The Middle Years (2006-2009)

Ah - I’ve been told that I’m one of the panelists helping to select finalists for the 2006 Bloggies, supposedly the Oscars of the blog world. So, yes, I feel like part of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association or something. (Well, yes, the right parallel to the Oscars would be the Academy, except well, I just like saying “the Hollywood Foreign Press Assocation”.)

Everyone Falls in Love Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometime Every Little Bit Hurts Everybody Hurts Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime Everything Counts Everyone Who Pretended to Like Me is Gone Everybody’s Gotta Live Everybody Plays the Fool Everybody Needs Somebody to Love Every Woman Needs Love Everybody Wants to Rule the World Every Rose Has Its Thorn Everybody Loves the Sunshine Every Little Thing She Does is Magic

This is one of the best of Slate’s corrections, at least to a word geek: Seth Mnookin used “acronym” when it should’ve been “abbreviation” in his article on the James Frey scandal.

Given the torrential rainy season lately, I’ve been tempted to look for a 300 x 50 x 50 boat (all dimensions in cubits, natch) and pairs of animals. But absent an ark, one takes comfort, paradoxically enough, in the charms of the music of anguish. So, my current rainy day playlist. It’s set, if one can imagine a fantasy scene, to me sitting in a bay window looking out at the water hit the pane:

Mohd al-Fayed writes to the Guardian, defends the memory of Dodi, and employs phrase “odious creep who has become a disease on the face of the Guardian.” A veritable parade of invective. Affirmations Google Should Consider Putting on Its Search Button Other Than “I’m Feeling Lucky.” “I Am a Deserving Human Being” (via kathryn yu) Singer Pink marries her boyfriend Carey Hart. Which makes her Mrs Pink Hart. Which is a Care Bear’s name. Since I’m in a pop-culture vein, Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe have split up. That’ll teach her to forget his name at the Oscars.

I love Anonymous Lawyer’s take on Brokeback Mountain as a movie extolling the virtues of spending more time in the office: I saw a commercial for “Brokeback Mountain” on television this evening, first time I’d seen it. I think they’re doing the movie a disservice by pitching it as a gay cowboy movie. Fairly clear from the trailer that it’s a movie about the benefits of a job that consumes most of your day. I think I’ll show a clip at next summer’s orientation. “Don’t worry about how much time you’ll spend in the office,” I’ll tell them. “You might just fall in love with someone you’re working with.” Looks like a terrific story about the possibility of on-the-job romance, assuming that in the movie they’re actually good cowboys. (Link)

He looked at the immense deep black sky, nothing like that purple evening light of Singapore, filtered as it was through dust particles drifting up from Sarawak or Kalimantan or somewhere. He looked at the constellations, every few months a new set. He thought about the shifting constellations and a sunset that changed time and the clocks that needed to be moved back and forth twice a year and how nothing was fixed.

In honour of the wedding I crashed in JB on Saturday - okay, not crashed, went invited but only at the last moment - here’s a link to my review of Wedding Crashers.

I’ve just become (guest) editor of The 2nd Rule, the 5-year-old e-mail-based “urban creative guerrilla magazine”. (I admit to not being a Fight Club fan, despite the magazine’s name…) We’re about to crank out the Jan/Feb issue, so I’m now looking for submissions of prose, poetry, and also music, art, photography, or any sort of digital media. So if you have something you want to say or show, and want it to reach about 6000-7000 readers/viewers, e-mail it to me at daryl [at] dsng [dot] net or editor [at] the2ndrule [dot] com, preferably by the end of January 2006. We can’t pay, but you’ll get credit, plus a link to your website if you have one.

> I was taken by the black-and-whites taken by Meme, including this one from the “No more Chernobyl” set. The “Beware of sign” sign - hey, I know where that is! Greenbelt, Manila. Paul Graham discusses good and bad procrastination. What does blogging come under? One wonders.

Went down to the neurologist yesterday to check out a little problem of facial tic that developed post-tooth extraction. So after a series of tests he said I didn’t need an MRI (whew), and that he would just give me some drugs to calm the nerves and I should see whether that worked. So I asked “well, if that doesn’t work, what’s the normal treatment for this?” To which he happily responded “oh, it’s Botox”.

More photos of the Yann Arthus-Bertrand exhibition are up on my Flickr page, including this one of a chunk of the Antarctic ice shelf that got broken off.

Maria E. Pineres does her art through needlepoint (aka cross-stitching). Lil’ Kim! The Beeb lists “100 things we didn’t know this time last year”. Including that 1 in 18 people have a third nipple. Another short story for the new year: Borges’ Funes, the Memorious Caroline Butler writes about loving an alcoholic rock star

I caught the preview of Jim Jarmusch’s Broken Flowers a few days back, and thought what with the end of a year, it was a good movie to watch in the spirit of reflecting back. Anyway, here’s my review (taken, as always, from my reviews site). Oh, and I should point out the soundtrack is excellent.

I tend to be a bit of an obsessive with music collecting, to say the least, so there’s quite a bit of junk in my MP3 collection since I won’t delete songs. But for once, I decided to let my iTunes play on without skipping through any songs. The first 10 songs of 2006: