The Early Years (2002-2005)

First one, on the video wall as I was waiting for the lift to the cinema: Nitty’s “Nasty Girl”, which rips off the Archies’ “Sugar Sugar”. You take a cornball song and add bog-standard booty-obsessed lyrics, what do you expect?

From A Capital Idea, a piece in the Fort-Worth Star-Telegram on the use of “wife-beater” as a way to describe a white undershirt… The Bangkok Street Dogs street dogs blog…

Some of the floats on display during the annual Chinese New Year Chingay parade. (Taken on 26 Feb 2005, when the floats were going towards Little India)

Friendster now has blogging, provided by SixApart, the MT/Typepad guys. Even the price packages sound like Typepad, with 3 levels of blogging packages: The default option when users sign up for a blog is Friendster Blogs Basic, for $4.95 per month or $49.50 per year. That option boasts extra storage and bandwidth.

Everyday for exercise I walk the 6 storeys up to my office in the Adelphi at least once. This invariably involves walking by and even stepping over a few foreign workers who’re sleeping on the staircase landing, waiting to see this firm (what does it do? law? construction?) that occupies a little nook of the building on the 5th floor. I always wonder, looking at these men on the landings, trying to get sleep in the heat and stale air of the stairwell or idly flipping through old stray pages of Tamil Murasu, what goes through their minds? What do they think about having travelled miles away from home just to end up whiling the day away seemingly waiting for Godot? What do they think about this guy in office attire stepping over them - do they think him ridiculous for choosing to walk?

I have been alerted that Bubba the enormous lobster has passed on. Let us have a moment of silence, and then pass the butter. Pinchy!!!

I like Leo Hickman’s column in the Guardian on ethical living: even if you can’t follow everything he writes about, it’s nice to try. Here’s one thing I was thinking about when I took out the recycling last night: I consume vast quantities of Pepsi, and the bag’s always bulging with cans when I bring it out once a fortnight. And then I always see these poor old men and women at hawker centres and food courts picking up old cans to make a few cents. Is there any way I can somehow give all my cans to one of these people instead of just having them recycled, given that I now don’t really live within walking distance of a hawker centre? Back when I had my own apartment near the river there was this guy who rummaged through the trash can downstairs looking for cans so I’d go down and give him all of my cans, usually made his day. Hmm. Suggestions welcome.

Love your dog? Hate cats? This Ikea cushion may be just the thing for your dog. (From Puptastic)

Great photo, no? Coconut all camouflaged. The spread of social networking means he’s even got his own Dogster page, replete with his “own” blog. Leave him a bone, will ya?

Bubba, this big-ass lobster, is saved. Yup, that’s him next to your regular ready-for-thermidor scrawny specimen. This bit in the article was funny: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent Wholey a letter asking him to work with the group to release Bubba back in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Maine.

Here’s a line of thought that I’m working on. “Desperate Housewives” is what happens when soap opera collides into Douglas Sirk: older actresses in over-the-top moments, set in lavish surroundings that are disquieting in their seeming perfection. Like Sirk’s films, “Desperate Housewives” speaks about the alienation of women and their categorisation into pre-assigned roles: the affair with John the gardener (Jesse Metcalfe) could have been straight from All That Heaven Allows, or Todd Haynes’ Sirk homage Far From Heaven. There’s melodrama, yes, but it’s far from camp.

Continuing my attempts to take pictures of public art in Singapore, here’s a sculpture outside the HDB Hub at Toa Payoh, pleasantly made up for Chinese New Year.

Wow, this sounds really annoying. Miami: City for the Horny.

I love the New Yorker and its polymathic ability to splash any subject across its pages. Case in point: in this week’s issue, Sasha Frere-Jones examines the world of ringtones, and notes that the advent of master tones might mean impending nostalgia for polyphonic ringtones.

Optimus Prime dies of prostate cancer.

Everything that needs to be said about the winners has been said elsewhere - heck, the photos of the law firm of Swank, Eastwood, and Foxx are so oversplashed, I thought I’d put up a pic of Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski, who won for Best Documentary. So here’s some random minor thoughts from yesterday’s ceremony:

Via Tym, I learnt that Andrew Sullivan wrote a recent column in the Times decrying the atomisation of society by iPod. Which may be true, but is hardly a revelation - Warren St. John in the New York Times already noted how some iPod users use it to shut out the world more than a year ago, and a few bloggers have said the same thing. Heck, even graffiti artists have grasped the iSolating effects. Not quite sure how the isolation effect is that different from what was achieved using Walkmen and Discmen previously, although perhaps the iPod seems even more ubiquitous than those products.

Here’s the secret to getting your lift to go into express mode. Otis only, apparently. And here’s a playlist of every free song in the iTunes music store. Okay, that just means songs below 30 seconds in length. (Via Jason Barrow.) Queer Eye for the Reporter Gal: how come Superman’s super vision doesn’t come with fashion sense? That red-and-blue outfit really doesn’t work.

Here’s “Kidnap”, an ad for the Marriott from McCann-Erikson Singapore. Funny, albeit very wrong. (Eagle eyes - and ears - will note that although the AdForum page says the language spoken is Malay, it’s clearly Mandarin.)

You too can stop global warming! Just jump at the right time. Of course, I don’t know how to judge the physics - fact or farrago? In any case it only caters to those in timezones from the International Date Line to +2 GMT (Istanbul), so those of us in the opposite part of the world will just brace ourselves for the impact.