d, which, if you think about it, rolls off the tongue in a rather adorable way. I found him to be thoughtful and funny, and lonely, which made both of us and worked especially well for me because most of the boys I talked to online were either horny, vapid, stupid or a tragic combination of all three. We had met in early 2004 on a gay networking site and he figured out who I was from my more or less indiscreet profile; it so turned out we were in the same year in the same school, which of course lent our conversations a little intrigue.

            “I saw you in school today, was walking behind you actually.”

            “OMG, you stupid voyeur. It was very rude of you not to say hi, then.”

            “I was distracted by your bag.”

            “How come?”
            “It was very smelly.”

It was silly things like that which helped brighten up school, which, while not entirely un-enjoyable, was almost cheerless. If you have never been to a Singapore junior college, all you’re missing is dusty floors, chipped paint on walls, lots of concrete and plastic tables with skinny metal legs, heat, sweat and faded school uniforms. There is invariably a large open space with wooden benches for studying, half-hearted greenery- shrubbery, more like (always bougainvilleas)- fluorescent lighting and a pond (koi or terrapins, depending on what kind of people attend your school). Mix all that up and no matter what you get, it’s probably a Singapore junior college. Add in the chatter of students, which you must play back as a low murmur with the occasional “oh my god”, plus the smells of fear and stress, and you’ve got a pretty good idea. It does not sound like a pleasant place because, in truth, it isn’t. Junior college exists to sift out those who Can from those who Cannot, those who Have from those who Have Not- if it were not so, then I wouldn’t have so many friends struggling as we speak to find places in schools that will accept their otherwise useless A level certificates. A place like that could drive you insane and, for some, also churns out the worst in you.

 That said, I was doing well in such environs, despite the gloom, mainly because I was the well-adjusted, sociable sort. My classmates and I, arts students as we were, would sit at the library, skiving off homework and classes to discuss the finer points of some tragically awkward new relationship or the various mis-pronouncements of tragically ineloquent teachers. Often, we would sit in the stuffy canteen and, surveying the swathes of humanity before us, tut meaningfully and misquote Voltaire or Marx or Orwell or whoever we thought might have sounded appropriately clever at the moment. ‘The masses’, I believe, centred quite heavily in our conversations. In short, we were a bunch of lazy, congenital assholes, though in the best of all possible ways.

I loved my friends, but no one in school knew about me, except for the other gay boys who frequented our school’s thread on the gay forums where, nightly, I would see the gathering of lonely gay boys in search of like others with whom they, fine we, could entertain thoughts of schoolboy romances and hidden gay fantasies, by which I mean nothing sordid, just a manifestation of the “he’s cute and I hope he’s gay” state of mind. 

Moving Forward

Here is something I sat down to write tonight, as I was struggling to write the lyrics for a song. This thing has been bugging me for a while, I keep thinking I need to write something that deals honestly, but unsentimentally, with the experience of growing up in Singapore. I wanted, initially, to write a series of songs, like a song cycle, maybe, to put together into a mini-musical, but song-writing has never been a talent of mine. Tonight, I thought it'd be easier to flesh out a concept, some sort of story, to fit the songs into, and as I got to writing, this huge chunk of prose began to write itself, and now I have the introduction to something, I don't quite know what, exactly. I've titled the work in progress "Moving Forward" after the title of one of the songs I had written, and I really can't wait to see what this becomes.

I know the prose is a little iffy in spots, I feel like it's too... prosaic, lots of long sentences and stuff, and the language I've kept simple where I can, not overly descriptive, more conversational, because I think that's how I would tell a story if, indeed, I were to tell a story. I hope whoever reads this can offer LOTS of criticism and maybe engage me on the side as to where I'm heading with it. 

Cheers!

_________

Introduction

I am not the sort who tells good stories, I will admit it from the start of this thing, because my life is generally uneventful. Uneventful on an epic scale, by which I mean nothing exciting or tragic or poignant happens in my life that, I figure, wouldn’t happen in mostly anybody else’s life. I won’t, for instance, travel halfway across the world to some remote part of Africa (for work, say, assuming I’m a journalist) and get embroiled in bloody drug wars, and then draw some life-transforming epiphany from an impoverished African girl whose life I save and who, as it turns out, gives me a spiritual re-awakening. No, I am not the contemplative sort.

What I do is grow up in Singapore which, strangely for a country so full of activity, is generally uneventful. We don’t get natural disasters, we don’t go on strike, we don’t get mass-murdering psychopaths (all too often), we don’t generally do anything dramatic that local TV doesn’t think of first. The grand events of our lives as Singaporeans are restricted to things that happen in other parts of the world, which we subsequently pretend we have any involvement in; things like Barack Obama in 2008 or, you know, sex scandals. We’re a sterile bunch, mostly, and our lives tick along uneventfully- school, lunch, school, facebook, clubs, sleep, school, lunch. That’s basically growing up in Singapore, and I’ve been doing it for twenty one years.

