The Early Years (2002-2005)

An old site: Heavy metal singer Ronnie James Dio for President.

From Gawker: Freemans, tuesday night the 16th of nov. the bush twins, along with 2 massive secret service men, tried to have dinner. they were told by the maitre’d that they were full and would be for the next 4 years. upon hearing, the entire restaurant cheered and did a round of shots… (Link)

Is Wikipedia a faith-based encyclopedia? Robert McHenry, former EIC of the Encyclopædia Britannica (note: love the conjoined “ae”), thinks so.

Some think so.

Rolling Stone’s criminal list of the top 500 songs of all time. Sure, nominate “Like a Rolling Stone” as your #1 why don’t you? Great song, but there’s an all too easy reference to the mag’s own name. Plus, “Hey Jude” is not the best Beatles song. Not even close.

Major standup comedy fan here. Quick point. One of my favourite comedians is Steven Wright, so here’s some of his jokes. “Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect”

I thought I was obsessive-compulsive about cataloguing my music, but that’s fairly garden-variety obsession. Even the fact that I arrange my dollar notes in my wallet in order of serial number is fairly harmless. Now, collecting 1.4 million pennies and sorting them by year and mint - wow.

An interesting use of mapping software: finding out “million-dollar blocks” - i.e. where the authorities spend too much on incarceration instead of prevention.

She sat back, and awaited the naming of I-69. If you can’t pass by an instance of the number 69 without laughing and you’re above 21, you have too much sex on the brain.

Just discovered Majikthise, a philosophy blog, via trying to find some information on baseball of all things. I thought in particular that this post on the reduction of the idea of morality into sexual morality by commentators such as David Brooks and Tom Wolfe was really good. Snippet:

Speaking of the MRT, they’re now running a promotion: “use this [picture of EZ-link stored value card] to win this [picture of car key]”. Isn’t that weird? It’s basically saying “if you use the subway a lot, you increase your chances of not having to use the subway ever again”.

A hilarious collection of fake Spidey comics.

Snippets of a conversation by 3 teenage students on the Singapore subway train. Girl talks about her boyfriend trying to get her to play PS2: “Everytime I play that soccer game I’m so scared I kick the ball away.”

On the release of the Beatles’ first four American albums on CD. I think the Capitol albums are a travesty, but I can appreciate that they hold nostalgic value for Americans. And this sentence is especially fun for a singles collector like me:

I watched Before Sunset yesterday, and it was an exhilarating, life-affirming film. Review to come soon. But anyway: before the movie started, they screened a trailer for Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and much as I liked the first movie this one looks like it’ll be a disappointment. Going by the principle that trailers for rom-coms usually show one of the better jokes, the joke Colin Firth (as Mark Darcy) has to deliver is atrocious: Bridget calls to say naughty things, Darcy is on speakerphone, and the punchline is of course revealing the luminaries with him; but Darcy names way too many names, completely ruining the comic timing of the joke.

This is what Gene Simmons looks like without the KISS makeup. Now you know why he needed the makeup.

Sexing up Ronald McDonald is just freaky. Brr.

Apologies Accepted - the international response to Sorry Everybody.

The news of the death of Winamp has spurred me to try to use the Windows version of iTunes, or rather, to resuscitate the moribund iTunes on my computer. Ultimately, I’ve come to this conclusion: much as I like the look and feel of iTunes, ultimately I find the program quite infuriating.

Today was a public holiday here in Singapore (yesterday was Hari Raya Puasa, the end of Ramadan, and since it was a Sunday they gave us the Monday off). As per tradition, the Istana, the official residence of the President, was open. I went with some friends to look around. It’s amazing to have this huge, lush, verdant space in the middle of Orchard Road, Singapore’s shopping heart. The photo above is of the actual Istana building. We took a little tour that let us see the state rooms, as well as the gifts presented to Singapore’s leaders by various heads of state. It’s definitely worth seeing at least once - next opening is Thursday, 10 February 2005 in honour of Chinese New Year.