The Early Years (2002-2005)

Ack, forgot the flash attachment on my spankin’ new cameraphone… but ooh, posting via Flickr. Quite cool. Thanks to all who came!

Some findings from the American Sociological Association’s 100th annual meeting that might explain the behaviour that I tend to lump under “stupid macho bullshit”: “I found that if you made men more insecure about their masculinity, they displayed more homophobic attitudes, tended to support the Iraq war more and would be more willing to purchase an SUV over another type of vehicle,” said Robb Willer, a sociology doctoral candidate at Cornell. Willer is presenting his findings Aug. 15 at the American Sociological Association’s 100th annual meeting in Philadelphia.

Yup, I’m DJing again, this time doing a hip-hop set at Hideout, 31B Circular Road this Friday, 5 August. Jon Fong’s opening the night at 9-ish, and I’ll come on around 11pm.

An interesting trend in advertising for women’s products lately seems to be encouraging the consumers to be happy with who they are: Dove’s Campaign For Real Beauty has its models plastered all over Singapore, while Always sanitary pads in the US now has a “Be Happy With Your Period” campaign. I guess ultimately it’s still firms trying to sell things to people, but it does seem to be a step up from “make people feel bad so they feel a need to buy the product”.

Since moving has put me in a nostalgic mood, here’s something for those who grew up in Singapore and Malaysia in the 1980s to wax lyrical about:

There’s a growing food crisis in Niger (pronounced nee-ZHER, incidentally): [France] said it would triple food aid to 4.6 million euros ($5.6 million) this year for Niger, where starvation threatens the lives of tens of thousands of children and has left millions of adults hungry after drought and locusts destroyed crops.

Sundays were meant for leisure reading… Grammar.police on American Apparel’s CEO Dov Charney’s hands-on approach… and we mean hands-on. (Here are the American Apparel models, for people who just want to gawk.) New Razr phone coming up, the “Q”. I still want the Sony Ericsson K750i, the one with the autofocus camera. Nick Hornby interviews Bruce Springsteen. I tend to agree with TMFTML, footnotes aren’t really the best style for Hornby. Since we’re talkin’ about the Boss, that brings to mind “Thunder Road”, which brings to mind Thunder Road, which is a film mentioned in the nice long feature on director Jim Jarmusch in today’s New York Times Magazine. Here’s a good quote: “Throughout his life, he has courted and cultivated influences and mentors, and though many of his mentors have now died, they seem to float around his brain like wise, stubborn, pontificating ghosts. ‘I really miss Joe Strummer,’’ he said. ‘‘Even though he’s dead, I still get advice from him. He’s very good at telling you to stick to your guns. I have Nick Ray, Sam Fuller and Joe - I have some great spirits when I need guidance. I hear William Burroughs a lot, too, but I don’t really want to listen to his advice.’”

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. - Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”

Congratulations to Stephanie Klein, whose blog was featured in a very flattering article in the New York Times as one of the “top 1%” of blogs (apparently if your Technorati rank is around 2000, that’s the top 1%, or so Sifty is quoted as saying). She was generally quite pleased:

I recently had dinner with Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, the economics blog that’s tucked into my blogroll - he also writes for the Avian Flu blog. Cowen’s an economics professor at George Mason University, but was in Singapore to research his upcoming book on American regional food.

Avast ye maties! There’s an open casting call for extras for Pirates of the Caribbean II and III in LA this Saturday: Pirates: Extreme characters and hideously unattractive types, ages 18-50. Odd body shapes or very lean to extremely skinny. Missing teeth, wandering eyes and serial killer looks with real long hair & beards. Wigs & makeup are not what we’re looking for. We also need little people, very large sumo wrestler types, extremely tall or extremely short people, albinos, amputees. Any size or shape that is NOT average is best. All ethnicities. Mostly men, very few women.

Eliot Spitzer continues his run as the crusading Attorney-General of New York - this time, he sniffs payola: “Our investigation shows that, contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees,” Spitzer said.

Exchanged my expiring Citibank credit card points for a Borders voucher which I promptly flipped around on the Simpsons Season 5 DVD set. Woo hoo! I just love listening to the commentary - so much effort goes into each episode, and unless you look up episodes on SNPP sometimes it’s easy to let references and allusions slip by, not to mention in-jokes (characters that look like writers, that sort of thing).

Another great mugshot from the Smoking Gun: Man gets arrested for abusing intoxicants after he was caught with dilated pupils - and spray paint all over his face.

Some days I like to check in on old college friends’ blogs, and so I was following Baratunde Thurston’s ascent as a liberal comedian, whereupon I chanced upon a link to singer/songwriter Mieka Pauley’s site. Good to see she’s still singing, and apparently doing well… I met her way back in ‘02, when she opened for Glen Phillips (formerly of Toad the Wet Sprocket) and did this awesome version of “Angel From Montgomery”. Such a talent - she’s got the guitar chops of a folk singer, but she can belt it like a soul singer.

Paul Krassner writes about Scientology. Just that combination of words is enough to make me want to read - Krassner, premier satirist of his generation, taking on the ripe subject of Scientology. But in this case it does sound like he was being serious about what Scientology said - still makes for a funny series of events:

It is silly to put personality quizzes on one’s blog This one said I’m like 3 of my comedic idols (Jon Stewart, Woody Allen, Ricky Gervais), plus it guessed (correctly) that I loved “the Office”. Ergo, I’m breaking the first rule. I’m an egoist. And hopelessly delusional. (Via waterbones)

I don’t know why I haven’t written about it when the song’s been stuck in my head for months, but might I recommend to you the hyperliterate lyrics and the rollicking tune of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ excellent “There She Goes My Beautiful World”, from the Abattoir Blues / the Lyre of Orpheus double album?

Rebecca Traister wrote a really good piece in today’s Salon on nannies, and how nannies occupy a space of discomfort in people’s sense of class and gender identity: The stories are very different, but they both highlight an uncomfortable condition of middle- and upper-class life that we don’t like to talk about very much. It’s incredibly hard to wrap our heads around the tricky contradictions and muddled ways we view the people – usually female, with varying degrees of education, money and racial advantages – who help parents privileged enough to employ them balance the responsibilities of work, social life and child rearing. It’s a powder-keg relationship, packed with class, gender and age anxieties, doused with the lighter fluid of psychological transference and jealousy. When it explodes, as it has in these two cases, neither nannies nor mommies nor jilted girlfriends come out looking good.

Man opens fake bank. A different kind of robbery. Using Google to write poetry. The Boston Herald asks why Myspace is so popular. (Still using my Friendster account myself.) Non-errors in English, for those who wish to boldly split an infinitive. Posters of various music gigs. Check out this Interpol poster, for a concert on my birthday 2 years ago. Or this great Jon Spencer Blues Explosion / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Liars one. Technorati Tags: robbery, poetry, myspace, english, music, posters