The Early Years (2002-2005)

RIP John Peel.

It’s quite embarrassing when you’re caught canoodling in public. Especially if you’re a couple of married members of the US Congress. And one week to go before elections.

The Singapore Art Museum (nee St Joseph’s Institution) on Bras Basah Road in Singapore, captured by my Lomo.

An MIT graduate railing against technology? Say it ain’t so!

The annual Head of the Charles Regatta was on in Boston this weekend. Hearing about it brought back memories of all the festivities at the banks of the Charles River. I always wondered if the name of the race was an oblique reference to the beheading of Charles I.

Mummifying your pets. Now that’s retro.

Barney, singing better than he’s ever sung before. West coast purple pimps represent!

Oh it’s like an animal farm That’s the rural charm In the country - Blur, “Country House” John Lanchester has a good piece in the Guardian on false idealisations of the countryside in England. He’s a novelist, but he’s got the essential idea of urban economics right:

Two things about Blogger that annoy me: It can’t get my time zone right for posts at noon-1pm and midnight-1am: the hour for such posts is always “01”. Not really a Blogger issue, but how it works with Google I guess - Google tends to capture the main page instead of the individual posts, so people come searching for things I wrote in the past and not find it. If you’ve come to this blog that way, do note that whatever I write should be in the archive - just use the Google site search I have in the sidebar. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Via Snog Blog, here’s a little site that lets you know your day of birth. I always knew I was loving and giving. Heh.

Random US election question: now that lots of states are allowing early voting, what happens when someone votes, and then dies before Election Day? I guess his or her vote must already be counted, but isn’t that sort of strange? A vote from a dead person? On the other hand, you could argue that Election Day was always sort of arbitrary.

Here’s research near and dear to my heart. (I drink an inordinate amount of cola a day, and one of the books I read numerous times as a child was The Other Guy Blinked, aka Pepsico CEO Roger Enrico’s story of the Cola wars.) Apparently Coke has such powerful branding that seeing the brand actually affects your nervous system’s response:

Busy moving house. So it will be a slow weekend over here at dsng.net. Maybe you want to try cooking to hook up? Or take the “which file extension are you?” quiz:

You know how rock star’s concert riders always have weird demands about M&Ms (only the brown ones, no blue ones etc.)? Or the urban legend that the green M&Ms are an aphrodisiac? Why don’t they make packs of M&Ms that are just one colour?

More pictures of Coconut, world’s cutest dog. Now a feisty 6 lb 8 oz. Not quite a Size 5 yet, though, apparently.

I have very fond memories of De La Vega’s graffiti gracing New York City’s streets - all these chalk figures and quotes in Union Square and elsewhere. I was reminded of this when I watched the Dave Chappelle Show and suddenly noticed he was wearing a De La Vega T-shirt. In support of De La Vega after his arrest?

I normally confine baseball talk to my baseball blog, but it had to be said: the Boston Red Sox are in the World Series. So happy.

This was a pic on my blog for a while: the turntable of my dreams. By Ron Arad.

Kottke has an interesting point on the increasing number of ads in blogs. I guess people need to defray the costs of hosting, and I’m inclined to accept that the presence of ads doesn’t immediately disrupt the look and feel of a page. (Of course, I may be biased myself - see the tiny little ad space in the sidebar?)

Well, good to see that Cheryl Fox, Singaporean newscaster and host of a certain gameshow that I once took part in, has been cleared of cocaine use.