The Early Years (2002-2005)

Looking through the 2005 Bloggies finalists, I found Satan’s Laundromat, “a photolog of New York, with an emphasis on urban decay, strange signage, and general weirdness”. Great stuff - the photos make me think of Luc Sante’s writing sometimes, and these shots of Alphabet City brought back memories. They also make me think of the times I walked around NYC and all the moments I wish I could’ve captured on film: there was this point when I was walking on some side street off Boston Road in the Bronx and it was a sweltering summer day, with waves of heat rising up from the asphalt, and then I came by this group of boys cooling off in the jet spray of an open fire hydrant.

Watched a documentary on some of the largest houses in Singapore, including a few with private elevators. Which inspired this random thought: whether it’s called an “elevator” or a “lift”, why do we only give the device credit for bringing people upwards? After all, it not only elevates people, it also brings them downwards.

Just to break up the text, here’s a pic I took of shophouses on Club Street. Uploaded it using Hello, which is okay but suffers from not letting you put in post titles (you have to add them in manually by going back to Blogger).

Stealing a link from the baseball forum I’m on, here’s a fun twisted comic from Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship comic strip (note: clearly, despite its name, the strip has nothing to do with religion - it’s not a Jack Chick thing). Man I love alternative comics.

This may be only interesting to those of us interested in the California scene of the 60s, but here goes: A Gag Reflex is the blog of a woman trying to find out who her real dad is - and trying to piece together what she can of her mother’s wild youth.

Yeah! Pats win the Super Bowl!! If you don’t care much for American football, you can always check out the Super Bowl ads… I quite liked the FedEx one this year. Hey, it had a dancing bear and Burt Reynolds. What’s not to like?

Fast Company, one of my favourite business magazines, has an article on the jobs in which women earn more than men. Among them were aerospace engineer, sales engineer, and statistician, which I thought a nice trio to counter stereotypes.

As usual, my Sunday afternoon was spent perusing the New York Times Magazine - this week it has a feature by David Sheff on his struggle with his son Nick’s meth addiction (registration required). Most striking was how much meth just took over Nick’s life:

In the puerile spirit of this post over at Lindsayism, I decided to annoy the Ikea ChatBot (bottom left corner of this page). Here’s a transcript of the “chat”, which has a sort of surreal sound to it:

I was amused by this tabloid headline: the New York Daily News proclaiming “Leona’s small dog now a medium?” Leona Helmsley’s dog Trouble is a fluffy Maltese small enough to fit into her purse. But when Trouble barks, Leona listens. That’s because the 84-year-old hotel queen is said to believe that her late husband, real-estate tycoon Harry Helmsley, communicates to her through the pooch.

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, and the chapter I’m on refers to Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman, pioneers in the field of reading faces. Ekman and his collaborator Wallace Friesen, drawing on the work of Tomkins, developed the Facial Action Coding System (that’s a good link if you’re reading the book too - it has photos of the various facial actions). The FACS in essence says that everything you’re thinking, all your emotions, can be deciphered from reading and interpreting your facail expression. Fascinating stuff.

By the way, my reviews of “The Office” and The Last Waltz are up on Delta Sierra Arts, my reviews blog.

I’m always interested in Singaporean English neologisms that are used in formal settings, for example the use of “handphone” where others might use “mobile phone” or “cellphone”. In this case, “up-riding escalator” means pretty much “this escalator goes up” (i.e. the sign’s saying don’t be stupid and step on the escalator from this end).

Inspired by Slate’s Surfergirl TV blog, I looked up Conan O’Brien talking about Johnny Carson on Google Video. Here’s a partial transcription, with some copyediting amendments: Ladies and gentlemen, this is our first show back since Johnny Carson passed away last week - news that I think stunned everybody. It’s taken a while to process. It’s been a week. And it is still pretty huge news to absorb. You know, last week, so much has been said about Johnny Carson, very eloquently and very well, by a lot of people who knew Johnny personally, who were good friends with Johnny, people whose careers were changed - Leno, Letterman - when Johnny Carson took those people under his wing and single handedly made them the performers we know today. So, thinking about it, and because I think we’re the last show because of our schedule to be on and probably to comment on this event, it’s been hard for me to imagine anything that I could say tonight to people that would in any way add to what’s already been said.

Just discovered Music Plasma (via Geeky Kewl), and it seems a pretty cool tool… just type in the name of any musician and it’ll spit out a graphic showing related / similar artists. I tried “Aretha Franklin”, which naturally created a universe of soul superpowers.

Why we won’t ever run out of energy, even if we run out of oil. As any reader of the Economist will tell you, any prediction that a commodity is going to become increasingly scarce in the past has usually doomed to failure.

Why is it that talking like Snoop never fails to amuse me? Here’s Gizoogle, like Google except it transizzolates the results into street talk. I particularly like the way they turned the “oo” into sweet rims. Holla! (Via Google Blogoscoped.)

Looking through an old New York Times article (reprinted in the Ledger) on the delicate balance between the human need to have secrets and the difficulty of maintaining duplicity: The ability to hold a secret is fundamental to healthy social development, [psychologists] say, and the desire to sample other identities - to reinvent oneself, to pretend - can last well into adulthood…

Had a dinner with fellow Singaporean bloggers yesterday, a veritable festival of geekage, with topics ranging from early 1990s Net usage to new blogging tools to enterprise blogging. The dinner reminded me, one thing I love about blogging is what it gives me something similar to what being in university gave me - a voice, a chance to speak or write about the obscure things that I love but that my community of friends here in Singapore don’t necessarily care much for - things like language use or baseball. And I know it’s been said many times, many ways (to completely misquote Nat King Cole), but I still think that’s one of the wonders of the Internet - the ability to aggregate very specific preferences.

An old piece: What bloggers can learn from journalists. And vice versa. (From Poynter Online.)