The Middle Years (2006-2009)

I’ve ranted in the past about the stupid untrue “Space Pen” urban legend and about how people like to believe that story about the Russians seemingly using a pencil. The Space Review further elaborates on the true origins of the Space Pen:

Everything was closed on Sunday in Bonn when I took a stroll around the silent town. I can imagine Singaporeans tearing their hair out to find that Mango and Zara are ever closed. How did that happen, that Singaporeans see their own city as offering nothing to do, but at the same time feel the need to scurry around every weekend doing things?

I will be in London from Thursday through Saturday, and Bonn, Germany for the 2 weeks after that. Updates as and when I so feel inclined.

Spent part of the day cataloguing my book collection using LibraryThing. It was quite addictive, I must say. Particularly for obsessive types such as myself - ended up keying in ISBN numbers to make sure I had the right editions. It’s like the Flickr/del.icio.us of book collections, I guess, although I’m still not sure how much I take to social tagging. But the visual display of my book covers was immensely satisfying to see.

I just heard the Nina Persson cover of R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion”, and it brought me back to 1991, me as a 13 year old, a freshly minted teenager. I can’t say I grew up immediately loving indie rock music: the first album I bought, really, was Paula Abdul’s Forever Your Girl.

This piece on a 639-year performance of John Cage’s “As Slow as Possible” is fascinating. As the musicologist Heinz-Klaus Metzger was quoted as saying: “To begin a performance with the perspective of more than a half-millennium - it’s just a kind of negation of the lifestyle of today.”

This news bit about scientists getting people to sense things with their tongues is freaky: By routing signals from helmet-mounted cameras, sonar and other equipment through the tongue to the brain, they hope to give elite soldiers superhuman senses similar to owls, snakes and fish.

Stephen Colbert’s speech at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner was a biting piece of comedy - he played the Fool, in that Shakespearean sense of the word, and the uncomfortable response of those gathered (for my money, he skewered the press just as much as the White House) was a sign of hitting the mark, I thought, even if the video at the end dragged on a bit.

The Dunkin’ Donuts “Doin’ Things is What I Like To Do” commercial has been nagging at me since I caught it - it’s weirdly catchy, even though it has that bit of a workers-unite propaganda creepiness. So it was fun to read Slate’s take on it (writer Seth Stevenson is a Red Sox fan as well - and given Dunkin’s base in Massachusetts) and to learn that it was a They Might Be Giants song.

Incidentally, for those of you using Firefox, I’m in love with the Scrapbook extension. It’s sort of the polar opposite of the social bookmarking of del.icio.us - this lets you save pages to your computer, and make notes and annotations, as well as other nifty things such as capturing all the linked files from a page. Perfect - especially in a day and age where a week or a month later, you find that your nicely-bookmarked links have all expired.

Another great thinker with connections to both America and Canada passes: as Screwy informs me, J. K. Galbraith just passed away. Gosh - that was a man you thought could go on forever. I remember seeing (I think) that imposing 6’ 8" figure in Harvard Yard - still looking remarkable for a man over 80.

Jane Jacobs, great urban thinker, passed away this week in Toronto. Some of you who know me know that I’m an urban economist by training. Well, a lot of my modes of thinking about cities are influenced by Jacobs - things such as the joys of neighbourhoods, messiness, seeming inefficiencies such as small enterprises that are vital and crucial for economic growth, and more than just growth, life. Her effort to save Greenwich Village is well celebrated - the Village Voice, obviously, paid its tribute - but there’s an entire body of work that she produced, well-written and fundamentally insightful, starting from The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that, thankfully, became highly influential.

Hasbro has announced that it is revamping the original American version of Monopoly, and moving the streets out of Atlantic City: Hasbro has announced plans to update the game to a “here and now” version, raising rents and letting the public vote on streets, neighborhoods and national monuments to fill the 22 properties on the board. And Atlantic City is not among the choices.

Hawai’i re-honours the humuhumunukunukuapuaa as the state fish. I suppose the humum… humuh… rectangular triggerfish forgot to pay its state-fish-license-renewal-fee. I’ve said it before, I think, but I want a solar cellphone charger. Especially for nights in the jungle when the phone’s running out of batteries. “Hotel California”: not a song about Satanism.

The Girlfriend and I were playing songs for each other over the phone, which led to her playing me an earworm of a French ditty. And that reminded me - at the idiosyncratic Other Music, which I used to occasionally shop at, they sometimes filed French music under the heading “Decadence”, and there’s something about those alternately little-girl / breathy voices of female French singers that makes that appropriate, methinks…

Had lunch at Überburger at Millen(n)ia Walk today in the continuation of my quest to find Singapore’s best burgers. (Aside: it aggravates me no end that “millennia” is spelt wrongly in that building’s name.) And it did live up to the hype - the sirloin burger I had was appropriately juicy, with judicious use of sea salt and hints of garlic. I suppose we’re 3 years behind the New York trend of gourmet burger places, but I’m just happy for more quality burger options.

Clive Thompson writes in the NY Times Magazine about Google and China. The 100 Unsexiest Men in the World A Gnarls Barkley interview in the Grauniad (okay, the Observer). Good to see them get the publicity.

For this year’s Earth Day, I attended the launch of the “Everyday Superhero” climate change awareness programme today at the Atrium. I thought the comic-book theme was fun, but then, I’ve always grown up with comics.

Compare and contrast time - at the left, a pic from a strange National Geographic article about a huge monster rabbit in a British village. That rabbit looks ridiculous! And apparently not an April Fool’s gag. It does seem very Wallace and Gromit, non?

Gawker posted an amusing e-mail list spat over some poor soul in Park Slope, Brooklyn, who made the mistake of gendering a found hat: Date: Mon, 20 Mar 2006 12:25:27 -0500 (EST) Subject: Found: boy’s hat