Herbie Hancock would be proud. Okay, these dancing robots really freak me out. How cool would a pocket-sized one of these be?

Traffic. I've been doing a little reading up on Melbourne in anticipation of our trip. Long time readers of this blog will know that traffic control holds a stupid fascination with me, so I was quite interested to find that Melbourne has invented their own unique maneuver, the hook turn. Can't wait to try one. Unfortunately, we're not renting a car this trip.

Last night was the first time I ever made a cabbie pull over and let me the heck out of his cab. Not because he was driving poorly, either. It was because he was berating me. I tried ten times to tell him that I wanted to go to where Alexandra St and Pasir Panjang St meet, but he was too drunk or stupid to understand. Instead he opted to mumble insults at me for five minutes: "When you get in cab, you should know where going! You live in penthouse near there, or something? Why you waste my time?" Most of the cab drivers in this town are wonderful and entertaining, but this guy should've been reported.

It's always interesting to me what constitutes a "joke" in other cultures. My Malaysian cow orker told me a joke today, which he was told back in school. It's a bit off-color, which makes it even funnier to me, since he's really kind of straight-laced. It's sort of a joke you play on someone else, and it requires a little modification to translate into English. But, it goes something like this:

Person 1: Use the words "Bob", "Mary", "Elephant", and "fucks" to make a complete sentence, without adding any other words.
Person 2 (the victim): Hmmm... I can't seem to do it. How do you do it?
Person 1: "Bob fucks Mary."
Person 2: But what about the elephant?
Person 1: The elephant fucks you.

Eulogy. Alistair Cooke has shuffled off this mortal coil. Alistair, if you're somewhere reading this, I'm sorry I nodded off during all those documentaries of yours they played us back in elementary school. You still planted some good seeds, and you my nigga.

For your listening pleasure. Our new friend Ken lent us an amazing CD that somehow escaped our attention. Well, perhaps it's not so surprising considering this town is a musical hell-hole, but there are so many artists on this CD that we (and especially I) love that you think I would've heard of it. It's called Wig In A Box -- Songs From & Inspired By Hedwig & The Angry Inch (which we've never seen, but I'm sure we will soon). Dig this crazy track listing:

1. The Origin Of Love - Rufus Wainwright
2. Angry Inch - Sleater Kinney & Fred Schneider
3. The Long Grift - They Might Be Giants
4. Sugar Daddy - Frank Black
5. City Of Women - Robyn Hitchcock
6. Freaks - Imperial Teen
7. Wicked Little Town - The Breeders
8. Nailed - Bob Mould
9. Wig In A Box - The Polyphonic Spree
10. Milford Lake - John Cameron Mitchell & Stephen Trask
11. Ladies & Gentlemen - Stephen Colbert
12. Tear Me Down - Spoon
13. Hedwigs Lament / Exquisite Corpse - Yoko Ono & Yo La Tengo
14. Wicked Little Town - Ben Kweller W/ Ben Folds & Ben Lee
15. Midnight Radio - Cyndi Lauper & The Minus 5 [featuring Peter Buck]
16. The Origin Of Love - Jonathan Richman

The big surprise here to me is the Cyndi Lauper song. I know what you're thinking, but the girl can still belt it out! The whole album is great; there doesn't seem to be a weak track on it.

In addition to having great musical taste, Ken is also a talented artist. Check out some of his work.

Huh huh huh, customers suck. Trying to get my DVD burner working yesterday, so I contacted their online "chat"-style support. Not exactly an enlightening experience. What follows is the exact transcript (they email it to you afterwards.) My comments in brackets.

Daniel: Thank you for contacting Iomega's Online Support Services. How may I help you?
Mark: Hi... Was chatting to Vivian earlier about getting by CD-DVD burner working. He had me install your HotBurn product
Mark: It got only as far as "Writing the Lead-In area" and hung up

[Five minutes pass.]

Mark: you there?
Daniel: Yes.
Daniel: Ojne moment please.

[Ten minutes pass.]

Daniel: Which version of Iomega Hotburn software are you using?
Mark: 2.4.2
Mark: build 70
Daniel: Ok.

[Five minutes pass.]

[I write and erase several nastier versions before finally sending:]

Mark: Are you multitasking or something? I'd like some help with this.

Daniel: I apologize for the delay in my response. It was because of some system problem that I was facing.

[Ah, the dreaded "some system problem". The kind that keeps you connected to the chat servlet but also keeps you from responding. I'm sure it's not because you're playing EverQuest or anything.]

