The Early Years (2002-2005)

Mmm, Slate has an article today on the resurgence of offal in high-end restaurants. Here’s my own paean to offal, published in FM (the Harvard Crimson magazine) in 2000… man, was I ahead of my time!

The Singapore Film Festival is on again. Unfortunately, while last year I could blog about the Festival to my heart’s content, this year I have to work. So far, I’ve only caught Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion, an extremely moving documentary on the plight of the Tibetan people. Makes one really sad. I liked that they showed the supporters of Tibet to be a wide, varied group, including many Asians, not just the stereotype of New Age hippies. Indeed, the most embarrassing moment would be the scenes of the mosh pit in the Free Tibet concert; but somehow, I’ve never heard a more affecting singing of “Losing My Religion”, if only because in the context of the film the lyrics take on both the original, metaphorical, end-of-one’s-rope sense and the literal. To see the grief in the monks and nuns, to hear their descriptions of the tortures endured, and to see their determination to remain non-violent despite it all… all very moving. Makes me wonder whether those Tibetans who ran the now-defunct Rising Moon restaurant in Harvard Square had stories to tell.

Talk about small sample sizes… you can start voting for the baseball All-Star Game now! So now Manny has one vote, at least… the game’s at Minute Maid Park. Why is the brand Minute Maid called thus? I like to think of it as “minute”, pronounced “MAI-nyute”. A diminutive domestic helper, bearing glasses of OJ.

Funniest headlines I’ve seen this year: “Rosie weds longtime girlfriend, slams Bush” “Bush satisfied with pre-9/11 probes” and in today’s USA Today: “With interns, you get what you pay for”

What does this image that’s now in the top-left hand corner of Friendster mean? Is this some sort of new logo?

Spent part of today afternoon watching news of the collapse of part of the Nicoll Highway. So sad that one foreign construction worker died. What an awful fate, forced by economic circumstances to go to a foreign country to perform manual labour, only to die in an accident. So much of Singapore these days is built on the backs of foreign workers, but they tend to be invisible until something like this occurs…

Some hopeful Yankee fan at ESPN has the Yankees leading the AL East, and indeed seems to have been watching a different set of April games from everyone else. This is ESPN’s version of April:

Last weekend I devoured The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon’s amazing book about a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. Autism and its effects on language are really fascinating - I think Haddon does a good job of capturing the systematising tendencies and the strict antipathy towards metaphor of Asperger’s. Was about to nap when I read the book, but I just barrelled through it, it was that fascinating. It won a Whitbread, and while I didn’t have time to read all the books it was up against (as book award judges themselves sometimes admit), it certainly seems a deserving winner.

Spent yesterday taking part in a pub quiz at the new Sanctuary bar at Wisma Atria. Dang, me and my friend answered the most questions, but we were pathetically let down by not winning points in any of the “bonus” rounds due to us not bringing enough rowdy friends to support our cause! Still, lots of fun, and I got to deliver a very rude innuendo-laden football commentary in the middle of Orchard Road.

Signed up with MLB.tv to watch the baseball games. The connection’s good with my cable connection, not as good with my DSL one, but hell - the ability to watch my beloved Sox destroy the Yankees, even when I’m 12 time zones ahead is amazing. That’s literally half the world away…

Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Only Living Boy in New York” keeps playing in my head. And I can’t stop thinking of that wonderful scene in Tadpole where the song comes on. And I don’t know which came first, to paraphrase High Fidelity: do I listen to the song because of the sense of urban desolation I feel, or do I feel that desolation because I listen to the song? Sometimes you walk around a crowded city and you realise, “hey, I’m really one in a million… and man, that feels like crap”.

William Saletan has a good piece in Slate on George W. Bush’s claim of credibility, keeping up his attack on Bush’s general fealty to internal consistency over all else. What was it Emerson said about foolish consistency and little minds?

Oh, I saw “Singapore’s first natural gas-powered bus” (I may be paraphrasing) last week! It was a 105, heading down Scotts Road. Makes me all warm and fuzzy to see environmentally-friendly developments. Now if they’d only introduce recycling in my building, so that I don’t have to schlep all these cans and paper to the (quite far away) recycling station at Raffles Place MRT.

Just finished watching Standing in the Shadows of Motown, about the Funk Brothers, the musicians of Motown. A nice parallel to Only the Strong Survive, which I saw in April last year. I feel it’s so sad that the Funk Brothers never really got the acclaim they deserved… man, if I could say I played on any one of those great great Motown hits - What’s Going On?, What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? etc. etc. etc. - let alone a thousand of them, I’d be a happy man.

Can I say that the new Burger King promotion in America, Subservient Chicken, is some seriously creepy stuff? And you can get a list of the things the chicken will do here…

While in Singapore demographics is front-page news quite frequently, when you see Time or Fortune or whatever do a story on the demographic aging crisis hitting (insert group of countries here: Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the world), you can be pretty dang sure it’s a slow news week. So, my Woody Allen-inspired solution to this is to subtract one year of age from everyone nearing retirement age. That way no one reaches an age to claim their pension… hey, it’s the same as raising the retirement age, but it makes everyone feel better about themselves.

Sights of last week: Thurs, 8.45am. Coast Guard and police vehicles, and various policemen stood around the Singapore River, with a police boat moving around the river. Obviously something had happened. Someone fell in? Lord knows. People just stood at the bridge and watched, but no one could say for sure what had happened. River taxis and bumboats were halted on both sides of the bridge. Nothing in the news the next day

Also, what’s with sistani.org suddenly getting all the attention?

Following in the footsteps of extreme ironing, the words “extreme blogging” came to my mind but a Google check shows that it’s been thought of before, Man, it’s hard to come up with anything new these days… still, anyone out there have good examples of blogging in an unusual location?

At least according to a time-killing quiz: You are a GRAMMAR GOD! If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.