The Early Years (2002-2005)

Exegesis of one of my favourite songs, The Band’s “The Weight”, complete with Buñuel references. Ah, enlightenment. Lyrics to “The Weight”. And yes, it is “Fanny”, not “Annie”, in the chorus.

My blog, in ASCII.

Luc Sante (author of one of my favourite books, Low Life, about the seedy history of New York) writes in the Village Voice about John Leland’s new book Hip: The History (excerpt) and the concept of hipness. Some flippin’ great lines and thoughts:

How cool is the fact that the first single off the Spongebob Squarepants movie soundtrack is a new Flaming Lips song (“SpongeBob & Patrick Confront the Psychic Wall of Energy”)? So right. Just so right.

One fun part of my former university was the annual IgNobel awards - awards given for funny scientific research. Among the winners this year was research done (by a high school student, so don’t start railing about wasting research grants) on the 5-second rule:

Looks like the California juggernaut is at it again… Google Print is clearly a direct response to Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book”, while Google SMS is helluva cool (if it’s as accurate as it claims). Would love to see Yahoo! and Amazon’s responses. And thanks to Scripting News, I learnt about Google Desktop Search, which I’m currently testing. Thus far, it’s frickin’ awesome - it finds any text within your Word, PowerPoint, and Excel files, and it digs up old web pages that you’ve visited (so none of that “where did I see that”). I don’t use Outlook or Outlook Express for e-mail, so it can’t handle that, but still, cool. I know, by now it’s like I’m a shill for the firm, but it’s just cool. I love how after a fairly moribund period, there’s now search wars and browser wars.

My bedroom window overlooks some classic Singaporean architecture: the old shophouses of the South Bridge Road area, full of clan associations and import-export businesses still conducted by pen and paper by old men in white singlets. It’s such a joy to walk by these slices of Singaporean history, and so I was really glad to learn (from soon-to-be-defunct paper Streats) that the area has now been earmarked for conservation.

Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson writes about the Long Tail effect - that the Net’s ability to offer unlimited selections (unlike traditional bookstores or record stores, which are bound by constraints of local demand and physical space) creates a “long tail” of demand that counters the standard assumptions of a hit-driven media culture. As Anderson aptly points out, “Hit-driven economics is a creation of an age without enough room to carry everything for everybody.” This seems natural - after all, it’s the same Internet that allows people to agglomerate very specialised interests that their residences may not allow them to explore - yet it still seems a long way before people understand the volume contained within the tail.

Okay, any boy growing up in Singapore in the 80s must have played Top Trumps at some point., that bunch of cards featuring cars, animals, drag racers, whatever, and their stats. (Apparently they’re now selling at Borders for $13 each.) Whiled away many a schoolbus ride home comparing the engine size of cars. Via Freaky Trigger, I learnt that they’re still making the cards, and there’s now a Smash Hits! deck. Must investigate.

Last night I watched the A&E Biography episode on Wally Amos, founder of Famous Amos. Show followed its usual predictable arc - man succeeds, destroys family, career hits a nadir, then revival. But as always the fact, the show dropped random nuggets of trivia that kept hooking me in, among them the fact that two of the initial investors in the cookie company were Helen Reddy and Marvin Gaye - could you get two more different singing styles? But then, Wally was the talent agent who signed Simon and Garfunkel. What a random path some lives take.

On freakiness in the Jackson family. (Do I really need to say which Jacksons?) How does a kid go through life with a name like “Jermajesty Jackson”? Not easy being in kindergarten when your first name sounds like a British punk song. And your mum being your uncle’s ex-wife probably doesn’t help matters any.

Being in London triggers a million synapses for any rock music fan, and it’s apparently no different for New Yorker critic Sasha Frere-Jones. I thought it was funny that he had the same reaction as I did years ago: walking around Soho, it’s impossible not to hear the Jam’s “‘A’ Bomb in Wardour Street” playing in one’s mind. (Of course, when I lived in London in the summer of 1999, the Admiral Duncan - a gay pub - was nail-bombed and the “Hate Bomb, Hate Bomb, Hate Bomb, Hate Bomb” line took on a chilly resonance.)

New photos of Coconut are up! That’s him chewing on a Greenie. A happy little Westie is he.

From Arts and Letters Daily (of all places), I learnt about this piece on Physicsweb about great equations (ranging from the elegant world-of-math-in-microcosm that is Euler’s equation, to the fundamental “1+1=2”) and what makes them great. A sense of wonder, Robert Crease concludes. I love how wonder is a common feeling in math and science as much as art.

I moved away from Network Solutions as my domain name registrar, primarily because GoDaddy was much cheaper. But this post on Gizmodo makes me glad I did it. Apparently they de-regged New York gossip uberblog Gawker (which can be found here - details on the deregistration here). Yeah, that’s the way to drum up business, screw over a famous (infamous?) blog.

The Guardian has a good piece on the disabled and sex in the UK: When was the last time you saw a disabled couple have sex on TV, or a disabled person portrayed in the mainstream media as anything other than “brave” or “tragic”?

From pop princess Hilary Duff, on her bad reviews: “The 50-year-old person that’s writing the review is not who is meant to see my movie,” Ms. Duff said, throwing her hands in the air. “I don’t care what they think of the movie. They’re 50. They’re not the demographic.” (Link)

I’m an elections junkie: when I was 14 I was hooked on a computer game where you were a US Presidential candidate and you had to move from city to city to try to gain the requisite number of electoral votes. Oh, and I’d memorised the number of electoral votes each state had. Which is why the Electoral Vote Predictor is on my blogroll. I’ve just discovered Prof Sam Wang’s Meta-Analysis of State Polls page, which goes electoral-vote.com one step further by doing a Bayesian (well, it looks Bayesian) analysis of voting patterns: now his analysis shows the median expected outcome to be a perfect 269-269 electoral vote tie. Ooh. Drama up ahead.

A fascinating piece on gentrification at 2blowhards.com points out that research shows that gentrification can actually cause poor people to stay. A good point made: Freeman and others, such as Duke’s Jacob Vigdor (who reached similar conclusions in a study of gentrification in Boston), note that those opposed to gentrification often presume that the poor neighborhoods are stable to begin with, with settled populations. This appears not to be the case, according to our best studies.

I’m intrigued by the idea that spam in part reflects a society’s collective deepest insecurities, the ones that people don’t dare to talk about openly. Hence the themes of sexual performance (including *ahem* enlargement) and financial relief.