The Early Years (2002-2005)

The night before I had a dream that I was walking down a street and Paperboy’s “Ditty” was playing in the background and people were dancing along. Mmm. Very MTV-esque.

Astute readers of this blog (are there any other kind?) will note that it has adopted some new Blogger features, most noticeably the new Blogger comments system rather than blogkomm. Beyond my initial excitement, here’s my comments on the changes:

The atrocities in Abu Ghraib are shocking beyond belief. A Lord of the Flies-like atmosphere seems to have pervaded the jail, although whether this was caused by systemic failure (and if so, what aspect - the use of contractors? the breakdown of command?) remains an issue in flux.

Oooh, Blogger has tons of new tricks - comments, post page archiving, and so on. Will take this chance to overhaul the site. :) Meanwhile, on the life-in-Singapore front, I had the pleasure of chancing upon a vintage car rally over the weekend, as well as the HiFly carnival (whatever that is!). Photos will be up shortly.

Cheap thrill moments: I had one of my flying anecdotes mentioned in Salon.com’s Ask the Pilot - I didn’t express it very well, but it’s the story of the Brit pilot and French flight attendant. (Incidentally, I always think Ask the Pilot is supposed to be in the Life section, not Technology and Business.)

Keep hearing Maroon 5’s “This Love” on the radio these days. Does anyone else think the song sounds like White Town’s “Your Woman”? Songs buskers sing alert: two guys, who should give away singing duties ASAP, doing “I Don’t Want to Talk About It” at the Clarke Quay underpass.

Supreme Court Justice David Souter (a Lowell House man… his face popped up in my copy of the house facebook every year) was attacked on a jog today. Which led me to learn one interesting thing: they let Supreme Court Justices jog alone??

That weird spammers technique of creating a bunch of fake names to fool the Bayesian filters leads to some strange name combinations in my inbox… today I got an e-mail from the funniest name I’ve seen yet, “Comeliness A. Tampon”. Heh. Amazing how the human mind immediately recognises that no one in their right mind would ever say “Hi, I’m Comely Tampon”, but it takes computers forever to understand that. Here’s a screen cap of my inbox…

The last road movie I watched at a film festival was Y Tu Mama Tambien, a joyous celebration of life, vigour, and sexual vitality amidst the spectre of death. This could be the anti-Mama, with the lead couple, David and Katia driving through Joshua Tree National Park, a landscape where life has been baked out. David and Katia are embarking on a trip ostensibly to look for scouting locations, but ultimately they’re cruising down a lost highway, plunging further downward into the loss of language and ultimately the loss of sanity1.

And I guess I didn’t know that I was only one of 1000 people invited to have a Gmail account, otherwise I too could have tried to make some money off it too. Heh. I wish Gmail would let me rename my account though…

Wow… I’m quoted in the introduction to The Friendly Jane Austen. How flattering! And just below Sir Walter Scott too. Ah, I write a few facetious lines to an Austen mailing list when I’m 18, and they wend their way nicely into publication a few years later.

As noted previously, I signed up for Gmail, but its vaunted spam filtering capabilities seem really bad at the moment. I’m getting loads of offers for prescription drugs that I don’t need *ahem*. On the plus side, unlike Yahoo!, when you hit “report as spam” on Gmail it shunts off the mails quickly. Yahoo seems to take forever to do that. Or for that matter, just to load an e-mail - Gmail, like Google, seems much faster.

Blender magazine this month has a list of the 50 worst songs ever… the site only has #50-41, but I’m hard pressed to believe that “My Heart Will Go On” is only at #50. I suspect vote-rigging to entice people to buy the magazine. Apparently “We Built This City” is at #1… I put that in my list of “too cheesy/kitschy to be a truly awful song” category, like Charlene’s “I’ve Never Been To Me”.

Was feeling bored on Saturday, so I went to catch Young Adam at the Singapore Film Festival. I briefly scanned the synopsis before getting the ticket, and was completely unprepared for Ewan McGregor, Tilda Swinton, and Emily Mortimer1 appearing onscreen. The tone of Scottish desolation, with a blanket of fog-grey that seemed to rest upon the movie, seemed an appropriate reflection of 1950s Glasgow, and of my mood - after all, I was watching a movie alone on a Saturday night. There was a strong suggestion of an utter lack of options in that life, what with the claustrophobia of the boat and the desperation and despair in the sex scenes between Joe and Ella (McGregor and Swinton)2. The movie meanders near the end though - the tortured Joe-Ella affair and its parallel with the Joe-Cathy relationship is spoilt, one thinks, by the sexual omnivorousness of Joe, who can’t seem to bump into a married woman without taking his pants off. But then I suppose one could argue that the cold sexual interactions just illustrate Joe’s general callousness. There’s an unfeeling, unforgiving, hard quality to the landscape, and it seems to be breathed into the fibre of Joe’s being. It seems as though the director (David Mackenize) wants us to feel that this alienation is part of the human condition. At the end of the movie, I’m still not completely convinced that this is true, instead of the alienation just being part of Joe’s character, but the film’s stark, spare style did leave an imprint.

PhotoMann has a collection of photos of Japanese vending machines, including the infamous ones that dispense “used schoolgirl panties”. I suppose that’s why the foreignness of Lost in Translation worked here in Singapore - Japanese society seems really different from almost every other….

I’ve decided to move my baseball-related thoughts to a separate Singapore Sox Fan blog, so the main dsng.net blog sorts out the baseball meanderings and focuses on the other miscellany that flounders in my mind.

I found this story on how the link between obesity and health is more tenuous than we’re led to believe quite convincing. I like the logic of Paul Campos’ central argument: making a large-sized person thin does not necessarily give him or her the health profile of someone who was more naturally thin in the first place. I guess I’ll check out The Obesity Myth once it comes out, to see whether his evidence supports his conclusions.

Wow. This is so sad: ESPN.com - Ex-NFL player Tillman killed in Afghanistan. A somber reminder that the war in Afghanistan still rages on, even though all the attention’s on Iraq.

Since a blog exists in part to let me get things off my chest, I shall start a series on jargon and other bits of English (mis)usage that I detest. It’s purely aesthetic: I’m not saying these things I dislike are ungrammatical, merely that I find them deeply unappealing.

Spent last Saturday wandering around Fort Canning Park, site of many a youthful football game where the ball got kicked into the cemetery. It’s been spruced up quite a bit since then, which makes for nicer paths although it’s lost a bit of its ramshackle charm. I remember the old fort bits which us boys used to climb up: covered in moss, slippery as hell, and an adventure. My old primary school is now the National Archives building, and I discovered a path up from there to the park… here’s a pic: