The Early Years (2002-2005)

Also in Chinatown, at the junction of South Bridge Road and Cross St, stands this memorial to the Sook Ching massacre of World War II. It was near here, in 1942, that Japanese soldiers rounded Chinese residents of Singapore up to be shot. (My dad says that “Sook Ching” means “searching for Chinese” in the Hokkien dialect - not sure about that. Edit: this site says it means “purification by purging”.)

“Flipped the landscape when Nigo made A Bathing Ape I got expensive taste (oh, well) guess I better save up (cho takai)” “Harajuku Girls”, Gwen Stefani (aka “the most extravagant piece of musical Orientalism this side of The Mikado”) A Bathing Ape opens in New York. Some of my friends there will be very, very happy. Just thought it’s pretty impressive how Bathing Ape has become such a major street fashion name - even doing designs for Pepsi didn’t seem to endanger its street cred:

Words fail me, too. Among the many cruel and unexpected ironies of the melting Arctic - and fasten your seat belts, kids, there are plenty more coming! - is the fact that the Inuit people who populate the region are quite literally unable to describe their changing world. As global warming melts the polar ice, plant and animal species advance northward into areas where they have never before been seen. Elk, salmon, barn owl, robin: Many indigenous languages simply lack words for these species. (Link)

Given the amount of information in both American and British English on the Net, I wish Google would allow for searches for words spelled in one dialect to include words spelled in another - e.g. a search for “centre” would return both “centre” and “center”, and a search for “colour” would return both “color” and “colour”.

I’ve been thinking recently about something I’ve written about before: “Hey Ya!” at its heart is a really, really despondent song. Meanwhile, the lyric in my head’s from Franz Ferdinand’s “Dark of the Matinee”:

An old funny bit: Colin Fahey tries to get the absolute lowest possible score on the SATs (you can’t leave a lot of questions blank, because blank answers count for more than wrong answers to discourage random guessing). Best part for me was the conclusion:

More on humour: a Dave Eggers-Matt Dellinger conversation on the brilliant humour of Monty Python. Interesting that Hank Azaria and David Cross made the same point - that Monty Python with its numerous references to history and art and so on made it okay to be an erudite comedian. We want… a shubbery!

I know I should want an iPod, it’s the greatest design since sliced bread, etc. etc., but I really, really don’t like the Chicago typeface that it uses. Maybe an iPod Mini, with its more pleasing Espy Sans?

From HERstory, a moving excerpt on the Bhopal tragedy.

The new Duravit design centre, designed by Philippe Starck. (He’s designing toilet bowls for Duravit… cheap at $2195.) Captions for what those two guys standing in the loo are thinking? “Our career’s going down the drain…”

Slate has an article on Renzo Piano, one of my favourite architects, talking about how he’s “either the most corporate avant-garde architect in the world or the most avant-garde corporate one” - i.e. he designs buildings that get built. Here’s an article I wrote for the Harvard Crimson back in 1998 (that was the year he won the Pritzker - it astounds me that it’s been that long) on a speech by Piano.

If you’ve ever shopped on Amazon, you’ll know one of the most frustrating things is the utter lack of a customer service number on their website. Nothing worse than having some issue with your order, and having to fill out an online form describing your problem instead of talking to someone. Timothy Noah finds the number. 1-800-201-7575.

Among the trivial facts I learnt today: Bill Cosby helped fund Melvin van Peebles’ excellent Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which is perhaps my favourite film title of all time. That, and Japanese men like fake laps, apparently.

Bought a pack of cheese biscuits for the family dog at bd dun bite, a new stall in the Holland Village hawker centre that sells freshly baked dog biscuits. Kind of like a Singaporean version of Three Dog Bakery, albeit with an unfathomable name. I thought it was quite enterprising that they set up in a hawker centre instead of a presumably more expensive store.

Just re-reading an old article on the firing of Gregg Easterbrook for what he wrote in his blog… also Trent Reznor helps solve his fans’ math problems… stumbled onto the blog of a 91-year-old man who loves growing tomatoes, showing that bloggers really do cover every wavelength on the spectrum of interests… Chinese American Princess, appealingly designed, plus it informed me of ChickenBiscuit.com, and chickens clucking crack me up without fail.

Apparently you can vote for my blog as “Best Singapore Blog” in the Asia Blog 2004 awards over at Simon World. (Edit: well, you can, once a day, until 31 December.) Thanks for those who nominated me, I’m flattered. As I’ve admitted before, this blog (and its related subsidiaries) isn’t the best source of life-in-Singapore vignettes, but I’m glad someone’s reading. As Academy Award nominees always say, it’s an honour just to be nominated. Um, except I really do mean it.

The 100 oldest currently registered domain names includes such luminaries as IBM.com and Sun.com, although the oldest is for Symbolics.com. Made me reminisce: the first website I visited back in 1994 was iii.net (now sadly registered to a holding company), back in the days before Singapore had commercial Internet providers and you had to use a Technet bug to telnet to other sites. It’s from those days, I think, that I ended up cited in the Mad About You FAQ. Ah, TV obsession.

“Teenagers and young men should keep their laptops off their laps because they could damage fertility”. Dang it! If this were the case, could they not have called it a laptop? The name encourages using it on a lap!

Just realised from this MSNBC article on the “Alpha Bloggers” in the tech community - usual suspects, including Doc Searls and Dan Gillmor - that Dave Winer has been setting up the Harvard Weblog project for the last year. Where I have been? Oh well. Another possible location for a blog.

Salad bar hacking, via Boing Boing. Aka the Beijing art of stacking as much as you can into one salad bowl at Pizza Hut. Kiasu-ism is alive and well all over the world I see.