The Early Years (2002-2005)

Merry Christmas! Ding fries are done!

This article from an old issue of the Gazette has been making the rounds: it’s on Mayor Antanas Mockus of Bogota and how he turned the city around, partly with the help of mimes. Yup, mimes:

Hey, they’ve discovered a new monkey! The Arunachal macaque. Always cool when a large new species is discovered. (From waterbones.)

People will sign anything. Heck - do you even know what you’re agreeing to when you click “Agree” while installing software?

Happy Festivus! Time for the Airing of the Grievances and the Feats of Strength. You’re all disappointments to me! Tangential links: Fooey to the World - Festivus is Come (from the New York Times)

I put a belated review of School of Rock up on my arts blog. For those about to rock - we salute you.

Here’s a map of America indicating whether people say “pop”, “soda”, or “Coke” to reference a soft drink. (In Singapore, we say “soft drink”. Or at least I do.) I knew “soda” was an East Coast / Left Coast thing, and that “Coke” was a southern thing (its Atlanta origins presumably contributes to some of that), but there’re pockets of “soda”-sayers in St Louis and Wisconsin, which intrigues me.

Why do I keep hearing “Wonderful Christmas Time” (the one that goes “Simply Having a Wonderful Christmas Time”) in every shopping centre? Why did Hilary Duff remake what is possibly the worst Paul McCartney song? WHY?

I admit to being enough of a geek to have played with gamebooks as a cub, so stumbling upon Demian’s Gamebook Web Page (thanks, Balderdash) took me back. I played Fighting Fantasy (Spaceship Traveller was the first I owned), all of Grail Quest, Sagas of the Demonspawn, both Horror Classics, and a smattering of Lone Wolf. Such is a geek’s education in an all-boys school.

Since I’m talking about iPods even though I don’t own one, I should note that although the U2 iPods have become instantly passe (kind of like trucker hats), you can still get one of these new Apple Signature iPods. Heh.

Via caustic.soda, the funniest book title I’ve heard all year: How to Good-Bye Depression: If You Constrict Anus 100 Times Everyday. Malarkey? or Effective Way? I guess there are positive benefits to being anal-retentive.

Apparently you can hack your iPod and change the font and graphics. At least, that’s if I’m reading this Engadget article right - the iPodWizard screenshots seem to imply that it lets you change the fonts. Hmm… time to revisit why I don’t own an iPod? Although seems annoying that hacking the iPod would void its warranty.

Obey the Dear Leader! Actually, that’s the third fake Kim Jong-Il blog I’ve seen. Why do the faux despots flock to Kim and ignore Saparmurad Niyazov? I mean, Niyazov erects statues of himself that rotate to face the sun and renames the months of the year after himself and his mother. What more does a Turkmen leader need to do to get some attention?

I wrote about Grace Chow and her blog a few weeks back, and the Straits Times had a nice long feature (registration required) on her today - you can see that the number of comments on her blog skyrocketed.

I like it when dogs are included in cultural rituals - like when they get Christmas presents (yes, I’ve bought stuff for the dogs already), or when they have bar(k) mitzvahs.

Testing something out - I figured I wrote all these papers in college that would never see the light of day, so why not put them up on this blog and spark off some ideas? So I’ve started a papers page where I’ll put up some of my previous writing, starting with a paper on Ulysses.

I know Keane are a teenybopper Coldplay, but I can’t get these lyrics out of my head: But I can’t stop now I’ve got troubles of my own Because I’m short on time

A real life murder mystery. Where’s Hercule Poirot when you need him?

So, Homer Simpson uses tabbed browsing. Cool.

How important is universality as a constituent of a work’s greatness? I was thinking about this in the context of Russian Ark. I like the film, but you need at least some passing familiarity with Russian history to begin to even try to grapple with its subject matter. The film uses a fair bit of irony, with the irony dependent on knowing events in Russian history subsequent to the times in which the film is set (that whole Great Nicholas Hall scene is a last hurrah of pre-Soviet opulence, for instance). Is it fair to expect this baseline of knowledge? Hmm.