Daniel: Please let me know the complete error message you get as stated by the system.
Mark: No error message. It just hangs up when it first tries to write to the disk

[...like I said already, you prat.]

[Ten minutes pass.]

Mark: Is your system problem something I can help you with?

[Five minutes pass.]

Mark: disconnected
Daniel: disconnected

I'm going to deal with them on the phone Monday. I can't wait.

Crime free, my ass. Took the train back to the station yesterday where I had left my bike in the morning, and it was gone. Someone cut through the lock in broad daylight in the middle of a heavy pedestrian area, and in Singapore no less. I can't remember what brand it was, so I haven't reported it to the police. It was only S$35, but it was nice to have. Someone needs a caning.

Oh, and "Nice, Jim."

Tax mystery solved. I complained earlier about the Singapore tax form not having any place to fill in how much you actually owe in taxes. I called their hotline today, and found out why: you just give them the numbers, and they send a form back telling you how much you owe. Now that I think about it, it makes more sense that way.

Frustrating. Last night I spent at least an hour typing up a big long screed to post to a mailing list I'm on. When finished, I clicked "Post", and poof, it just went away. I'm usually good about backups, auto-saves, and archiving of outgoing messages so this doesn't happen. But I was typing it through a web interface this time, and now it all vanished into the mists of time.

I know I'm not the only person this has ever happened to. Why isn't there an operating-system-level feature that just records your last 10000 or so keystrokes? It could save you, regardless of your application. Something you could turn on and off, obviously, for security reasons.

My personal theory is that aliens monitor us by stealing every fiftieth email and tenth printout, which explains why some things just never make it through when you click on "send" or "print".

A little off the top, please. Inspired by the recent Foxtrot comic strips, tonight we gave ourselves virtual makeovers just for grins. It's a pretty cool program they have to do it, but a lot of hairstyle choices look unreal, and there aren't a lot of choices for dudes. Still, we may have found me a new look.

Sunday's match report from the coach. (Hey, you know I only post these things when I score! That's happening probably more than it should lately, considering I'm supposed to be playing defense. And actually, their first goal was an own goal by me that I had to redeem myself for...)

Ventz PM were caught in a mixup as our game was rained off at the last minute. We shifted fields but there was now 3 teams in 1 game! Therefore it was decided we play a half against each teams and I decided to let the other two teams play first. In the first halve/game against Poser Utd , we went down early when they broke thru to slot pass pur keeper. We took control after that and pressurised them for the equalizer. Close to the end , after much presure , Mark S cut in from the left to unleash an unstoppable shot pass the keeper.

In the 2nd half/game , over confidence and fatigue allowed our opponents to take the lead. We huffed and puffed to bring the game back and scored thru a Steven A volley from 20m at the stroke of full time!

Ah ahhhh, Mr. Heath. You'd think a one page tax form, when we have no extra income or reliefs (deductions) would be a piece of cake. But it has confounded us utterly. After big sections for listing your income and reliefs, there seems to be no place AT ALL to list how much you actually owe. The formula for computing the tax is hidden away on a separate worksheet, but what do we do with the numbers?

From what we can tell, though, we don't have a lot to complain about, amount-wise; tax rate seems VERY low here, at least comparatively.

Sure to start neighborhood fights. Been playing around with this site which lets you see which US candidate your neighbors have contributed to. You can even look people up by name. Apparently, you have to be pretty up front about contributing, because even famous people are listed (along with their addresses, which I wont post here). My comments in brackets:

Former pols:

Barbara P. Bush (Retired):
George W. Bush $2,000

Michael S. Dukakis (Professor Northeastern University):
John Kerry $2,000

Walter F Mondale (IR IR):
Bob Graham $500

Henry A. Kissinger (Chairman Kissinger Associates):
George W. Bush $1,000
George W. Bush $1,000

H. Ross Perot (President Perot Systems Corporation):
George W. Bush $2,000

Big money dudes:

George Soros (Investor SOROS FUNDS MANAGEMENT):
John Kerry $2,000
Bob Graham $2,000
Wesley Clark $2,000
Howard Dean $1,000 <-- interesting, he gets less

Donald J. Trump (President The Trump Organization):
John Kerry $2,000
George W. Bush $2,000
[That's a head-scratcher. No, I guess not. Trump just wants
to be on the winning team.]

William H. Gates (CEO Microsoft Corp.):
George W. Bush $2,000

S. ROBSON WALTON (CHAIRMAN WALMART):
George W. Bush $2,000

Big money entertainers:

Jerry Seinfeld (Entertainer Self-employed):
John Kerry $2,000
Wesley Clark $2,000

Jessica Seinfeld (his wife):
Wesley Clark $2,000

[None of the Friends cast, those rich indolent bastards.]

