The Middle Years (2006-2009)

Woman gives birth to twins, one black, one white (same dad, before anyone besmirches the mother’s good name). (Tangent: I love the word “besmirch”.) Wonder if such a dichotomous twin birth has happened in Singapore? Anyway, back on point - the two boys really are cute - and really do look like each other.

Global ecosystems ‘face collapse’ (from the Living Planet Report) The conservative Weekly Standard places a Democrat on the cover and writes a glowing report. More on invisibility, from Popular Science. Salon’s Broadsheet blog notes the furore over a Peekaboo pole-dancing kit being inadvertently put in the children’s toys and games section at Tesco. Yep = iPhoto for PDFs (via Popagandhi). Nifty.

William Saletan (who can at times be insufferable) has a good response to Rush Limbaugh’s claims that Michael J. Fox was somehow not playing fair in his campaign for stem cell research (“This is really shameless of Michael J. Fox. Either he didn’t take his medication or he’s acting, one of the two.”) The fact is - once you’ve established that he’s not acting (which by all accounts he isn’t), how could it be wrong to display the symptoms of a disease if he’s really suffering from it?

New York has a fascinating article on calorie restriction - not to be confused with anorexia - and how it could potentially double your lifespan. Certainly not my thing - it’s entirely possible that I’ve had more than 1800 calories in a day just from Pepsi/Coke - but the rigour is intriguing. Take Michael, the guy who counts 1913 calories a day - no more, no less. (Clever quip: “Cooking for him is the same elaborate exercise in dietary Sudoku it is for all CR die-hards, only more so.”) How much of the extra lifespan is spent weighing and counting calories?

If you haven’t seen the Michael J. Fox campaign ad yet, the display of his Parkinson’s symptoms is pretty shocking. Marty McFly, travelling through time, now reduced to not even having full control of his muscles.

Met up with some fellow bloggers - including old friends Kin Mun, Adrianna, and Adrian - at a dinner thing with Richard Edelman tonight (talking about concepts such as the horizontal peer to peer conversation). ‘Twas just nice to emerge out of my work burrow for some blog-related stuff, if only for an evening. And ’twas nice to catch up with Kin Mun and see his spankin’ new studio. (A koan: what is the sound of one hand clapping? I don’t know, but it has much less echo in a soundproof studio.)

So, randomly, I decided to look up the plural of conundrum today, and, as this illuminating discussion points out, “conundrum” isn’t definitively Latin in origin. I particularly like the correction of the snob who insists that ‘octopuses’ is wrong:

One of the chief aspects of The Prestige is, well, the prestige - the point in the magic show where the magician shows the audience something they’ve never seen before. And, as Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) warns, a good magician should never reveal his secrets, for without his secrets he is nothing. And yet the best part of this show - just as in Memento, the first film written by the Nolan brothers - is the revelation of all its secrets, the part where the audience figures out how everything is pieced together…

History Shots. What crisp presentation of information. An old one, but Fiona Apple is a sweetheart. Weird Al Yankovic, and what he owes to MTV, as well as why he’s not weird.

Crikey, another stingray-to-the-chest attack.

Talk about science fiction - coming up to breathe for a few minutes, I found news about the world’s first (non-fictional) cloaking device and then teleportation (between light and matter, no less)… I love how the article on the invisibility device allowed the reporter to bring out his geek-lit side, referencing H2G2:

Slate had a fascinating comparison of what different countries’ versions of “The Office” reflect about work (and general) culture. (And yes, I do love “The Office”.) What would a Singaporean version look like, I wonder?

China wants more pandas. And that involves “panda porn” apparently. Cue sleazy music, scantily clad pandas…

Just read Who Moved My Blackberry?, the book-length version of Lucy Kellaway’s “Martin Lukes” Financial Times column parodying business speak and jargon (the Martin Lukes character loves, loves the concept of ‘creovativity’, a bastard blend of creativity and innovation). I got hooked on the column in Bonn (the hotel I was in gave me the FT as the daily paper) and it was quite funny to read this tale of the absurdity of corporate life.

Always found eccentrics amusing, so I was highly intrigued when someone pointed out Timothy Dexter, eccentric and very lucky man: Because he was basically uneducated, his business sense was peculiar but extremely lucky. Somebody inspired him to send warming pans for sale to West Indies, a tropical area. His captain sold them as ladles for local molasses industry and made a good profit. Next Dexter sent wool mittens to the same place. Asian merchants bought them for export to Siberia.

October’s here again, and with it brings the promise of one of my favourite dishes, German pork knuckles… okay, I just had real German pork knuckles in Bonn in May, so it’s not like I’ve been deprived, but man, nothing like a huge chunk o’ meat.

Al Gore had a funny opening quote at the MTV Video Music Awards - “I actually was not planning on being here tonight, but then MTV explained to me that Justin Timberlake is bringing sexy back”. But I can’t get “Sexy Back” out of my head - there’s a raunch to that song that suggests Timberlake’s Prince-loving side, and that’s more fun than his Michael Jackson wannabe side…

Back in secondary school, for a “street theatre” festival, I wrote a short play that involved a guy being strangled by an extension cord as a sort of commentary on the stifling effects of technology. (Not very subtle, but hey, I was 13.) These days, technology seems determined to strangle me. Just when I was getting mad at Apple for totally screwing up my Macbook, Microsoft reliably screws up as well.

Incidentally - yes, that’s me in the Sunday Times (Singapore, not the London one) today. If you haven’t seen it - don’t worry about it.

I cannot in good conscience recommend my Macbook anymore, much as I’m in love with its features and ease of use. Apparently the “random shutdown” syndrome that I experienced has been pretty much experienced by many around the world - the worrying thing is reading some of the comments on Ubergeek it seems having the logic board replaced (as my computer is doing right now) may not prevent a recurrence of the problem. And the fact that Apple is only issuing a terse response is pretty crap.