The Early Years (2002-2005)

Oh, besides attending the comedy workshop last Saturday, I also met Cory Doctorow of BoingBoing.net at a Singapore Writers’ Festival dinner thing. The last time I took part in the Singapore Writers’ Festival was at a poetry reading AGES ago - I read some of my poetry at the Substation. But it was fun talking to Cory, and he did have some very insightful questions - such as, “does it matter that a lot of the public spaces in Singapore such as shopping malls are privately owned?”

Myself as a South Park character. Well, with a few pimpin’ touches: South Park Studio

S.E. Hinton surfaces! For the release of the recut version of The Outsiders film. I remember reading that as a young teenager - didn’t know that Hinton herself was only 17 when the book was published. What matters in a framing a picture. Speaking of which, does anyone know where to get good framed movie posters in Singapore? Not poster reprints, but the originals. I’ve tried the store at the Esplanade, but I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. The Romenesko effect: the effect of a blog collecting news, gossip, and commentary on the cloistered world of American journalism. Technorati Tags: books, framing, journalism

Businessweek discusses Technorati’s growth expansion into the Blogfinder service, which lets you find blogs about a specific subject. Which is cool, except that unless you go in and change the blog’s configuration, it tries to guess what your blog is about based on your most frequently used Technorati tags. But if your blog is really specialised, you really wouldn’t go around tagging every post with the exact same tag right? For instance, it would seem kind of silly for me to tag every post on my Red Sox blog with “red sox” or “baseball”.

I’m reading Yann Martel’s Life of Pi right now, and at one point he notes the tendency of people to anthropomorphise animals - we think of animals totally in human terms (hey, I do it to Coconut and Rerun all the time). And I think we do it even when we buy things.

Been on a bit of a spending spree… Books: Abha Dawesar, Babyji Julie Hilden, 3 Yann Martel, The Life of Pi Anais Nin, Henry and June Alexei Sayle, Barcelona Plates

It’s pretty cool what you can find on Flickr… here’s the side of a car of the Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad in Colorado.

This is both cool and creepy: an in-car camera-computer that ensures you keep your eyes on the road when driving. Which reminds me of a song my mum taught me a long time ago:

The Village Voice’s “three young indie designers to check out now” story highlighted Rebecca Turbow’s Safe Clothes line, which I thought had an oddly interesting sterile-bordering-on-creepy look. Meanwhile, Vogue had a feature story on Alice in Wonderland, including these really interesting shots by Annie Leibovitz of various designers’ take on Alice. Of course, the model they used (Natalia Vodianova) is 21 years old, which is much less creepy than Charles Dodgson taking photos of Alice Liddell.

At the Singapore Repertory Theatre Shabana Azmi, Peter Friedman, Simon Jones One of Harold Pinter’s greatest plays (and that’s saying a lot), Betrayal tells the story of an affair in reverse, from a gathering of two former lovers Emma (Shabana Azmi) and Jerry (Peter Friedman) two years after the end of the affair, to the moment of declaration of affection. Yet Betrayal is about far more than the most obvious betrayal of adultery. It is about betrayal in many forms: the ways in which we betray lovers, friends, and ourselves, and the way life itself betrays expectations of how anything should turn out. Emma’s husband is Jerry’s best friend Robert (Simon Jones), who seems initially the poor cuckolded husband, before the play betrays our own assumptions and expectations, with revelations of casual violence (“I’ve hit Emma once or twice”) and of Robert’s knowledge of his wife’s affair. It’s a love triangle of sorts, given how significant Robert and Jerry’s friendship are (Robert goes on, in a memorable bit, about why women shouldn’t join in their regular squash game).

This bit on Michael Jackson (in what I’m guessing was the Page Six section of the NY Post) is funny: Michael Jackson is undergoing a major change in his appearance as he hides away in Bahrain and tries to re-launch his career. Jackson, who is now 47, is working on a more masculine appearance and has begun a regimen of working out, wearing shorter wigs and using less make-up.

The Guardian has a good essay by Richard Dawkins of Oxford and Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago on the debate over teaching Intelligent Design in schools: The call for balance, by the way, was always tempered by the maxim, “When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly half way between. It is possible for one side simply to be wrong.”

The Washington Post looks at Amazon.com’s new “Text Stats” feature. Thanks to a sensational subsection called Fun Stats, you will know just how many words you are getting per dollar and per ounce with each book. For instance, “War & Peace” by Leo Tolstoy gives you 51,707 words per dollar, while “Obliviously On He Sails: The Bush Administration in Rhyme” by Calvin Trillin delivers only 1,106 words per dollar.

The current pair of sandals I’m using dates back to forever - so I bought a pair of Havainas flip-flops. Fun-looking huh?

Spotted this on Thundercat - they created these stickers that make the “walking man” icon of the New York crosswalks funkier. Cool beans. (Via Air Massive) Edit: ah, BoingBoing published (twice!) my submission on Thundercut, which made me realise there’s a video by Ektopia of his work. There’s also a Thundercut set on Flickr.

What a busy weekend. Spent a good part of it at Steve Kaplan’s Comedy Intensive workshop, (at S$100, a far sight cheaper than the US$275 it would’ve cost me in the States) which was filled with excellent insights into writing comedy. Now I feel inspired to join an improv troupe or in the least develop a version of the Aristocrats joke. Plus the workshop also helped confirm something I’ve said before, that Groundhog Day is one of the truly great comedy films of all time (we did a full-length analysis of the film).

One thing about DJing on Wednesday though, it meant I had to pluck out some CDs from the spankin’ new CD shelves that I had made, thereby destroying the beautifully alphabetised arrangement. Oh well.

I come from a family of avid bowlers - I even have my own ball, a random present given to me on a whim. Haven’t bowled much since I broke my hand a couple of years back (was happy to even hit 3 digits a couple of weeks back), but I still find bowling news fairly interesting, especially when it marries bowling and tech geekery:

From my gig yesterday - here are the decks at Hideout, taken with my spiffy phone-plus-flash attachment. The flash really makes a difference. Anyway, I had great fun - thanks to all who came, and happy birthday to the bloke celebrating his birthday! A setlist should be up soon, but off the top of my head, I definitely played these songs (throwing in a bit of hip-hop on the management’s behest):

Back in college, my friend Jenny and I had an ongoing debate over the Supremes’ “You Can’t Hurry Love”: is its central message fundamentally optimistic, or melancholic? And I think ultimately it depends on the listener and how comfortable one is about having things beyond your control. If you can’t hurry love and you just have to wait - should that cause one to be upset at the vagaries of fate? Or does that mean that, well, love will happen anyway, and your present lovelorn state is just a blip of unhappiness?