The Early Years (2002-2005)

High five! More Coconut photos

A geek test that doesn’t involve tech/computer knowledge. Results sound true, I guess. You are 27% geek You are a geek liaison, which means you go both ways. You can hang out with normal people or you can hang out with geeks which means you often have geeks as friends and/or have a job where you have to mediate between geeks and normal people. This is an important role and one of which you should be proud. In fact, you can make a good deal of money as a translator. Normal: Tell our geek we need him to work this weekend. You [to Geek]: We need more than that, Scotty. You’ll have to stay until you can squeeze more outta them engines! Geek [to You]: I’m givin’ her all she’s got, Captain, but we need more dilithium crystals! You [to Normal]: He wants to know if he gets overtime. Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Robot maids. I grew up seeing science fiction filled with ROBOT MAIDS. Now it’s the fourth year of the 21st century, and I still have to do my own ironing. Someone’s got some ‘splaining to do.

On how the Queen in chess abrogated power.

Whenever I write reviews of music and films and so on, they usually go into Delta Sierra Arts, my reviews blog. According to my stats, I usually get hits there from people looking on information on Kristina and Mirtha Jung - I interviewed Ted Demme when the George Jung biopic Blow just came out and reviewed the movie, so there’s quite a bit on the site abut the Jung family. I’m not sure what to make of this… In any case, I just wrote a post there, on songs about dancing in the face of adversity. And if you want to read more on film in particular, here’s a good list of film blogs.

Damn, I wanted to be Carl.

Two completely unrelated things: Firefox 1.0PR is out! Man, I can’t even imagine going back to Internet Explorer - not until IE introduces tabbed browsing, at least. The Village Voice has a review of Showtime, the new album by Dizzee Rascal, he of the brilliant Boy in Da Corner. Exciting.

Random Singaporean moment: listening to a male cab driver sing along to ‘‘I Am Woman". I suppose I’m just glad I didn’t get this guy.

Wow, suddenly I feel inundated by Shakespeare. Just read the excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt’s new book Will in the World, on how the trial of Ruy Lopez may have inspired Shakespeare to make the creative leap that was The Merchant of Venice. Greenblatt (an excellent prof, incidentally) makes an observation I’ve heard before, but never expressed so well:

Again, I thought I should comment on something that’s been in my blogroll for a while. I chanced upon Jon Haddock’s isometric screenshots a while back, thanks to a writeup in a copy of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that I happened to pick up in the Frankfurt airport. (I can’t find that article online, although I did find something on Haddock from the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Did I get the papers mixed up? As for the question of why I was reading a newspaper in German, the logical answer is - “because it was there”.)

The Penguin Cam from the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Talk about cute.

Buy tickets. This is easy. Call the movie ticket hotline. Enter 1. Then 1 again. Then 2-7-6-9, for the hell of it. Then the 4-digit code of your movie. If you don’t know the code, listen to the helpful woman read out the movie names. If you’re wondering what the hell she said, that was her attempt to pronounce the name of that foreign film you want to see. Stop being so pretentious. Select the movie. Press 1. Press 3-2-4-3. Press 9-2-7-4. Press charges. Enter your 16-digit credit card number, 4-digit expiration date (which is technically not a date, but a month), 7-digit identity card number, 6-digit postal code, date of birth, spouse’s date of birth, and the date of birth of person you’re watching the movie with, you no good cheating bastard. Made a mistake? No problem. Just start all over again!

Random Google in-jokes. Pigeon rank, indeed.

The nifty little envelope icon next to my name on this post is part of Blogger’s new “e-mail this post” service, in case you’d like to share a particular post I’ve written with anyone. Or just make fun of what I write with anyone.

Dog bites man is not a story. Dog shoots man is. Man got what he deserved, is all I can say.

This was a link on my sidebar for a while, but I thought I should just talk about it: the Front de Libération des Nains de Jardins believes that garden gnomes are slaves, and “liberates” them. Apparently they’ve “freed” 6000 gnomes since 1996. So for those of you who believe the idea of sending the gnome around the world in Amelie was original… hate to disappoint you. But gnome-napping does seem to have been popularised - here’s an April case from Duluth, Minnesota.

The New York Times’ style section devotes a whole article to the decline of the thong, with the usual sociological analysis of the rise of the trend: The thong underpant became a cultural touchstone, the very symbol of the tease. It caught on at a time when lad magazines like Maxim and FHM, with their photographs of panty-clad but never entirely nude women, took over from the old-man’s magazine, Playboy, with its gauzy, fully naked pinups; when adolescent love was celebrated with the soul-free hookup, a form of physical connection without the burden of intimacy. Ms. Lewinsky flashed her thong to begin an affair that didn’t feature real sex, at least by the definition of one of the parties.

Always. In memoriam September 11, 2001.

Tried out the Gender Genie - which guesses whether you’re male or female by what you enter in a text book - on some of the entries in this blog. I’d read the same article in the New York Times that had inspired the bookblog people to create the Genie (it postulated that you can guess a person’s gender solely based on his or her diction - not the subject matter, but just whether you use a lot of articles like “the” and other such criteria), but to take that article and spin it into an application is quite a feat. Anyway, my piece on weather and voting is apparently quite male-sounding, while my piece on losing the impulse to do things sounds female to the Genie. And if you enter all the text before this sentence, the Genie concludes that I am male. 2 out of 3 ain’t bad.