[None of the big shot hosts: Leno, Letterman, Oprah, Colin O'Brien, Kilby, Jon Stewart.]

Barbra Streisand (Actress/ Musician Self employed):
Howard Dean $1,000
John Kerry $1,000
John Edwards $1,000
Dick Gephardt $1,000
Al Sharpton $1,000
Bob Graham $1,000
Wesley Clark $1,000

Susan Sarandon (Actress Self employed):
Howard Dean $2,000

[Pundits: no Michael Moore, Al Franken, Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, Ollie North, Ann Coulter.]

Stephen King (Writer Self employed):
Howard Dean $2,000

Tabitha King (writer Self employed [his wife]):
Howard Dean $2,000

Robert Deniro (Filmmaker Tribeca Productions):
Howard Dean $2,000
Dick Gephardt $2,000
Wesley Clark $2,000

Ben Affleck (["]Actor["]):
Wesley Clark $2,000

Edward Norton (Actor Self-employed):
John Kerry $2,000
Dennis Kucinich $2,000

Michael Douglas (Actor and Producer Furtler files):
Howard Dean $2,000

Meg Ryan (Information Requested):
Wesley Clark $2,000

Helen Hunt (Actress Self employed):
Howard Dean $2,000

Steven Buscemi (Information Requested):
Wesley Clark $1,000

The national and city maps are very interesting too.

Quitters Inc. I was talking to Marjorie the other day about my tendency to crack my knuckles, and my neck. I said, since I'm sharing an office, that these are probably not the most endearing qualities in an office mate. She replied, "Or a spouse."

So I hereby give them up. While I'm at it, I'll throw in biting my nails.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, it's easy to quit, I've done it hundreds of times. I actually quit nail-biting before, for a good long time, by wearing a rubber band around my wrist, and snapping it whenever I caught myself mano-a-boca. But then, five years later, I started up again. I tried the rubber band trick again a few years later, and it didn't work at all; I snapped it several times daily for a good long month, but never stopped the biting.

I generally have pretty good will power, though, so this time I'm going to quit these habits just by trying really hard, and by the old public shame method -- letting others around me know I'm trying to quit. Hence this post.

Just about the most depressing thing ever. When my job sent me to an Air Force base in Germany for a month, and then a Nato base in Italy for a month, it used to boggle my mind that there were so many people in both places that had been stationed there for years but had never ventured off the base, or learned a word of the native language. A few -- just a few -- of the military guys there shared my frustration, and these were the guys I befriended, and went out exploring with when I could.

So today I when I stumbled across this blog on Blogdex, I thought, here's a guy who feels like I do. He was even better than me at befriending locals and taking the sorts of photos that I never had the guts to take, especially given that he's stationed in Iraq. And it sounded like he was truly trying to help the locals. He's a guy I would like to hang out with if I ever found myself stationed there. I went back and read half his archive, and planned to add his blog to my list of blogs I check routinely.

Then, reading further down in Blogdex, I discovered another link that explained why his blog was rated so high in Blogdex. With a sick feeling I found that he was just killed in an ambush while making a foray out of the safe zone.

Just, so senseless.

I pieced together this panorama from Tioman Island. I'm not sure if the variations in lighting from frame to frame are the camera's fault or the weather's. We holed up in the little shacks to the left of the picture.

Monthly geek-out! Bear with me. A tenth planet has been discovered. "Sedna" is actually not really a planet, but it's the biggest thing that's been discovered since Pluto.

Someday I'm going to start a website that's all about trying to give a sense of size and scale to our universe, especially our solar system, with splashy diagrams and descriptive text. (And of course I would have to call it the Total Perspective Vortex, in honor of Douglas Adams.) In the meanwhile, here's some decidedly non-splashy graphics I whipped up that'll give you a sense of how far away this new object they've discovered is:

Se---j----s--------u----------n--------p-----------------------------------@----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------!--

where
S is the sun
e is the earth
j is jupiter
s is saturn
u is uranus
n is neptune
p is pluto (on average)
@ is Sedna, at its CLOSEST
! is Sedna, at its FURTHEST

Just how far away is that?

Have you ever seen a car with 186000 miles (300000 kilometers) on it? Imagine traveling all that distance -- every side street, vacation trip, work commute, whatever -- in a single second. That's how fast light travels. A (say) radio message traveling that fast would take over ten hours to reach Sedna at its closest point, and it would be another ten hours before you got a response. At its FURTHEST point, your message would take 117 hours (almost five days!) to reach Sedna.

Picture our moon; Sedna's about half as big, best guess. And at the distance it is out there, it's not going to be reflecting a lot of sunlight. It's amazing that they could spot this thing. The article doesn't say, but I'm sure it found near it's closest point in orbit, which it makes the rounds to every 10000 years or so. So, its last visit this close was around the time that agriculture and the bow and arrow were novel concepts.

Commericals. Some of my favorite commercials here in Singapore:

1. Two guys are looking out a hotel window, wide-eyed. They gleefully run out of the room to the elevator, then down and through the lobby (slowing down to try to appear calm when passing the reception desk) and out into the street, where it is snowing. It is obviously their first time seeing snow, and they look up to feel it on their faces, and start throwing snowballs at each other. The commercial is for Emirates (the airline out of Dubai) and features their slogan, "When was the last time you did something for the first time?" Sure, it's a feel-good commercial, but it makes me feel good.

2. Travel commericals for Malaysia, New Zealand (featuring, unsurprisingly, "Don't Dream It's Over"), and lately, some island off the coast of South Korea, just because they remind me there's a lot of places left to visit.

3. A young Singaporean couple, very much in love, are consulting their auntie about the most fortuitous day to get married. The auntie is taking the dates they suggest and looking them up in her book of astrology. Or so it seems; actually, inside the astrology book she has a TV schedule. So for each date, she's actually looking up what's going to be on TV that day, and responds "Saturday the 6th, hmmmm, not auspicious", or "No, Friday the 12th, doesn't look good..." (because there is so much good on TV, you see). Nicely captures a lot about Singapore and their melding of the modern and the traditional.

Tioman. Last weekend Mom and Dad acquiesced to our need to getout of town, and agreed to our suggestion to go to Tioman Island, up north in Malaysia. The package we booked involved a bus ride over the border and three hours north to the coastal town of Mersing, where we would catch a ferry out to the island. Things started bad as I realized I forgot my Singapore work permit just before we boarded the bus. We decided to just go anyway and hope that the stamp in my passport would suffice. It did; we were able to leave without too much hassle.

The bus ride was a white-knuckle adventure, with a driver who didn't dawdle on the turns or let little things like no-passing zones prevent him from overtaking other vehicles. At a rest stop we spotted a pair of Oriental Pied Hornbills -- very cool. Our driver's hurry paid off as we managed to just catch our ferry out to the island. Actually, it was less of a ferry than a state's fair carnival ride; hot, cramped, bumpy, and poorly maintained. It didn't help that our driver smoked. Quite a change from our last visit here, where we had a two-story ferry with a snack bar over calm seas. Fortunately my mom had enough bonine for everyone.

Arrived two hours later ready to kiss the ground. Our rooms at the Salang Beach Resort were a little more -- shall we say 'rustic' -- than I was expecting. But they kept the rain off our heads. (Fortunately we only got a little rain.) The AC in my parents room was so loud it would have kept them awake, so they had to switch rooms. In their next room the AC was nice and quiet, but didn't blow cold air. Third room was the charm.

Did a little snorkeling, then had a nice fish dinner and drinks. That night we were woken from our slumber at 4 am by the guest in the next room who was VERY drunk and wouldn't stop trying to get in our room. (Note to self: Add "pepper spray" to travel packing list.) We eventually went down to the "police station" (a one room white bungalo) and managed to convince the guy there to put on shirt and follow us, but he didn't speak English well enough to even understand what was going on. When we got back our neighbor had gone inside his room (apparently our "We'll see how you like it in a Malaysian prison" threat struck a chord), and our barefoot officer seemed reluctant to pursue anything, or even come up off the sidewalk. He disappeared back into the night a minute later. We shrugged and went back in to try to sleep, once the adreneline wore off. We complained to the management the next morning. Others complained about this guy too, but they didn't kick him out. Instead it was our turn to switch rooms.

After a breakfast of banana pancakes (the traditional backpacker brekkie), we decided to do a little hiking. Now, we were at just about the northernmost resort on the island, so the only direction to hike was south. There are no real roads on Tioman (except for a short one near the middle); instead, there is only a footpath that skirts the edge of the island. This suffices because pretty much all the development on the island is within 100m of water, since the interior is mountainous. So we decided to just walk south to the next water-taxi stop south of us, or at least to "Monkey Beach", a supposedly nice place in between. Following the signs led us up the hills into the jungle, but we only made it a short way before deciding it was just too steep and too muddy. We were going to go on anyway until I posed the question of just how many hours we were from any sort of decent medical care, should somebody fall. I wish I had taken a picture of my retired parents scrambling down a muddy path through the jungle on a Malaysian island with their hands down in the mud.

