The Early Years (2002-2005)

From Majikthise, why rats can’t vomit, and which animals can. Seems like humans and dogs blow chunks most easily. Rerun, the family Cairn terrier, seems prone to it. But then he likes to try to eat snails in the garden, and escargot in the raw certainly seems like it would be emetic.

The companion pic to this one, taken at the Drake Hotel. For a pup of less than a year, Coconut’s already done quite a bit of travelling.

I suppose that only if you were drunk would doing something like this make any sense. Talk about a s***-eating grin.

Laws of Attraction is a passable rom-com with a standard adversaries-become-lovers plot. Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play two of Manhattan’s top divorce lawyers with very different styles (he’s casual and often unscrupulous, she’s straitlaced and takes the high road) who predictably fall for each other. Meanwhile, Michael Sheen and Parker Posey chip in gamely as an over-the-top rock star-fashion designer couple whose divorce proceedings pit the lawyers against each other.

It’s April Fool’s Day an Tomfoolery, one of my favourite books in my childhood came to mind. It collated all sorts of nonce and nonsense, including this old chestnut of a rhyme:

When I was young, it seemed that the big American TV shows would take forever to come to Singapore. I’d have to endure reading all the buzz about “Seinfeld” and other shows in Entertainment Weekly a year or two before the shows flickered onto our TV screens.

Tanya Gold inveighs in the Guardian against the way Charlotte Bronte’s image has been overly sanitised: As the 150th anniversary of her death on March 31 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of [Elizabeth] Gaskell’s fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry’s veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend.

I think it’s funny that an elected official such as Governor Mark Warner of Virginia can issue press releases and responses in limericks: I took some grief for my nudist park pun. But resist I cannot on this one. I will sign this bill, more or less of free will. But I can’t do it without having some fun. (press release)

I saw this funny livejournal bit from qwantz on putting songs in list format, including the Ghostbusters theme song. So I thought I’d translate the concept into a Powerpoint presentation (please save and open the file from your own hard drive to save my bandwidth).

Another earthquake hit western Sumatra early this morning. That region has really suffered. Reports on the earthquake differed initially on its magnitude, from 8.2 on MSNBC to 8.5 (Today), but the USGS seems to have it definitely at 8.7 now. That’s about half the strength of December’s quake, which still means it was pretty big, though fortuitously no tsunami ensued.

Dir. Peter Berg Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights is set in the oil town of Odessa, Texas, a world in which football is religion. The film is shot to emphasise the flat landscape of Odessa, all heat and dust, the sheer emptiness of a town that has nothing to look for but the Friday night lights of the title. That sense of urgency pervades the game scenes of the film: you can almost feel the crunch as the adolescent bodies slam into each other.

Lima Originally uploaded by Barrybar. Interesting - the Wooster Collective is trying to get people to download street art onto their cellphones, as a means of supporting artists. The Collective’s site has a lot of good pics, including some sightings of De La Vega’s chalk drawings (those make me nostalgic), and a link to Patrick Barry Barr’s Flickr collection of street art photos.

Went to church for Good Friday and Easter Sunday, and apparently someone had set fire to the nearby public carpark where we park our cars. As you can see, the darkness and soot made it near-nigh impossible to get a good shot with my Palm (no proper digital camera on hand), but it was quite shocking to see the hulls of burnt motorcycles and to smell the lingering acrid odor of charred rubber.

Happy Easter everyone! Easter here in Singapore isn’t the chocolate festival it was in America, where the local Target had aisles upon aisles of Peeps, as well as Reese’s Pieces, M&Ms, and other assorted sweets shaped like eggs. But I’m still looking forward to picking up a chocolate rabbit once Easter is over and the stores have to clear stock.

Lots more new photos of Coconut, world’s cutest dog, from when we took him to stay at the Drake Hotel in Chicago. His first road trip!

David Duchovny now has a blog. Started to promote House of D, the new film he’s directing (“here comes the push part. i want to impart to you all a sense of urgency about house of d. this is the kind of movie that hollywood doesn’t really make any more—it’s a movie with a story and a red blood beating heart, not a spectacle of explosions with a heart composed of story structure software and green green money (that’s not too bad) it needs you to need it”, and yes he does write like that without any capitalisation and with run-on sentences yes), but hopefully it’ll take on a life of its own like Zach Braff’s.

Bobby Fischer freed from jail and moves to the Fortress of Solitude. Okay, Iceland. Same difference. I still think (as I said before) that it’s funny that his major crime was playing chess in Yugoslavia.

Okay, so they cost 68-75 euros each for 128 MB of space, but oh man do these flash drives ever look good. There’re tempura and takoyaki flash drives too. (From Akihabara News, via yjblog)

Time machine for sale on eBay. Actually, all you have to do to afford it is buy it, go back in time 100 years, and buy stock in Coca-Cola or just put money in a bank and let it compound (idea stolen from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, natch). Easy peasy.