The Early Years (2002-2005)

Hey, London now has a gallery dedicated to political cartoons. Presumably it has a British bent, and I’m glad to hear that Bell is among the names featured. Also: one of the things that distinguishes a truly great city, I think, is the level of specificity of interests that it can cater for. A gallery just for political cartoons. The stores that sell nothing but buttons and zippers in the Garment District of New York.

Buildings that look like things, including Singapore’s very own Esplanade, which some says resembles the spiky durian. I quite like the gherkin myself…

The Accidental Video Game Porn Archive. Courtesy of Shaolin Spot, a kung fu blog.

Continuing my quest to put up my life online, here’s photos from my trip to Iceland back in 2000. Icelandair had nice deals for Boston-London flights, and it was a nice layover. Iceland is like bizarro world - it looks like the moon, and it’s dotted with active volcanoes and geysers (“geyser” is one of the few words that I can think of that English borrows from Icelandic - “saga” is the only other one that comes to mind). But nary a tree - the soil’s too volcanic. On the tour, they showed us the first few trees ever grown in Iceland, and it was quite funny how trees were considered a sight to behold.

Congratulations to Santiago Calatrava for winning the 2005 American Institute of Architects Gold Medal. A Daily Dose of Architecture has further comments. Me, I can’t wait to see his WTC Transportation Hub.

Randomly passing the time. Why am I not surprised by this result? You are a Hippie. Wow. What kind of Sixties Person are you? brought to you by Quizilla

There’s been some buzz in the Singaporean blogosubsphere about the idea of holding a Bloggercon in Singapore… I personally think it’s a great idea. There’s so much diversity in the blogging community here, which belies the standard cliches of Singaporeans being boring, and it’ll be great to see the whole range of them.

Torrez has a list of eponymous songs. Embarrassingly, all I could think of to add to the list was the Monkees’ “(Theme From) the Monkees”.

“Staplers of the stars”. $200 for a stapler is expensive, but heck, stationery in America, as I recall, was really expensive. Used to hike up to Staples in Alewife (before it opened in the Square) to pick up binders - I love Bob Slate’s but the cost could be prohibitive. Heck, here’s a regular stapler and it’s $31. Office Space cameos notwithstanding.

Hate spam and want to do something more than just install spam filters? As noted in Kottke, Lycos now has a screensaver that launches what’s in effect a denial of service attack on spammers.

My review of Before Sunset is up on my arts review blog.

A kind of shocking story - this girl allegedly had her mother murdered. Her blogging is incidental to the mother-daughter trauma that precipitated the case, except that she actually blogged about the murder. Freaky.

Just checked out brand-new doggie blog Modern Pooch. Cute. Although this pic of a Mini Schnauzer inside a shoebox is just weird.

Here’s a rendition from the marvelous Mr Picassohead tool. (Picassohead gallery) From Things Above, which has lots of interesting art-related links.

Hey, I never knew About.com had a page specifically dedicated to urban legends. Like proving that the “home computer of the future” picture supposedly taken in 1954 is a fake, and that the whole “Bush states have lower IQs than Kerry states” thing is a hoax too.

A slight little “this day in history” note in The Straits Times pointed out that Singapore’s second Chief Minister Lim Yew Hock passed away on this date in 1984 “at his home in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia”. That intrigued me - why was our former Chief Minister living in Saudi Arabia? There’s not much on the web on Singapore’s history, though, but the first para of this column seems to indicate the basis of the story: Lim Yew Hock had converted to Islam, and went on to Saudi Arabia to become Assistant Secretary-General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.

My new coinage: faux irony. Or “fauxrony” if you must. For situations where people claim to like something in an ironic manner except that they really do like it genuinely.

Am I the only one who thinks it strange that pharmaceutical firms make most of their money off just a handful of so-called blockbuster drugs? I used to think they had a whole array of drugs and the profits were spread more evenly among them. Funny how billions can ride on something like Vioxx. Rangel MD has a doctor’s perspective on the Vioxx scandal:

I’m fascinated by the insidious process of word adoption - while people bemoan awful coined neologisms, some phrases just slip insidiously into the universal English language. Hence “run-up” and “gone missing” are now part and parcel of American English, and I presume some Americans would be shocked to even realise this wasn’t the case 20 years ago. Among other British English words I’ve spotted making the trans-Atlantic leap: “gobsmacked”. On the other hand, I guess “fortnight” doesn’t look to be crossing over anytime soon, more’s the pity.

Origami theory - you can make everything with just one cut? Best. Math. Ever.