The Middle Years (2006-2009)

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good.

I want to kill the stupid Facebook meme that claims the BBC has made a list of 100 books that it thinks you should read, since I hate misattribution with a passion, and urban legends make my blood boil. So here goes:

Twitter is a drug. I feel like everything I post now wants to be shortened into pithy 140 (why not the full 160 of SMS?) character pieces. But a welcome palliative was listening to the late John Updike’s “Playing With Dynamite” (read by Roger Angell) on the bus. Suddenly I felt like writing again - full, proper writing. Or at least seeing the world better. I looked outside the bus window and wondered about the lives upon lives stacked in the apartment blocks, true human contact playing out behind the glass facade of the Newton Road apartments.

Trying out a DSLR…

Randomly stumbled upon a recording in Amoy (Hokkien, really) that’s part of the NASA Voyager spacecraft’s golden phonograph. I love that the idea that the first thing you would ask an alien is exactly the same thing you might ask a distant relative over Chinese New Year - lin chia pa buey?

Dang if Twitter isn’t addictive. While on the plethora of buses (77, 124, 132, 145, 147) today, podcasts & twittering amply helped me while away my time…

Random things I learned today: “America the Beautiful” can be sung to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne”, and vice versa. (I suppose this is something like how the “Star-Spangled Banner” is set to the Anacreontic song.)

Read a review of Susan Sontag’s diaries in Time, which obviously is not quite the same as reading the diaries themselves. But inspired by the tone. Against Interpretation was one of the lodestars of my younger teenage self, at least in writing style. Perhaps better to write out thoughts to self in blog, Twitter-style.

Pu er is the main Chinese tea I drink - seems to be just the thing to sop up the oil in Chinese restaurant food. But I had no idea there had been a boom and bust in the pu er market.

My iPhone’s external speaker died on me a few days ago - quite annoying, as it meant I couldn’t hear the ringer or listen to podcasts while I was doing something else that didn’t allow me to use headphones. So after much fiddling around with solutions such as repeatedly plugging / unplugging headphones, I took it down to Singtel to get it fixed. Now, I had gone down the previous week and was told that there was a 90-minute wait, and was asked nicely to come back. So imagine how happy I was to be told that there were only 2 customers ahead of me in the queue…

Went to a talk on “The Financial Crisis of 2007-2009: Understanding Its Causes, Consequences—and Its Possible Cures” by Brad DeLong, whose blog I’ve followed for a while, and was duly impressed by DeLong’s broad historical reach and scope in delineating what made this recession different from many previous recessions, and on the huge magnitude of the impact of a sudden change in people’s preferences for risky assets (which DeLong estimates led to about $17 trillion of the total decline in asset values) - as opposed to the actual increase in the default discount for mortgage payments (which are relatively small).

Happy New Year one and all. I suppose with my brother’s piece in Today, it’s not actually news that my mother’s in the hospital, and has been so for the past few weeks. You will forgive me if it’s not something I particularly wish to talk about in public at this point in time (whether on this blog, on Facebook, or Twitter), but thank you to all friends who’ve offered comfort, or even unknowing distraction. And I’ll echo my brother’s comments about doing little things to help others - besides giving blood, you can help all manner of animals, or do your part for the environment. Here’s to 2009.

Had a great New Year’s Eve dinner at Pietrasanta - here are the appetisers, including a great Tuscan seafood soup (Caciucco alla Livornese). Happy New Year one and all!

Also, the news that Jeremy Piven may have gotten an overdose of mercury made me look up the FDA guidelines on mercury, including how much fish one can eat in a week. No more than 1 weekly serving of swordfish or shark, apparently. And perhaps not too much of “certain species of very large tuna”. Not that anyone should be eating too much shark or tuna anyway, what with overfishing and all.

Spotted what seemed like a Brahimny kite flying outside my office window today. Really dazzling to watch it soar.

One of the things I was discussing with my friends in New York is how surreal, albeit gratifying, it is to see college friends actually in the news - whether because they’ve written books, made films, or analysed politics. Lo and behold, what should come in my inbox this week but a twofer. Congrats to Sugi for having Love Marriage be on the Washington Post’s best fiction of 2008 list, and to Franklin for the writeup in Entertainment Weekly on the Black List.

Sometimes words that are perfectly useful seem to fall out of favour in English. Such as “fortnight” among Americans. Such is the case with “masher”, which I recalled when doing an old New York Times crossword that brought up the lovely phrase “mash note”, and which refers, apparently, to “a man who thinks himself irresistible to the female sex but whose advances are often unwelcome” - I can’t think of a good word that can be used as a synonym for that. All that comes to mind are phrases such as “would-be lothario”. Or “quixotic Don Juan”, which at least makes a double-Don literary reference.

Went over the weekend to Sylvia’s for soul food… if I only had the capacity to eat both a plate of ribs and a plate of chicken & waffles. Will have to save the chicken & waffles for another day. But Sylvia Woods herself actually came into the restaurant.

Ah, I do love to be back in New York. Now off to search for some soul food… Sylvia’s is kind of cliched, but I do like it. More later.

Various points of view. And congrats to Paul Krugman, a deserving winner of the Nobel for economics. More Taleb, from Fortune, in 2007. Jeffrey Frankel of the K-school at Harvard, in 2005, on budget deficits. “But some day soon, the bond market will catch up with reality, and will fall substantially. Rising long-term interest rates (and slowing house prices) will send millions of American households into default on their mortgages – especially those with interest-only or Adjustable Rate Mortgages…” Hussman commentary. “Four magic words will ease this crisis: ‘We are providing capital.”