The Early Years (2002-2005)

So, a thought: the name of the sloth - the mammal - being a native of the Americas almost certainly postdates the word ‘sloth’ meaning laziness. Which means that the poor animal was named after one of the Seven Deadly Sins. How unfair. One day you’re minding your own business and the next someone discovers you and suddenly you’re the physical embodiment of a lack of virtue. It’s not like people saw bonobo monkeys and called them “lusts”.

Fire destroys former Aardman sets. The talking polar bears, terrapins and jaguar from Creature Comforts have gone and Frank the Tortoise, who won fame as the face of a television advertising campaign is missing. Wallace and Gromit’s world has shrunk considerably after many of the wonderfully crafted sets which they inhabited were reduced to ashes while manifold manifestations of the Plasticine character Morph have vanished forever.

So, a little ramble through some stray thoughts: I’ve been reading Jonathan Franzen’s collection of essays How To Be Alone and it struck me that the essay “Imperial Bedroom”, his take on privacy written in 1998 amidst the heat of the Lewinsky scandals (how far away that seems!), still makes for relevant reading.

From a discussion I was having at lunch a few days back: here’s the news that the Nobel for Medicine was won by Barry J. Marshall and J. Robin Warren, who discovered that stomach ulcers were caused by H. pylori bacteria, not stress. Figured they would get it sooner or later, and they deserve it - must have struggled against ridiculous odds (and an odd amount of ridicule, probably) to overturn conventional wisdom.

I’m tired and my Sox have been eliminated from the playoffs. So here’s just a quick set of links: Honda’s WOW concept car, meant specially for dogs How to remove a hickie English Cut, the blog of a Savile Row tailor Get Fuzzy this week has been running a series of random dog facts

Right, so Singapore keeps being filled with all these new condominiums with names that have zero sense of place - they’re just generic sounding names such as “Palm Fronds” or “Sun Island” (I’m making these up, of course). So why not create one named the Fountainhead? I can see the ad copy now:

Dir. Miguel Arteta Jennifer Aniston, Mike White, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal The Good Girl of the title - and a bitter title it is - is Justine (Jennifer Aniston, playing against type), a 30-year-old cashier who’s stuck in a meaningless existence working at Retail Rodeo, a K-Mart/Wal-Mart type store, and living with her stoner husband Phil (John C. Reilly, giving a better sad-sack husband performance here than he did in Chicago). Director Miguel Arteta films in such a way as to pale every outdoor scene, as if to emphasise the blandness of it all, while the flourescent-lit colour scheme of Retail Rodeo shows that the indoors offers little respite.

A list of books I’ve bought from the ANA Bookstore in Far East Plaza, my source of quality cheap books, in the last week. How is it one can enter meaning only to get something to read while he’s eating fish and chips and emerge arm-laden with the next month’s supply of words?

Good Lord - flipping through people from my class in the Facebook (Class of ‘01), it’s a bit scary to see that people are starting to put up wedding pics on their profiles. Fifth year reunions coming up - interesting to see how so much has changed for some people.

So one thing I like about my new mobile phone is that its dictionary is pretty smart, and seems to reorder itself according to the frequency with which you use words - so I don’t have to keep cycling through “darwl” (what the hell is that anyway?) to get through to “Daryl”. It also remembers how you like to capitalise words, which is pretty nifty.

Here’s what I played a couple of nights ago… ‘Twas a short little set, and the early evening period meant I slipped in more than a few mellow songs. (Except that the PINE*am song takes Erik Satie’s minimal classic and turns it into a Japanese-pop noise-festival.)

Wow - they finally photographed a giant squid live in the wild! For centuries giant squids, formally called Architeuthis, have been the stuff of legends, appearing in the myths of ancient Greece or attacking a submarine in Jules Verne’s “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.” But they had never been seen in their natural habitat, only caught in fishing nets or washed ashore dead or dying.

Dir. Austin Chick Mark Ruffalo, Maya Stange, Kathleen Robertson, Petra Wright XX/XY, Austin Chick’s directorial debut, tells a familiar story: being young, reckless, feeling like and acting as though nothing has consequences - and then growing older, and learning to deal with the consequences of one’s actions. Wannabe artist Coles (Mark Ruffalo) meets Sam (Maya Stange) at a party at Sarah Lawrence, and Sam invites along punk grrl Thea (Kathleen Robertson) for a menage a trois. And so begins a classic relationship of youth, prodigal, profligate, promiscuous, and seemingly aconsequential - until the heartbreak when Coles reveals to Sam he has had a one-night stand.

An amusing sign from Amsterdam from Indrani’s Flickr collection of photos of signs. I think it means “if you spot a paedophile in a hat abducting a little girl, you should drop a large object such as a bicycle on him”.

Someone tried to send me an e-mail today and it bounced. And that just seals it: I’ve come to realise that quite a few e-mails don’t make it through my layers of spam protection (on the forwarding address, on the dsng.net server, on my own Eudora junk-mail filter). Heck, there are e-mails that I send out that don’t make it through the layers of protection I have. So - if you wrote me a while ago and suspect I didn’t receive it - I probably didn’t.

Got a last-minute request to do a DJ slot tonight at Hideout. I’ll be on from 9 till 10.30pm, anyone wants to drop by to say hi. Basic indie rock stuff - nothing fancy, just another view of the crevices of my record collection.

Not being au fait with the martial arts (my weekend watching of Kill Bill notwithstanding), I’ve never heard of Wing Chun Kung Fu in my life, and then suddenly in the space of 12 hours I hear 2 references to it - first in Alexei Sayle’s “This Stupid Smile”, a short story from his Barcelona Plates collection, then in my inbox this morning, some club was offering Wing Chun Kung Fu lessons. Isn’t it weird when random things start peppering one’s sphere of thought?

Dir. Jean-Pierre Limosin Novo tells a story that is part Memento, part 50 First Dates (although this French film, a 2002 product, predates the latter tale): the lead character, Graham (Eduardo Noriega) suffers from short term memory loss thanks to an accident. This being a French film, the memory loss leads to him being kept as a sexual plaything for his boss, Sabine (Nathalie Richard).

I just thought the way this loo sign was phrased was funny. What’s a “female handicap”? Or is that just inviting snarky answers? The equivalent male toilet sign is here.

Wow, the first weekend in a while in which I wasn’t working. So I did guy-style shopping. Which is to say, I knew what I wanted to get and went to the stores and got them. Among the items purchased: