The Early Years (2002-2005)

Where spam comes from. I don’t buy it though - North Korea as a major source of spam, and no Florida? I suppose they’re just measuring where the servers of spam are located, not the senders.

Watched the Che Guevara youth biopic The Motorcycle Diaries as part of the First Brazilian Film Festival yesterday. (Seems like every embassy here in Singapore wants to start its own film festival - good work by the Singapore Film Society!) I’ve put up a review on Delta Sierra Arts, my arts review site. An extract is here:

(From Gizmodo) Apparently Pets Mobility, an Arizonan firm, is developing a cellphone for dogs. Cool. Funny they don’t sell the “travelling and need to talk to your pet” angle. What Gizmodo calls the “Lassie function” is quite cool too - you can use the phone to tell your dog to go fetch help.

They’re releasing the Wayans brothers comedy White Chicks on 30 Sept here in Singapore. Except they’re calling it Scary White Chicks, which is clearly an attempt to cash in on the Scary Movie name but makes no sense in the context of the movie, seeing as the “women” that Shawn and Marlon play aren’t supposed to be scary at all. I suppose adding the “Scary” to the movie title helps people know that it’s not some movie with dubious “artistic” value1.

Jim Carson writes on Why You Won’t Lose 95lb by September. You know those diet pills that they try to sell you through spam? Here’s the calculations that say why they can’t be working.

Why do we say “comparing apples to oranges”? What’s wrong with comparing apples to oranges? I do that all the time! I go up to a fruit juice stall and think that I’d like some orange juice, which implicitly means I don’t want apple. I think lots of people compare apples and oranges for very legitimate reasons.

When I was younger, a lot of my sense of pop culture and pop culture references came from Mad magazine, since there was a huge collection over at my grandparents’ place. So long before I ever watched Five Easy Pieces, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Shampoo, or basically any movie predating the 80s, I had some skewed sense of them. I was therefore very gratified to learn, in listening to the audio commentary on the Simpsons Season 4 DVD, that one of the Simpsons writers - couldn’t really tell from the voice, maybe Al Jean? - got that same Mad-influenced warped version of pop culture, since his mother wouldn’t let him actually watch those R-rated films. Good to know I’m not the only one. What, me worry?

Another one of these personality tests: the Enneagram test, more about motivations than the MBTI, which is about behaviour. Kottke mentions that there was a Malcolm Gladwell article on the MBTI in a recent New Yorker, which I must have missed - scouring my archives now.

Even Margaret Cho is blogging these days. Actually, it’s interesting when public figures blog, if only because they spend so much time revealing aspects of themselves (particularly a gifted comedian like Cho) that it’s a wonder they even want to reveal any more.

Oh, these child stars. Tracey Gold - aka Carol from “Growing Pains” - got arrested for DUI. Here’s the mugshot from the Smoking Gun.

I studied urban economics in college, and even wrote a thesis on the relation between income and people’s desire to move into cities. So I was quite happy to find Beyond Brilliance, Beyond Stupidity, which catalogues good and bad developments in urban planning. Good to have something else to read besides Otis White’s (engrossing) pieces on Civic Strategies.

If you’re in court for drinking and driving, it’s usually not a good idea to be drunk: link.

Cody Wiewandt answers some of the questions in the Jadakiss song “Why”. Hilarious.

Stumbled upon Sometimes Always, which has funny recollections of interviews with various DJs (yay, Peter Kruder!), as well as thoughts on film.

Farewell, Johnny Ramone.

Should I be reassured by the fact that I’ve taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test dozens of times and it always points to the same thing? Or should I be worried?

Law & Order gets a street named after it in New York. Well, it should, if the claims of bringing in $700 million to the NY economy are accurate. Why, every time I see L&O, I think “New York, what a lovely city! Bizarre homicides! I must return!” I kid because I love… So, if the show’s called “Law & Order”, why does the Order part come before the Law?

So, I was trying to remember one of the Yiddish words Mike Myers used to use on Saturday Night Live (it was “verklempt”), and so I typed in, naturlich, “yiddish mike myers” into Google. Besides the search results, it actually asked “Did you mean: irish mike myers”. Hey, normally the “did you mean” corrects typoes. I can’t believe it tried to change a language into an ethnicity. No, I did not mean Irish Mike Myers. And Mike Myers isn’t even Irish. His mother’s Liverpudlian if I remember right. Weird.

An entry in John & Belle Have a Blog spoke about North Korean news pronouncements, which reminded me of all those ads they used to take out in the Straits Times with the praises of Kim Il-Sung and Kim Jong-Il and their juche philosophy. The thing is, shouldn’t propagandists learn the language they’re, well, propagandising in? The KCNA (Korea Central News Agency) website is a font of unintentional hilarity. Sample:

More on rock, paper, scissors, thanks to Dean’s World: rock, paper, Saddam. “DUDE, DOUBLE YOU TEE EFF is two papers?” Hilarious.