The Early Years (2002-2005)

Why does Yahoo! think I live in a time zone called “CST”? China Standard Time? Do they not know that there’s few things Singaporeans get annoyed by more than to be thought of as being part of China? Anyway, on to the things that caught my eye:

Looks like fellow Singaporean blogger Xiaxue’s endorsement deal with LocalBrand T-shirts has made worldwide blogging news. Even Biz Stone has a post on it on Blogger’s own blog. Maybe I should take a leaf from this. Advertise on dsng.net! I’m the #1 hit in Google for the following searches!

In Chicago, we went to the Green Mill in Uptown, perhaps the best jazz bar in the city and probably the oldest jazz bar in the world (found a picture of the place in daylight from here). The Girlfriend and I had differing opinions on the atmosphere of the place: I like dive bars, and the Green Mill had a sort of dive-y throwback feel to it, perhaps attributable to its speakeasy origins - it was allegedly owned by Al Capone. I wasn’t expecting this - the online descriptions made the place sound a bit chi-chi, but it turned out to be the kind of place that sells cheap Pabst and Schlitz. Two Pabsts, one Amstel Light, $10 altogether: great deal. (There was a $6 cover on a Tuesday, admittedly.) Nothing like a good old-fashioned jazz lounge.

Apparently my decision not to get an iPod because I don’t like the Chicago font it uses has been featured in Wired’s Japan website, leading to a minor infestation of Japanese tech-geeks on this here blog (assuming, of course, that Wired Japan has the same demographic of readership as its American counterpart). Lord knows what they say about me since I 1) can’t read Japanese and 2) don’t even have the Asian fonts plug-ins installed. What’s “persnickety” and “finicky” in Japanese?

Me, and Coconut, and a cat we vanquished.

Okay, not really, but a cute set of pics from Modern Pooch nonetheless.

Here are my reviews of two movies that couldn’t be more different in tone: Robots and Closer. Excerpts: Robots: A young person off to see a benevolent dictator who meets misfits along the way: how much more like the Wizard of Oz can the plot get? (Indeed, the Tin Man, perhaps the prototypical mechanical actor, makes a cameo in the film.) But as might be expected, the path of true invention never did run smooth: Big Weld has been absent from the helm of his firm, and in his absence, the villainous Ratchet (Greg Kinnear), egged on by his megalomaniacal mother Madame Gasket (Jim Broadbent), has taken over the running of Big Weld industries. Ratchet introduces - for shame! - the profit motive, thereby condemning to obsolescence the millions of robots who can’t afford upgrades. Rodney thus has to team up with a ragtag bunch of misfit robots to save the day. Robots, inevitably, highlights the overarching importance of a firm’s role as corporate citizen over its duty to shareholders.

Back in Singapore after I was bumped off my regularly scheduled flight - got a nice airline voucher and an upgrade to business class for my pains. Note to self: wherever possible, fly business. If only for the ability to sleep lying down, and the in-chair massage function.

David Edelstein summarises his readers’ votes for worst twist endings to movies. The Life of David Gale takes first place, unsurprisingly. For me Fight Club (#9) is one of the worst offenders - I think the “split personality” thing struck me as trying too hard to seem deep without really succeeding. But the absolute disappointment was Unbreakable, which had a “surprise” ending that could be figured out in 10 minutes…

The most popular McDonald’s in the world (30,000 customers a day) is in Pushkin Square in Moscow - interesting, I would’ve guessed Beijing. I know when McDonald’s first opened in Singapore in 1979, its Liat Towers branch was the busiest in the world for a year or so…

Just back from Chicago, city of dyed-green rivers - Happy St Patrick’s Day one and all!

Since my original post on English words that are borrowed from Malay was so popular, here’s a much shorter list, that of English words that are borrowed from Cantonese. I’ll exclude words like ginseng, kumquat, and lychee, which refer to unique objects that are clearly Chinese in origin, choosing instead to look at words that are not immediately apparently Cantonese. As can be seen, although the British have had a presence in Hong Kong for a while, the loan words are much fewer:

Over the last few days, I’ve been tapping the wonders of American cable, watching such films as Ella Enchanted (terrible), Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen (bearable), and A League of Their Own (quite good, actually - and now that I know a lot more about baseball it makes more sense)… anyway, weekend links:

What song was #1 on the day you were born? Mine - the Bee Gees’ “Stayin’ Alive” (US) and Abba’s “Take a Chance On Me” (UK). Popularised disco rules!

Am in Indiana right now, chilling with Coconut. Caught an article in the Economist on how dogs really do have personalities - since that content is subscriber-only, here’s an Irish Times article on the same subject. Clearly that’s obvious to many of us dog owners, but of course we’d be biased., so it’s nice to know it’s not just us human owners anthropomorphising. There are four categories of doggy personality, apparently: energy level; affection; calmness/anxiety; and competence (a combination of being dependable and open to new experiences). Interesting…

Going to fly off on holiday in a few hours. Enjoy these links for the next day or so: Yahoo! has a “Netrospective”. And a poet, upon hearing the neologism, has a coronary…

Over at Slate, Ian Ayres argues that single-use toilets should never be gender-marked. (Linguistic aside: I always assumed Americans used “toilet” to refer specifically to the bowl, not the room - this is a rare instance of the latter referent.)

“The landscape value system, and particularly the aesthetic it produces, unfairly condemns whole areas of industrial cityscape, of non-landscape. And as long as the vestiges of landscape endure, partisans of cityscape and great industry must fight a lonely battle, one contrary to the common wisdom of Americans descended from the makers of landscape” - John Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America 1580-1845.

There’s something about how people in really big metropolises can sometimes get very parochial about their neighbourhoods - I guess when the world’s at your feet, it’s not that tempting to explore the rest of the city. And most New Yorkers I know have never been to Bed-Stuy (too prissy to go? no real reason to go?). But there’s some wonderful architecture there, particularly the brownstone buildings. Here’s a wonderful set of photos by Tom Fletcher of the architecture of Bedford-Stuyvesant, from which I’ve taken the above picture. (Via Brownstoner)

From a Grauniad Guardian article on James Dyson, inventor of the dual-cyclone vacuum cleaner: He still has one major ambition. To become a verb, in the same way that Hoover - or, as he puts it, “the alternative” - has done. I suggest to him that people are already using his product but still saying they are “hoovering”. He smiles. “I don’t think they’ll be doing that for long,” he says.