The Early Years (2002-2005)

Yup, pimping myself again: Tonight, 8.30 onwards, I’m DJing (as “Slapdash”) with Jon Fong (“Mocopops”) at Hideout, 31B Circular Road (it’s up the stairs behind Boat Quay). Gimme indie rock!! Oh, and do come up and say hi… if I’m busy trying to cue up the next song I apologise…

Okay, I’m a sucker for cheesy romantic comedies anyway, but man - Must Love Dogs sounds like it was calculated to make me fork out good money to see it… John Cusack? Check. The smoking hot Diane Lane? Check. (And plus points for a romantic comedy where the female lead is older than the male one.) And dogs being the centre of the plot. Sounds good.

The strangeness of some items sold in Japan never fails to get to me. Such as this Sharanpowan thingy - a pillow? - based on Maria Sharapova’s chest area. Or - stranger yet - the one based on her legs.

Yup, I actually carved out some time to go see some performances at the Singapore Arts Festival, so here are my reviews of Mirando Al Cielo, the Gogmagogs, and Impenjarament, all of which were very entertaining.

Another Sunday night, and the weekend slips away, like a lover on a secret assignation, hardly stopping to linger, hardly allowing a moment to savour it. Where does the time go?

Hmm… so couples trying to get pregnant shouldn’t drink tau huey zhui and other such soy products? Ah. Suddenly there’s a whole new way of looking at the birth rates in Singapore…

What is perhaps most annoying about the Blogger issue with adding the div{clear:both} tags is that it’s been more than 24 hours since many bloggers first blogged about it and Blogger hasn’t even admitted that there’s a problem. The last post on Blogger Status remains firmly stuck on 17 June 2005, even though there’s a post on the Blogger home page dated 24 June 2005 12:07pm jauntily telling people about the launch of Blogger images. Yeah, fine and dandy that you can now upload images via Blogger (even though they won’t let you upload onto your own server, apparently) but how useful is that when the look and feel of various Blogger-based blogs is being affected by these new insertions?

I caught Impenjarament, a Teater Ekamatra production, at the Esplanade Theatre Studio last night. I’ve always felt the quality of Singaporean theatre is particularly high, and the show didn’t let me down - there was solid acting from the all-male cast, excellent use of space, and a vivid script that director Aidli ‘Alin’ Mosbit exploits well.

So Vietnamese Prime Minister Phan Van Khai was in Boston yesterday and took in the chance to stroll around Harvard, leading to that photo of him rubbing the John Harvard statue above. Um - does he not realise that drunk college students like to pee around the statue? Hope he brought hand sanitiser. Of course, they tell tourists that students rub the shoe for good luck before exams…

Yep, it’s been confirmed. This Wed, 29 June 2005, I’m going to be DJing again at Hideout, 31B Circular Road near Boat Quay, along with fellow DJ Jon Fong. Indie rock and classic stuff from my side, indie rock and old school pop from his. Be there, or be not there. General madness promised.

This is weird, Blogger just started adding these random div tags before and after my posts: Which is annoying, because that adds a whole little bit of white space that was totally not meant to be there. Will investigate.

So Coconut, world’s cutest dog, turns one today. That’s him, 7 weeks old or so, when he first came into our lives. He was so small then… not even 3 pounds. Now he’s a big boy. And his dad loves him lots, and wishes him the happiest of birthdays.

Daniel Altman, an old friend and former TF (and part time DJ, if I recall right), comes up with an article in the New York Times about hotel DJs: Once it would have been unheard of to see a D.J. anywhere except in a dance club, a radio studio or behind a folding table at a wedding or bar mitzvah. In the last several years, though, D.J.’s have been popping up all over the place - music shops, department stores, bars and now, with apparent success, in hotels.

I’ve never really been in favour of putting clothes on a dog for reasons other than warmth, so I can’t decide if this is a cute or cruel way of dressing up a dachshund:

So I see there was a fire at Plaza Singapura yesterday, which inspired me to drag this old picture out… On 23 Feb, I went down to Plaza Singapura to pick some stuff up from the optician, and then suddenly, all these grey panels dropped down, blocking the escalator. Fire! At first I thought it was just a fire drill, but peeking in between the panels there was definitely the acrid smell of smoke in the air. Since they didn’t ask us to evacuate, but the escalators and lifts were shut off, I stayed on the 4th floor. And two floors below people were merrily eating at Secret Recipe, oblivious to the commotion. Quite funny, really.

Signs that Singapore is where the IOC is going to make its decision on where to host the 2012 Games are slowly creeping up around town. Last week, I passed by 2 billboards at the City Hall busstop extolling the virtues of Madrid as a potential host city. Then Straits Times had a long pullout section on Moscow. And I also picked up a couple of free “London 2012” postcards, featuring a marathon runner running by Tower Bridge. The postcard had the full number of pubs in London featured at the back. Apparently a criterion of a good Olympics host city is the ability to get quality ale. You know, because Guinness gives you strength or something.

Brendan O’Neill’s scathing criticism of Coldplay and bland Brit bands in Salon, all replete with class-warfare overtones, rightfully got slammed by readers - clearly statements such as the one below conflate class issues and the glamour myth of the sexdrugsdrink rockstar with the quality - and the kind - of music generated:

Speaking of synthesis, Kottke has a funny post on synaesthesia and cellphone ringtones. And Cameron Marlow thinks McDonald’s America has a secret menu. A solar-powered handphone charger. I really, really want this.

ipod therefore i am Originally uploaded by maximolly. Randomly surfing through Flickr, I found this photo of an “i-Buy i-Pod therefore i-Am” graffito in the Lower Haight that I thought nicely captured a troubling aspect of consumer society: that one’s self-definition is often all too tied up with the products one owns.

On Friday, moseying on down to a bar and dancing, I was asked the immortal question “are you straight?” I presume that was either a compliment of my dancing skills or a comment on my tight shiny pants. Or both. (The answer, incidentally, is “yes”.)