The Early Years (2002-2005)

Jesse Sheidlower (editor-at-large of the OED) writes about the Linguistic Society of America’s annual convention - specifically, the ‘fun’ part where the American Dialect Society chooses the Word of the Year. The overall winner was “red state, blue state, purple state” - a convenient expression of the political dichotomy of America.

It’s hard being a Cassandra figure…

Just noticed that Slate now has a discussion between two of my favourite writers, James Surowiecki and Malcolm Gladwell, on decision-making. Well worth reading. When do you get better decisions by distributing, as opposed to having a single savant make the decisions?

As expected, Mr Brown wins the Best Singapore Blog award. Congratulations to him and to all my fellow finalists!

Back from Jakarta, and just sent the Girlfriend off back to America. What a hectic crazy few days. Jakarta was absolutely teeming with people, with people filling every conceivable space as though obeying some law of human Brownian motion. A flurry of images: kids playing under highway bridges, goats eating the grass, and the stark contrast of simple roadside stalls amassing outside a spanking clean Carrefour. And traffic, traffic, traffic far as the eye can see. With cars three abreast on two-lane roads, the macet was immensely frustrating - especially for people who had weddings to help out in. But how authentic would a Jakarta trip be without hours stuck in traffic, eh? Am still nursing allergies from the pollution. Nice to have a chance to use my sparing Malay vocabulary though, lama benar tak bercakap Bahasa Melayu (or Bahasa Indonesia)…

Meantimes, I’ll be off to Jakarta over the weekend. Be good y’all.

Seth Mnookin writes in Slate about conquering his heroin addiction. Mnookin’s a good guy (full disclosure: he’s a former Crimson editor who held the music-reviewer role that I would later inherit, and he’s a fellow member of Sons of Sam Horn), and I was shocked when I first read about his addiction story in the Harvard University Gazette. Nice to see his turnaround. Time to make New Year’s resolutions, methinks. Like resolving to actually make resolutions on time, instead of procrastinating…

Baidu (China’s biggest search engine) has released its list of top 10 searches in various categories in 2004 (the link’s all in Chinese, so don’t bother if you don’t have the Chinese character add-on installed at home - I don’t, so I had to look it up at work). The top 10 “why” searches are quite interesting:

The new work year has begun - can hardly believe it’s 2005 already. Anyway, about work, ever been so committed to a project you would do it even after you weren’t working for the company? Here’s a prime example of skunkworks…

Sandra Bullock gives $1 million to tsunami relief. Nice.

I love hero-dog stories. Like this dog that saved a boy from the tsunami. While water lapped at Sangeeta [the mother]’s heels as she rushed up a hill, the scruffy dog named Selvakumar ducked into the hut after Dinakaran [the 7-year-old boy].

This is disgusting: people taking advantage of the tsunami for criminality - sexual abuse of the afflicted in Sri Lanka, looting of the houses of those known to be missing in Sweden. Special circles of hell should be reserved for the lowlifes who perpetrate these crimes.

Happy (sombre) new year to one and all. For a brief interlude from the news, here’s Pac-Mondrian.

This entry was time-stamped 31 Dec 2004 to remain at the top of the page until the end of 2004. I have kept the time stamp in order to preserve the permalink URL for anyone linking directly to the post. However, the real time of the last update was at: Sunday, 2 Jan 2005, 2.05am.

Even escapism - i.e. clicking on the “Next Blog” bar and seeing what pops up - brings up sadness these days. Found a blog dedicated to looking for a missing Thai national (Premnet Senthong), and EVERY blog that came up talked about the tsunamis. Very sad.

This is terrible. Landmines have been washed out of known minefields in Sri Lanka as a consequence of the tsunami. As if there weren’t enough to worry about. I was stunned at 44,000 yesterday. Now it’s three times that amount. Complete devastation.

Everytime I look at the news - and, rightfully, it’s all that’s in the news - the death toll keeps rising. 44,000 was the last figure I saw. And the poor sanitation and lack of access to medicines will probably keep that count rising further. Between this terrible earthquake and the hurricanes in the Caribbean, it’s been an awful year to live in the tropics.

How to turn Vladimir into Ketel One, via a Brita filter. Makes sense to me - now to get someone to test if it works.

If you need a 2005 calendar, but are cheap, J-Walk advises that you can use any of the calendars for 1994, 1983, 1977, 1966, 1955, 1949, 1938, 1927, 1921, and 1910… alternatively, you could cancel out the days of the week on your 2003 calendar and rewrite them in the correct order.

Ah, this explains some of the traffic I’ve been getting. A link from the Cult of Mac Blog. Thanks to people who’ve pointed out that the new 4th generation iPods have changed their font from Chicago to Myriad… the prospect gets more interesting…