Plan B was more snorkeling from the beach. Though the day was cloudier and the water was more choppy, it was still pretty good. My favorite sightings were several so-called "cleaning stations", which are fixed places on the reef that fish visit to have their parasites picked off by cleaner wrasses. I saw a big parrot fish even let a cleaner wrasse swim into its mouth. Also spotted were giant clams, blue and black angelfish that swam up to my fingers, file fish, nudibranches, and a clown fish and its parent in an anemone.

That night we spotted eery lights from under the water just off the beach from our huts; it was a night-diving expedition, which I don't know if we'd have the guts to try. Maybe someday. Still need to get certified first.

We were hoping for calmer seas on the return trip, but it was not to be. I think it was a bit rougher, but at least we were going with the waves this time. Still, the little kid behind me got sick, and I had to keep going to the back of the boat to splash water on my face.

The bus ride back was somewhat less intense, as there wasn't a ferry to catch. My Dad sat opposite a Malaysian guy -- Jules? -- and struck up an interesting conversation, which I only heard snippets of. The guy worked for Peace Cola, the Malaysian alternative to Coca Cola, which donates part of their proceeds to peace causes. He had lots of other interesting information about Malaysia and their relationship with Singapore, that I wish I could remember more of.

All in all, a very interesting trip. Given the difficulty of the commute, it would have been nice to spend more time, but it was still nice to get away. And hopefully we gave my parents some good stories to relate to the folks back home.

I ate lunch today at a hawker center stall that offered "Claypot Vinegar Pig's Trotter".

I opted for the red wine chicken instead.

Now it can be said: our guests were my parents, who didn't want to announce to any unfriendlies that their house was going to be unoccupied for two weeks. They've now arrived safely home. Here are some of the things we showed (or inflicted upon) them:

Sungei Buloh Nature Preserve. Our tour guide Rhea showed us many interesting things we missed on previous visits. No snakes this time, but we did see mudskippers, weaver ants, cross spiders, archer fish, and a giant monitor lizard.

Hawker centers. Not a lot of success here as we seemed to always suggest the wrong item, either too spicy or too weird, while they were already overdosing on strangeness.

Little India. On a Sunday night, when the throngs descend. Topped off with another too-spicy but tasty meal.

Tioman Island, as I mentioned before; I'll post details from this interesting side trip tonight, hopefully.

Also: Comfort food at Brewerkz on Clarke Quay. Orchard Road. The wet market and bird-singing place at Ghim Moh. Catholic Mass -- the "sign of peace" involved mostly bowing instead of handshaking. Brunch at Cellar Door. China Town. The Merlion. Games of bridge in the evenings (they're teaching us). Pricy Mexican at Margarita's.

On their own they checked out the Changi(?) Yacht Club, the Asian Civilizations Museum, Body Worlds, and Sentosa Island.

A wonderful visit! With each passing year I am more and more grateful to be able to call such wonderful and adventuresome people my parents.

Pissing down with rain on a boring Monday. For our guests' last day here, it rained. And rained. And rained. I've never seen quite this much rain here. Rainy season was supposed to be over.

While I gather my notes for the full report on our visitors, I can report on something we snuck off and did on our own last Thursday night: the David Bowie concert, at Singapore Indoor Stadium. Buying nosebleed seats paid off as didn't sell enough tickets, and closed the upper level of the stadium. So we ended up with much better seats, and even improved on them by wandering up to maybe 15 meters from stage right. (Not quite as good as seeing him from about three meters away last year in Brooklyn, but still.) Sound was pretty bad for the first half of the show until somebody plugged in a loose cord or something and the stack of speakers pointed our way turned on. David was in fine form and chatty. The set list was the tried and true formula of a familiar opening, a mix of old and new, and a finish of old favorites. Highlights for me were Five Years and I'm Afraid of Americans (which he graciously prefaced by saying was about just a few Americans that he was afraid of).

At one point I happily pointed out to Marjorie that David Bowie has no ass! This is a beacon of hope for me, that a man can not only exist but actually thrive without one.

As the show ended we bolted for the taxi stand, and were first in the queue. Of course, no taxis came by, preferring to cruise around until called (for the bonus $3 surcharge). So eventually we had to call one, as did everyone else who was waiting. While they all disappeared one by one into their summoned cabs, we waited and waited for our guy who never showed. He eventually called us but couldn't figure out how to get to where we were, and wanted us to walk around the stadium and find him. Yeah right. We ended up walking out through the now-deserted parking lots until we got out on the main road a flagged another one down. Sometimes I really miss having a car.

Lots to report, no time to report it. Got back yesterday from visiting Pulau Tioman with our out-of-town guests. It was adventuresome; stories to follow. Back to work.

It's Monday morning, and my software has gone on strike.

The program that I'm writing has suddenly decided to lay things out differently.

To modify the program, I need to check the appropriate file out of WinCVS, but WinCVS is crashing as soon as I open it.

I'm trying to upgrade it, but whenever I download a zip file using IE it comes up as an empty zip.

And to top it off, Mozilla mail is crashing every time I switch folders.

Sorry about the lack of updates... Our guests have been here since late Thursday and we've been busy running them ragged. Clarke Quay (Brewerkz), hawker centers, wet markets, Sungei Buloh nature preserve, Colbar, Cellar Door, lots of other stuff.

Still managed to sneak off and play soccer today; just a friendly intersquad game, and only enough for seven a side. Afterwards a guy on our team was giving me a lift home, and ran out of gas on the TPE (expressway). A small misadventure ensued involving some policemen and a couple of cabs. After finally getting home an hour and a half later, we took our guests to Little India for their Sunday night craziness, when the area gets inundated with young Indian men for their traditional night on the town. Had an overly spicy but very tasty meal at the [I forget the name], a subsidiary of the Apolo Banana Leaf restaurant.

I was feeling adventurous at lunch today, so I had my first ever bowl of Fish Ball Noodle. It was really quite good, and not at all fishy. Somehow they make the fish balls have the consistency and uniformity of hard-boiled egg whites. There are lots of other things that come in ball form that I'll have to try. [Insert ball joke here.]

Weekend wrap-up. Friday night: Went to see Something's Gotta Give, and enjoyed it muchly. Saturday: Grocery shopped, hung by the pool. Reminisced about "wing night", so we showered up and went to Brewerkz and got wings and (very cheap) pitchers. Yum. Sunday: Soccer game for me at Turf City; tied 2-2. Almost scored on a header, but it was our own goal. Cooked up green mole chicken with tortillas, refried bean, Mexican rice, and chips; yum again. Watched a rental DVD, "Whale Rider" about a Maori village; very good. More exciting updates as events warrant.

Addendum: Oh, and we got buzzed by our second flying lizard, right as we were walking out of our apartment complex. We chased him up a tree.

Weirdie. Until the conversation with our dinner guests last night, it never dawned on me how often Australians shorten their words. We all know they're Aussies, not Australians, and cook on barbies, not barbecue -- but they also go to unis, not universities; they're from Tazzie, not Tasmania, and they eat brekkie, not breakfast. Any others I'm forgetting?

I've also noticed a Britishism from the Brit who sometimes drives me home from soccer. The "n't" contractions are used as little as possible, in favor of combining the to be and to have verbs with the subject. So it's "we've not..." instead of "we haven't...", and "Joe's not..." instead of "Joe isn't...". That's a subtler thing. Usually, he'll drop one or two of the wackier Britishisms every trip, like something being "sixes and sevens". (I wish I had written them all down.) The other day he made a wrong turn and said, "Woops, I think I dropped a bollock here..."

On a more disappointing note, they replaced the crazy Mandarin lady's voice on the MRT line that warns you to stand behind the yellow line. Of the four languages they speak it in, hers was the only one that was replaced, so they must've had complaints.

Valentine's Day was very nice. A quiet dinner followed by (as Marjorie mentioned) a quiet evening at home with chocolate-covered strawberries, and champagne.

In other news... Goooooooaaaaaallll! Scored again today, on a decent shot from 25 yards out. Of course, it helped that the team we were playing weren't very good -- it was 4-nil at the half, and my goal made it six. At halftime our coach said he'd buy us ten pitchers later in the month if we reached 10 goals. We made it, on a penalty kick in injury time, for a final score of 10-2.

We've submitted our entry to the Metamorphosism limerick contest. Ours certainly isn't the best but at least it scans.

Lucid dreaming. Do you ever have "lucid dreams" -- the kind where you consciously know you're dreaming, and can control what goes on, at least to some extent? For a while I've been having them, mostly in the mornings in between alarm clock snoozes. There are certain things you supposedly can't do in these dreams, such as flick on and off a light switch -- apparently the part of your brain that controls what's going on can't handle the sudden change in lighting. Well, I've been particularly fascinated with trying to read in my lucid dreams. It's really strange; try "picking up a book and reading it" the next time you're lucid dreaming. Your dream-composer knows it's supposed to be filling in some sort of coherent story, but it can't do it that fast. So what you get (or at least what I get) is a string of almost random words, mostly grammatically correct, but with only just a hint of coherency. It's kind of exhilarating in a hard-to-define way.

I'm trying to figure out how to transcribe some of what my sleep-brain is composing. Sometimes it can go on for paragraph after paragraph, but whenever I try to hard to remember some of it, I pop back into consciousness with only the last few words in my memory.

Bike. I bought a bike today. It's a cheap little mountain bike, and I do mean cheap and little. Got it for S$35 (about US$20), and it's too small for me, but for the price, how could I say no? Basic transportation is a good thing.

It's been a couple of years since I've ridden a bicycle, but it turns out, it's just like riding a bicycle.

A walk on slippery rocks. Forgive my longwindedness tonight. I've decided to start trying to write more.

Tonight's subject is philosophy. No need to run screaming; I'm not going to share any of my personal opinions on the matter with you. I'm just going to talk about philosophy in general.

A while back I had a friend of a friend who was always cold to me, and I never knew why. Years later, I found out the answer. I turns out that when we first met, I found out she was a philosophy major in school, and apparently gave her a lot of grief about it. Now, I have no recollection of this happening. But it sounds like me. I've always thought philosophy to be a soft, and stupid, major. (Part of me was sorry, but another part thought, what philosophy is it that holds a grudge for three years? Don't you people debate a lot?)

Not that I think the subject is unimportant. Some days, it's all I think about. But in the field of philosophy, there seems to be no attempt to winnow out the truth. There's an old joke:

A university dean, facing a budget crisis, decided to chide the head of the physics department. "Why do you need all this equipment for experiments?" he said. "Why can't you be more like the math department? All they need is paper, pencils, and a wastebasket. Or better still, be like the philosophy department. They don't even need the wastebasket!

It's true, philosophy never throws anything away. Take any philosophy course, and you'll be taught mutually exclusive, even highly contradictory philosophies. Some may even be flatly disproven. And yet, they Must Be Taught. I think if a university professor ever tried to espouse a specific philosophy to students, and taught that this or that other philosophy is a complete failure (or worse, neglected to even teach it), they'd ride him or her out of there on a rail.

I've had people try to give me philosophy books to read. I've developed a nice system for dealing with them. The books usually consist of a logical form of argument -- state assumptions, draw inferences, reach conclusion -- and I can at least credit them for that. Usually. But I always see the whole thing as a big shaky tower, built up from the axioms. As such, I usually only read until I reach what I perceive is the first faulty inference. Then I think, if they're just going to build on this, why should I read on? The tower already will not stand. (Not that I could do any better. The small towers I have built for myself have failed to achieve any great unity or height.)

And usually I find that the conclusions these philosophers come to are the ones they were already convinced of before they started their formulating. Their ideas are always a product of their time and place. Like, Ayn Rand escapes communist Russia, becomes a fervent capitalist, then formulates a philosophy. Starting at first principles, she builds and builds upon them until she arrives at -- capitalism! What a surprise!

Okay, I'll say it. I'm basically an existentialist without the angst. If I even understand the term correctly.

I'm mostly through with Albert Camus' The Plague, which got me thinking on these lines. Obligatory quote:

But the narrator is inclined to think that by attributing overimportance to praiseworthy actions one may, by implication, be paying indirect but potent homage to the worst side of human nature. For this attitude implies that such actions shine out as rare exceptions, while callousness and apathy are the general rule. The narrator does not share that view. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clearsightedness.

"Me" shirts. You never notice them until they're pointed out to you, then you notice them everywhere. Singaporeans are crazy, it seems, about "me" shirts. That might not be their official name, but I don't know what else you could call them. These are just t-shirts, almost always black, that have some familiar graphic printed on the front, with the word "me" replacing some part. For instance, one of the more common ones is a chessboard showing a partially played game, with one of the squares showing "me" instead of a piece. Other examples include: a maze, with "me" trapped somewhere inside. An eye chart, with one of the "E" letters replaced by "me". A Pac-Man screen, with "me" running around the maze. The I-Ching symbols, with one replaced by "me".

There are at least twenty varieties I've seen. I'm not even quite sure what they mean, though I expect they don't mean anything in particular, except "my life is complicated" or something like that. I have no idea where they sell them -- I know one place that sells the white "Pac-Man" version, but that's it. It's a mystery.

