The Early Years (2002-2005)

Ah, a clean sweep for P-Jack and the Lord of the Rings crew, with requisite big ups for their homeys in New-Z. And, despite the New York Times calling the win “extraordinary”, who would expect otherwise?

A little nugget from the Harvard Business Review: one of their 20 “Breakthrough Ideas” for 2004 is “The MFA is the New MBA” i.e. MBAs are becoming a dime a dozen, while arts grad students are valued for creativity. So there is hope for us aspiring creative-writing types even if we don’t write the Great (Insert Nationality Here) Novel?

Two thoughts on how the reckless use of cliches can give the wrong impression: Was just reading the latest edition of the Harvard Business Review, and an old thought struck me: why is it acceptable to talk about “slaughtering sacred cows” in business? Firstly, why should killing an animal have good connotations? And, more importantly, isn’t the phrase vaguely offensive to people of a faith that actually has literal sacred cows?

Wow, some of the e-mails on Andrew Sullivan’s blog by others outraged by Bush’s support for an amendment to the American Constitution are really moving…

Random things: Here’s a photo of the new family dog, to break up all the text. He’s my brother’s dog, really, but he has everyone’s attention. His name’s Rerun. Named for Linus and Lucy’s younger brother in Peanuts, not Fred Berry’s character in What’s Happening!! or the concept of repeating an old episode of a TV show.

I’m currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point. I’ve read parts of it before, but I’m still really impressed by the ideas on social epidemics. The idea’s that really sticking in my head right now is that of Hartshorne and May’s 1920s studies on cheating, where they concluded that honesty as a trait isn’t “fundamental” in the way we tend to believe, but is often dependent on context: if someone is willing to cheat on a word completion test, it doesn’t mean she’s going to cheat on a different kind of test. Fascinating. So how much of personality can we directly infer from one person if we only know them in a specific context? I don’t know, but it sure adds to my skepticism about how much outdoor activities can really help teach you about honesty, or to how much learning to be a risk-taker in the physical realm can help you in the business realm. If I trust someone in a trust fall, does that mean they’re inherently trustworthy in other contexts?

A couple of English usage questions, inspired by a copy of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation” (written by Lynne Truss) that I saw - okay, read through - at Borders the other day:

On the fun side, look what happens if you type “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” into Google.

Man, look what cropped up in my e-mail Inbox today. Subject: Look whose sailing on the Salon cruise From: Salon Premium Reply-To: phurley@salon.com Sigh. You’d think a high-quality publication like Salon would know the difference between “who’s” and “whose”.

Also, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my Mum, Andrea, and all other assorted Jan 13 babies.

Wow. No posts since October? No wonder no one’s visiting the blog! My thanks to other bloggers who caught me on TV and mentioned me, I’ve just auto-Googled (or whatever you call it when one googles oneself) and noticed my name. It’s amazing the detritus of your past that washes up on the Web. I wrote a long parody of the Wife of Bath once, and it’s up.

Ban Comic Sans. It’s too cute a font to be released to the masses.

A cooler head prevails: so what’s the starting rotation for the ALCS? I actually like: Game 1: Wakefield Game 2: this is the one I can’t decide - Kim???? Kim as a starter seems to be a popular option, judging by the feedback I’ve seen on the Sox blogs, but in Yankee Stadium? Arroyo? because it would be surprising for the Yankees, and a pitcher they’ve never seen would be a good thing? (Vaughn Eshelman!) Some sort of Burkett/Suppan/Kim/Arroyo committee?

Argh, it’s 11.30am in the morning and I’m at my desk and all I want to do is run out onto the street and shout! Takes me back to 1999 all over again - I wish I were back in Boston to join in the celebrations! Derek Lowe, none out, tying run on 2nd, winning run on 1st - shows he’s still got closer in his blood… runners on 2nd and 3rd, 1 out and he goes for the strikeouts instead of the force? Amazing, especially for a groundball pitcher…

Been watching the one and only season of My So-Called Life on DVD. It’s so amazing - each of the characters is so fleshed out, from Angela Chase to her parents to Rickie and Rayanne… definitely among my list of best-ever one-season shows. (What else would there be? Hmm… Profit?)

The parallel to the left side listing of movies I’ve watched in the theatre this year is this listing of movies I’ve watched this year on DVD, video, and other media:

Salon has a funny summary of the MTV Video Music Awards, including some of Chris Rock’s great, great lines. “Good Charlotte? More like a mediocre Green Day.” - man, the more I see Rock’s act, the more I see just how sharp he is. And his taste is impeccable. Unlike whoever voted for Linkin Park over the White Stripes. How does one deal with people who think Linkin Park is real rock music? And how good is Johnny Cash’s video for “Hurt”?

Urban legends really bother me. Or rather, people who have the credulity to accept urban legends without looking them up really bother me. Snopes.com does a very good job of thoroughly investigating these stories. Especially “inspirational” stories that claim to be true. I received a magazine today that repeated the (untrue) story of the Seattle Special Olympics and how one boy supposedly fell down and the rest stopped, linked arms, and walked to the finish line together. (The real story, apparently, is that there was a track and field event in Spokane in 1976, and one competitor fell down, and one or two people went back to help him.) A mawkish story, and, as some have pointed out, a story that’s actually quite insulting and demeaning to the Special Olympics participants. Yeah, I’m a skeptic by nature…

David Halberstam (whose The Best and the Brightest I’m now reading) has a nice piece on the Red Sox Nation in the Boston Globe today. I think back on how I became a Red Sox convert - a citizen not by birth (having been born half a world away, and in a country without any baseball) but by naturalisation. I suppose “convert” isn’t the right word, given that not knowing any baseball in Singapore I was unlikely to start following any team (having said that, I do remember seeing the Skydome when I was in Toronto in 1993… but that hardly counts). I became a Sox convert through osmosis: I think it was the constant feed of Sox news from boston.com (then my home page) and from TV, as I whiled away my Sunday afternoons in college doing work and watching the Sox on Fox 25. And then came the 1999 ALDS - my roommate had taken the term off, I had the room all to myself, and so to add some semblance of noise I left the TV on constantly - and then I saw Game 5, Pedro coming on in relief, the Troy O’Leary grand slam. It was an epiphany. It felt like Boston’s heart was pounding collectively, and I don’t think I’ve ever felt the collective will of a city for a sport outside of football, or “soccer” as some people seem to like to call it (mmm - watching World Cup 1998 in England!), and I was hooked… a late convert, then, but with the usual fervour of the convert…

So why is it Friendster arranges profiles on pages so that early adopters get shafted by getting put near the back? Is there no justice? He said in a melodramatic tone of voice. And I recognise it’s super-geeky to be sneakily proud of having a low Friendster and ICQ number, but yeah. Interestingly, it’s quite clear that the pattern of Friendster adoption leans northeast/New York initially - so if you look at my profile (search for Daryl Sng) you’ll notice that the newer users tend to be my Singaporean friends, and the older ones my American friends…