The Early Years (2002-2005)

“That New York figured out the twenty-first century’s game back in the nineteenth doesn’t explain why people continue to gravitate to its dense stress long after physical proximity theoretically has become irrelevant to doing business, and the reason, of course, is that physical proximity is not irrelevant to doing business: it matters.” - Paul Goldberger, in The New Yorker

One thing I loved about my job as a travel writer was just the daily random walking around cities. You walk inordinate amounts as a travel writer, and that’s the way it should be: I think there’s very little that gives you more of a sense of a city than facing it head on. I loved just chancing upon things as I walked around New York and London… strolling around the City of London with the street names that harked back hundreds of years, or walking from the Bronx Zoo to Arthur Avenue. (In Singapore, unfortunately, there’s a kind of sameness once you get out of the city centre that makes these long walks not as exciting.) Still, it takes a kind of bravado to choose to walk around L.A., the city where cars are a religion. Which is why I thought Neil Hopper’s Walking in LA site is pretty cool.

Terrible New York Times headline: “Bush Returns to Florida, Storm Rent but Vote Rich” (Link) The headline took me a double take to get, and that’s one take too many. Hyphens would’ve helped (“storm-rent”, maybe “vote-rich” even). Right now there are two words that can be both noun and verb (“storm” and “vote”), and, worse, there’s “rent”, a word that can be both noun and verb - but that the NYT has chosen to use in the less common adjectival form. As it’s constructed, I almost read it as Bush telling Florida to “storm rent, vote rich” - and saying that Bush is asking people to wage war on rents and vote for the rich is a completely different meaning from what the article intends, to say the least.

A thought on Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety (my current reading) that struck me. Writing in Fast Company, Charles Fishman once made the point that employment has grown in some service businesses that have been automated:

Cherry Potter (what a name to have) thinks it’s the latter: Why do we still fall for Mr Darcy?

Drink up, baby, stay up all night. With the things you could do, You won’t but you might. The potential you’ll be, That you’ll never see, The promises you’ll only make.

If you think these ringtones work, I’ve got a few rare religious artifacts I’d like to sell you.

I really hate the hooey that makes up urban legends. Something about people’s credulity when it comes to these overly pat stories really aggravates me. I especially hate it when a supposedly distinguished speaker goes up on stage, gets paid thousands of dollars, and delivers a completely false story to illustrate his or her point. If you’re that smart, why don’t you check out your anecdotes? So Snopes.com has been a godsend, and it’s nice to check in from time to time to debunk whatever makes the rounds on e-mails. (Coke doesn’t dissolve teeth, for one.) Was thinking about this because someone mentioned the “NASA spent $1.5 million to develop a pen that would work in space, while the Russians used a pencil” story. Sounded like complete bullplop to me, so I checked it up, and it was nice to have it affirmed that in real life what happened was the other way around. Both Americans and Russians were using pencils, but pencil lead could cause a host of problems in space, so an enterprising guy developed (at his own expense) a pen that would eliminate these problems:

Coconut and his friend Bogart. I like Coconut’s somewhat indignant look in this pic.

“I was sad because I had no on-board fax until I saw a man who had no mobile phone” - New Yorker cartoon I’m presently reading Alain de Botton’s Status Anxiety, about one of the fundamental paradoxes of modern capitalism and meritocracy: by making it possible (or at least trying) for anyone to succeed in a society, the corollary must be that those who don’t succeed somehow brought it upon themselves. It’s the troubling flip side of opportunity, perhaps because of the fundamental attribution error: people tend to discount the role of luck and fortune in judging success, and so create these assumptions of morality associated with success.

It’s Banned Books Week in the US, and here’s the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most frequently challenged books. I can understand people’s objections to certain themes (Madonna’s “Sex”, #19), but I can’t see what’s objectionable about Thomas Rockwell’s “How to Eat Fried Worms” (#98).

Apparently Malaysia is home to the world’s only wild cattle. I didn’t know that. But then, as the Register informs me, scientists are being paid to go there and see if there are lesbian cows in the wild.

If you’re not prudish, here’s a bunch of rude anagrams. The one for “the menstrual cycle” is unprintable here, but made me laugh.

“Let’s take a ride, run with the dogs tonight, in suburbia” - Pet Shop Boys, “Suburbia” Dynamist Blog touches on a process that looks ultimately like suburbanisation in China and Brazil. Instinctively, this Crabgrass Frontier reader dislikes suburbia, but thinks it’s inevitable in those two countries - the awful conditions of the urban areas there are a good parallel to the awful conditions of 19th-century American cities.

Old friend/editor Alan Wirzbicki writes in the New Republic Online on the futility of those “voting is cool” drives to encourage youth voting in the US. Makes a good point:

Just joined sgfilm.com, an online forum for Singaporean film buffs and filmmakers. (I just lurk, really - haven’t said a word yet.) Found this interesting piece on “why cinema is important to Singapore”, which carries the reminder that this used to be a thriving film centre back in the 1960s. Here’s the sgfilm blog.

One summer, one of my housemates worked in a lab where he conducted sleep-related experiments. He’d keep people up for ridiculous periods of time, and not allow them any way of telling what time it was (hence: no watches or timepieces, no TV, VCR clocks presumably all unset with that annoying blinking “00:00” timestamp). Freaky. I would feel so unanchored without any sense of time.

Okay, I’m slow, but I just found the blog of Biz Stone, the Blogger exec who literally wrote the book on blogging. Two links from his site: 1. Yhis blog will be deleted by tomorrow. Because I love that it opens with a Kierkegaard quote. and 2. The guys who created Am I Hot or Not? have created Vote or Not, giving away $100,000 to an American who registers on their site and votes in the Presidential election on 2 November. Man, it would be fun to have money to spend organising random lotteries for various causes.

The Guardian has a long profile of Scissor Sisters. Just thought I’d share because “Comfortably Numb” is a kickass song.

I consume way more Pepsi and Coke than is good for me. So anyway, on my way to the post office today I passed by a wizened old man who was collecting soda cans from a trash can presumably to exchange for cash. Using my very halting faculty in the Hokkien language, I indicated to him I had all these cans upstairs in my apartment and asked him to wait. Came down with 3 bags of soda cans. Boy was he happy. So I didn’t have to carry all those cans to the recycling bins (no recycling collection in my apartment, annoyingly), and this man has a good day at the office. I think that’s a fair deal.