The Early Years (2002-2005)

Here’s part of the flyer I got in my e-mail… woohoo! Yep, that’s me, DJing tomorrow night, Wed 11 May, from 10pm till about 1am, Hideout, 31 Circular Road (behind Boat Quay).

Salon notes Microsoft’s version 3.0 of its policy on gay rights, in which Microsoft has agreed to support legislation that eliminates discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Steve Ballmer’s email to Microsoft employees says it all:

Perhaps of interest only to the minority reading from Singapore: here’s Wa Si Hokkien Lang, an entire blog written in Hokkien. Sample entry: Limpeh jin tulan. Offit lai sar eh new worker. Ko si university graduate ler! Niameh. Pik giap liao First Class Honours! Tapi kio yi zhor kang, yi lang simik lan ciao mah beh hiao. Nabeh. Jip pai eh hao seh kia sa ma eh hiao thak chek beh hiao zhor kang ah?

What a weekend. 2-0 over Newcastle despite a shaky first half, and then Liverpool loses 3-1 (the Bergkamp backheel that set up the goal was magnificent). Everton are in the Champions League. Brilliant.

So I’ve gotten the word: I’ll be DJing at Hideout at 31B Circular Road this Wednesday, 11 May. It’s a cosy little space, and I’ll be spinning indie stuff all night long, which is a change from the house some of you might have seen me spin - I’ll probably go for a dirty garage-rock sound.

The shocking but false story of the Old Negro Space Program. Bacon Strips Bandages. Mmm. Bacon. How to tweak Firefox - a great guide. Thieves in St Louis target stained glass. I can’t even imagine how anyone would fence stolen stained glass. The results of CSS Reboot, a project to showcase well-designed sites (all launched on May 1). The first and only time travel convention at MIT. Official site. But what if in the future time travel is easy but travelling across spaces is hard, so people can come back to 2005 but only in a specific location? Huh? Huh?

Another case of unexamined statistics, this one in a CNN article on how e-mails affect your IQ - the article also mentions the results of a survey on e-mail: Nine out of 10 people thought colleagues who answered messages during face-to-face meetings were rude, while three out of 10 believed it was not only acceptable, but a sign of diligence and efficiency.

Just wrote a review of a film from the Singapore Film Festival, Splendid Float aka Yan Guang Si She Gewutuan (can’t seem to get the Chinese characters to appear).

Was recently thinking about Nick Hornby novels and how they so precisely describe that vacant space between the end of college and the onset of full adulthood/maturity… continuing the theme, westward.com talks about the quarter-life crisis.

I didn’t pay much attention to Singapore Idol, but the winner Taufik Batisah gets props from me for quoting Sir Mix-a-Lot’s classic “I like big butts and I cannot lie” line in today’s Straits Times.

Received an SMS trying to get me to celebrate something called “Cuervo de Mayo” [sic] today. I suppose in a country as far removed from Mexico as Singapore, the name of the celebration of the Battle of Puebla ends up transmogrified into a branding exercise…

Ray Baumgardner has a funny theory about China’s gift of pandas to Taiwan: China makes noises like they want to invade Taiwan and then they offer them a pair of pandas. It doesn’t make sense. Unless…these pandas aren’t really pandas at all. They are Trojan Pandas.

This was a fun game… Petals Around The Rose. Apparently played by Bill Gates. Um, can’t really say more.

Apparently, the world’s funniest joke (well, besides “Wenn ist das Nunstruck git und Slotermeyer? Ja!… Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput”) is this: “Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn’t seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed.

Another day, another Jack the Ripper theory. But this one - with Jack as sailor - seems somewhat plausible. I did the Jack the Ripper London Walk a long time ago - 12 years by now, I think - and I remember it being lots of fun, but maybe I’m morbid like that. Ah, so J-Lo is a pick-and-eat kind of girl… don’t be fooled by the rocks that she got. Or maybe it’s part of her new Presidential campaign. Sometimes it’s like the Explainer column in Slate reads my mind… I suppose that’s why I own the book. Anyway, here’s where the phrase “cold feet” comes from. Just renewed my Salon Premium membership and got some issues of Wired to go along with it. No Granta this time, but still, I like. Has “The Scream” been burned? I certainly hope not. I’d rather the painting be furtively transported across the Continent, much like the Fallen Madonna With the Big Boobies.

Hmm… the groom still wants to marry the runaway bride. I guess that’s love. Or delusion.

Over at A Capital Idea, Nicole has a post on how unchallenged statistics often wend their way into daily use, based on this Carl Bialik column. Numbers that originate from unquestioned assertions often find their way into regular use - such as the alarmist quote that “Canadian police estimate that more than 100,000 Web sites contain images of child sexual abuse.” As Bialik notes:

I am a Japanese School Teacher - a funny series of columns by a black American guy teaching in Japan. I went to a hip-hop club with a friend a few weeks ago, and pretty much everyone there was wearing the exact same thing. The guys ALL wore NY Yankees caps, to the side, a sweater, a coat, some “bling-bling” for good measure, and big pants. The girls all looked like a tit-less, ass-less version of Beyonce from one of her videos. I swear, it’s like they went to K-Mart and bought “Hip-Hop in a Can” for $9.99 and popped it open….voila! I’m ghetto now! …No you’re not! The other thing that depressed me about this club was that no one really danced…they all “swayed” to the music, while holding cigarettes. In neatly arraigned lines. That’s Japan for you. (Link)

Speaking of prewar Singapore, here’s a picture of the Adelphi Hotel on Coleman Street, one of Singapore’s big 3 hotels in the 1900s, along with the Raffles, which of course still stands, and the Hotel de l’Europe, which is now our present Supreme Court building. The Adelphi was acquired by Arathoon Sarkies and Eleazar Johannes in 1903 - adding to the Armenian domination of the hotel industry then - and I’m trying to figure out when it was torn down. (There’s a reference to the Adelphi still being around in 1962, since that’s when the Singapore Contract Bridge Association was formed.)

Many thanks to fellow Singaporean blogger Mr Miyagi for the link. Miyagi took time off his schedule of teaching Ralph Macchio to wax on and off to blog about an effort to collate the voices of Singaporeans - a sort of folk history or oral history of Singapore and Singaporeans via podcast. Recording down the voices of our grandparents and others who’ve spent time on this island and preserve their stories - I think this is a very worthy project.