Wildlife spotting. Most of my wildlife spotting has not been in restaurants, unless you want to count animals that are already cleaned and gutted for cooking. Today, however, while lunching at a local restaurant, I spotted a little nose and whiskers poking out from under a refrigerator in a curtained-off cubbyhole. I first thought mouse, then rat. But then the little critter came out from his cover completely to sniff some section of the floor, and I could tell right away (from all the nature shows I've watched) that it was a shrew. Most probably an Asian musk shrew. For some reason I feel better that it wasn't a rat or a mouse, but apparently these guys are just as qualified to be labelled "vermin". I know every restaurant deals with things like this, but there seemed to be several of them there, and they were infringing on the guest area, so I don't see any need to go back to this place...

The Matrix, Retarded. Saw it with my boss, and we tried to figure it out afterwards, and decided that we might trying to make sense of something that the creator doesn't even have a clear picture of. When the audience is laughing at the movie, not with it, there's something wrong. Obviously, not without its entertaining points, but the fight scenes got boring, the psychobabble was laid on thick, and the plot was almost incomprehensible. I'm surprised as anyone that it sucked for reasons other than Keanu Reeves.

Spam, spam, spam. I've been getting more and more spam these days. One spammer in particular has been offering me a "free trial of HGH" every day -- sometimes two or three times a day -- for the past two months. He keeps varying his mailings to sneak around the filters I have set up. If they ever catch him, I hope it's in Singapore, although maybe a thorough caning is too good for him.

Bossman is reconfiguring our web site and mail server. He says that "dictionary attack" emails (which come from spammers who are trying every stinking word in the dictionary at your hostname -- like aardvark@yourhost.com, abacus@yourhost.com, abalone@yourhost.com -- in an effort to discover addresses they can send spam to) are coming in at a rate of more than one per second.

I can't believe this problem is still ongoing. In fact, it's getting worse. Spam accounts for something like 40% of all email traffic these days. Why can nothing be done? I've seen proposals for a pay system -- where it would cost you something like a nickel per email. I would be in favor.

By the way, it's a bad idea to leave your email address when you post comments; spammers seek them out and add them to their lists.

Return of the Assless Wonder. For a while there, I was actually developing a butt. I even had to buy a pair of fat pants. But, now that I've been getting into some kind of shape, it seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic concerns aside, my job pretty much requires sitting on it all day -- and even with a fairly plush chair, it's been increasingly sore. I even had to use a pillow this past weekend when we rented the car.

In other local news, just when it looked like we were about to be declared SARS-free, somebody goes and mucks it up. And, they've declared martial law across the water in Sumatra. Nothing to worry about here, though; the only time Sumatra seems to affect Singapore at all is when it catches fire.

Some random driving today landed us way out on the west coast of S'pore, where there are acres and acres of cemetaries. Apparently this is where everyone who dies here ends up. Interesting, in that the cemetaries are segregated; we drove through the Hindu and Chinese sections, and also past a number of [something]-atoriums, where they had hundreds of little lockers, presumably for burial urns containing the cremated remains. On a small, densely populated island, what else would you expect?

Marjorie drove for a little bit, out in the middle of nowhere; her first left-side-of-the-road driving experience. She did well. But after I took the wheel back, somehow we suddenly found ourselves on the north part of the island, and almost drove into the Malaysia checkpoint by mistake.

We figured we had to go out to dinner, since we had a car. We did Mexican twice already this week, but it was at the places in Holland Village, which are passable at best. So this time we hit Margaritas, which, near as we can tell, is the only place in town that "gets" Mexican food. Num.