My name is Brandon Wong Jian Han, which is a typically Singaporean Chinese name because no one calls me by my Chinese name except for Chinese language teachers, so I’m mostly just Brandon. I would make some deep and intellectual comment about that, but I don’t really care except that my parents thought Brandon would be a nice name and my grandparents thought Jian Han would be a nice name, but even they still call me Blandon, and the mis-pronunciation, I believe, is a cultural quirk, so go chew on that.

Anyway, tangential from whatever I’ve just said, I do happen to have a story to tell. It may not be a story about good or evil, because I frankly find those a little artificial, nor is it a story about loss or tragedy, or madness or sex, but it is a personal story and one that I want to tell before it gets lost when I get too busy finding a job and subsequently become a slave to it in a couple of years. Things like that happen, I see it in books and movies all the time- lost opportunity, lost love, lost stories; and it happens a lot in Singapore, you see it every time you take a train or a bus and see all the stifled people in shirts and ties and business suits and make-up, their faces tell you they’ve lost their stories. When you ask these people how they’ve been, they go, “like that lor”, and what kind of story is that? If you ask me now how my life has been, I’ll go “never been better” and it’s true, I’ve been feeling a lot happier about the way things are now than I have in a long time, and if you bear with me, I think I can get through the why of it without resorting to cheap tricks like sudden deaths and Vietnamese orphans.

This story will begin in 2004, when I turned seventeen, and I have picked 2004 because it was a year where, at least for a relatively uneventful life like mine, there were a couple of important moments. For one, I had just started junior college, which would turn out to be quite a whirl of important memories, and there also came some changes to my family which I think are quite significant.

Mainly, it was that my father, who had spent most of his adult life as a sea-faring Master Mariner (which, at least, was the description my mother told me to write under my dad’s profession on forms), had, in January that year, been offered a desk-bound job at the company as a manager of sorts, and would therefore begin to stay on-shore for good instead of scooting off to sea every four months as had been the trend for the past 30 years. This made us all very happy, ans a little hesitant, having grown up without the typical ever-present father of most happily well-adjusted families. This is not to say we were dysfunctional, of course, because my mother, Mother, who is a nurse and thus a strong woman of impressive fortitude (both physical and mental), had raised us all almost single-handedly since we were little and had instilled in us, though unwittingly through severe parental rhetoric, a pronounced talent for sarcasm and annoying banter, especially seeing as how she, when not being fierce and fearsome, was generally the kind of good-natured, easy to amuse mother you’d associate with women of her short and rotund stature.

‘Us’, hitherto, referred to my twin sister, Valerie, and I who, as with most twins, grew up best friends; we are perfect complements in humour, taste and self-abuse, though I will not hesitate to say that I am clearly smarter. The both of us kept a firm and stoic distance from our older brother, Victor who, at ten years our senior, had fairly little in common with us. He was invariably mean and angsty when we were growing up, the kind of brother who hits his younger siblings and makes them cry and then threatens them with more hitting if they squeal to Mother. By 2004, though, he had mellowed considerably and our relationship was steely and un-interactive, quite like living with, and I borrow liberally from Harry Potter, the family ghoul. At this point in the story, Victor was a writer for a bridal magazine, un-creatively named ‘Weddings’, though he being expressly of the gruff, unsentimental variety, Valerie and I often wondered what he could possibly contribute to the magazine. Of course, we never said this to him.

For all this latent tension, our family was more or less happy, and in 2004, my typical, average, middle class Singaporean Chinese family had begun to even out some of the rough edges of its earlier years- we had just moved into a new house in Tanjong Katong, a 5-room executive HDB apartment we had found on resale at what my mother said, to my father who was somewhere in the Indian Ocean when she sealed the deal, was a great price. Moving out of the old house at Bedok, where we had lived for close to ten years, was imperative by this time, because my mother was convinced that something big and dramatic was needed to help us move beyond the tumult it had seen. Tumult in the familial sense, to us at least, refers to some conflict or another between my parents and Victor. Victor, who inherited my mother’s incredible temper, also had, growing up, a testy relationship with my parents. This was in Victor’s early teens, when Valerie and I were very little, and we would wake up in the middle of the night to sounds of things crashing amidst raised voices, the kinds of sounds that make you angry and afraid just listening to them. One morning, after such a quarrel, we walked into the living room and saw the telephone flung across the room, right through the wooden door of a cabinet.

This is, in a way, the story of that fight, though not entirely, because it is also a story of my family, of myself and the lives of others and how it’s become mad and complicated and wonderful. It is, most importantly, a story about growth, and it starts in 2004.