The Early Years (2002-2005)

Just as Singapore’s own bloggercon took place in DXO, a club, other bloggercons around the region are meeting in interesting locales as well… the Bombay one, true to that city’s rich acting tradition, is being held at the Prithvi Theatre at the end of this month, while the Chennai one will take place in the “wonderful and elite Madras Boat Club”. No Wi-Fi in the Madras Boat Club, unfortunately. I think buildings that date back to 1867 in general tend not to have Wi-Fi.

Plastic surgery for dogs grows in popularity in Brazil. He uses Botox to fix inverted eyelashes. He has even tightened the mammillae of a couple of female dogs, whose owners wanted to show them after they had given birth.

Now that Google Maps and Hot Or Not have opened their data to let users create their own apps, someone combined the two of them. Brilliant, eh? Ah, open source.

Talk about bitter cuckolded husbands.

There are some days when all you want out of your playlists is melancholy, when you want the drums to hit in slow, when you neither want music to soothe or to heighten, but just to be there, to articulate for you. Which is to say, there are some days when what you want are the tones of Al Green in “For the Good Times”:

One of the more well-known Singaporean bloggers, Xiaxue, just had her Blogger account hacked, and over 3000 blog posts deleted. That’s, to put it mildly, a shitty thing to do. It’s probably even criminal. I know she’s controversial and that some people don’t like her tone of voice - but to hack into an account and actually delete years of effort and leave a horrible message below? That’s disgusting.

Spencer Tunick continues his public nude art series in Tyneside: Spencer Tunick, a 38-year-old New York-based artist who creates and documents installations of large numbers of naked people, must be a man of no mean persuasive powers to have convinced 1,700 Tynesiders that getting up in the dark, stripping off and spending the next three hours with a brisk north-eastern wind whipping round their unmentionables was a good idea.

One of the funnier sights of New York for me when I was working there was Allen Street on the Lower East Side, where, right at one end of the street of restaurant supplies, the Singaporean restaurant Sentosa stood near the Malaysian restaurant Proton Saga. If you’re not from either country, that might not be funny, but it’s hard to think of two names that are more immediately recognisable as belonging to the respective countries. Plus, besides the amusing naming, the places had great food - tucked away at one end of the LES, they seemed to attract smaller crowds than, say, Penang or Nyonya, but more hardcore diners.

Random thought: the point of the “no such thing as a quiet beer” Carlsberg ads they show before movies seems to be “Everytime you’re about to get lucky, don’t open a Carlsberg, otherwise some asses will barge their way into your life”.

The July issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore is out. Here’s some lines from “Quarterly Report No. 2: Central City Waste Incinerator” by Yeow Kai Chai (music reviewer for the Straits Times), a poem that I thought tangibly tripped off the tongue:

The whole concept of “Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others” is somewhat bizarre to me - who makes a musical based on songs by the Smiths? Musical theatre, at least in the West End/Broadway style, often seems to involve a certain detachment between actor/singer and character, whereas the Smiths come across as so intensely personal, even when they’re over the top, even when Morrissey is at his most theatrical and melodramatic. It really does sound like a mismatch:

Tom Coates writes about the stoic manner in which Londoners have responded to the bombings. Quintessentially British: “We’re going to make it absolutely clear once and for all that this is a city that has been burned to the ground, ravaged by Plague and bombed to hell and will not be moved by these terrorists. And then we’re going to get on with our lives. As normal. Full Stop.”

By the way, thanks to all those who I met at Saturday’s bloggercon, ’twas nice to put faces to the blog handles. So, in alphabetical order, a big hello to Amy, Faith, Faith (whose blog seems especially personal so perhaps I won’t link), Grace, Sandra, Scarlett, Sheena, Terz, Tym, and Zhiyang. Um, if I missed you out, I do apologise - just leave a comment and I’ll get right on it. Thanks for coming to our humble li’l affair. Same time next year?

David Hare, playwright extraordinaire, praises public speaking, as opposed to other methods of public discourse: Underlying this patronising conviction that no one person should be given the floor lies the idea that group discussion is more “democratic” than an individual being licensed to hold forth. My experience is the opposite.

Ruth Walker (who runs Verbal Energy, the Christian Science Monitor’s language blog, and with whom I’ve had a short e-mail exchange on the transition of “shop” from an intransitive to a transitive verb) mellows on elisions such as “gonna”, noting that there is a clear semantic difference between “gonna” in the sense of “about to perform an action” and “going to” in the sense of “about to reach a location” - no one ever uses" gonna" in the latter context. Will Smith, for instance, sang about “going to Miami”, not “gonna Miami”.

So Bloggers.SG 2005, the first Singaporean bloggercon, went off quite well… the above pic is of the queue to enter the club. A queue! That we were not expecting. It was really great to see a random germ of an idea turn into a big shebang with proper speakers and bellydancers and sponsorship and all… And the fireworks at the end of it all were awesome! (Thank you, National Day Parade rehearsals!)

For tomorrow’s Bloggers.SG blogging conference at DXO, I’m moderating the “Blogging and the Law” panel that starts at 4pm. I am very pleased that we have two major panellists to speak on the topic, Daniel Koh from Rajah & Tann and Tan Min-Liang from Tan & Tan Partnership. Their full bios are here, but here’s a brief summary:

Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth. (I promise, not all the links will be this heavy.) Ingenious uses for condoms in an Indian town. (See what I mean?) The idea of Celine Dion being booed on Live 8 is very amusing to me. The Cock, perhaps the most in-your-face name for a gay bar ever, closes down in New York. Actually, the Cock is not totally shutting down. It’s moving into the Hole, another bar. The joke possibilities are endless. Technorati Tags: truth, condoms, live8, nyc, bars

Some advertising for the upcoming Bloggers.sg Singapore bloggers conference - this Sat, 16 July, 2pm, at DXO (here’s the NTUC Club press release on the subject). I’m moderating the legal panel at 4pm, where a couple of noted lawyers answer questions about the law and blogging. Wow, when we started this was supposed to be an informal 50-person session. Lord knows how it grew to this size.

Ray Charles’ “Georgia On My Mind” and Gladys Knight and the Pips’ “Midnight Train to Georgia” are absolutely spectacular songs (few backup singers do backup like the Pips… that “woo-woo!” bit never sounds worn out). They’re not even necessarily full-blown sad, except insofar as nostalgia and longing for places and loved ones is always somewhat sad. But somehow, heard back-to-back in the dark of the night they’re quite possibly the sound of the broken soul weeping into the last order of whiskey. The wearing down of dreams in “Midnight Train”; the unsettledness of the “no peace I find” line of “Georgia On My Mind” - somehow that delicate mix of hopefulness and exhaustion tilts differently depending on when one listens to the songs…