Why our lunch break today was more interesting than yours. We went and saw the procession for the Thaipusam festival. Scroll down for pictures of this amazing event. Now that's devotion.

I have a particularly stupid prejudice where I only expect Western religions to keep up with modern technology. It's hard to imagine the temple that organizes such a festival to have a website, but here it is. Check out their guidelines for devotees.

I'm amazed. I never thought it had a chance of happening. But it appears the Pixies are reuniting.

When asked whether the reunion tour was strictly a money-making venture, front man Frank Black responded "Ha! No! No, my child, this is not my desire." Seriously, I don't care if it is. I just hope they head out this way. A lot of Singaporeans have been clamoring for a Pixies reunion.

No, wait, I'm thinking of Air Supply.

I kid! I kid!

There's a new restaurant within walking distance from us that I've become obsessed with trying. It's called Midnight Curry, and it's only open from midnight until 8 am. Such an eatery might not be out of place in Manhattan, but it sits in a quiet, staid little corner of a conservative town, and there's next to nothing in its immediate area (Clementi and Ulu Pandan). I can't figure out who they cater to, so I am intrigued. Curry after midnight sounds like a recipe for scary dreams though.

For the last month I've been hounded relentlessly by
journalists and fans alike, all wanting to know "Where is your
Top Albums of 2003 list?" Well, you can all stop harassing me
now. The delay was caused by several new albums I got over
Christmas that I wanted to give a chance to sink in before I
ranked them. There's almost nothing novel in this year's list;
mostly just new albums by bands I already liked. In the internet
age, I can hardly blame the musical pit that is Singapore for my
lack of finding anything novel. And so it goes:

10. Turin Brakes, "The Optimist LP". Marjorie latched onto this
one more than I did, but it's pretty solid acoustic rock,
with good harmonizing. Rating: 6.

9. Death Cab For Cutie, "Transatlanticism". Marjorie has also
been playing this one a lot. It's a quality effort. The acoustic
ballad (need to look up title) is one of my favorite songs
this year. Rating: 7.

8. Frank Black, "Show Me Your Tears". More of the same from Frank.
That's a good thing. When bands break up or artists die, you
always end up wishing they had produced more output. Hard to
complain about Frank, who's been averaging a couple of albums
a year. Rating: 8.

7. Quasi, "Hot Sh*t". A somewhat new direction; they've pretty
much abandoned their signature fuzzy organ sound. Lots of
good songs here. Rating: 8.

6. Joe Strummer, "Streetcore". The world has been robbed of Joe's
enormous talent, just one year ago. I still feel bitter and
poignant when I listen to this album, which might be keeping
me from enjoying it more. I don't think this album ranks
up there with his previous two, but you still feel (more than
hear) Joe's greatness shine through, often. No one else could
cover "Redemption Song" and get away with it, I think. Rating: 8.

5. Radiohead, "Hail To The Thief". There's so much expectation
built into every new Radiohead album, like each has the
potential to bring the world crashing down. And so, there's
always a letdown when you first hear it. But, I pulled this
one out again recently, and tried to listen to it like it
was some new band I'd never heard of before, and you know?
It's a damn fine piece of work. Rating: 8.5.

4. Rufus Wainwright, "Want One". Rufus's "Poses" was my album of
the year a few years back. "Want One" seems, paradoxically,
both more stripped down and more full of big, crashing
symphonic lushness. Very satisfying. Rating: 9.

3. Fountains of Wayne, "Welcome Interstate Managers". Glad to see
these guys finally getting the recognition they deserve.
A great, fun pop album. I so wish these guys would take
themselves more seriously, though. Rating: 9.

2. White Stripes, "Elephant". Proving their debut album "White
Blood Cells" was no fluke. Jack White is a hugely gifted
guitar player, singer, and songwriter. Despite the punk
stylings and attitude, this album just seems joyful to me.
Rating: 9.

And Mark's number one album for the year...

1. Nothing. I looked back on my favorite albums of the previous
few years, and decided there's nothing I've heard this year that
deserved to be included in this pantheon. Let's hope for better
stuff in the coming year.

The new Birkenstock, now with a sole that's molded to fit your... Well, it's just molded. This is what happens when it rains for five days straight. Marjorie put up a brave fight with the Lysol, but Mother Nature won in the end.

Equatorial living. Two tidbits about living close to the equator that I bet you didn't know. If I hadn't read about them, I would have never noticed, myself.

The moon appears to flip completely upside down in the process of going from one horizon to the other.

Sunsets and sunrises happen faster than they do at other latitudes, as the sun rises and sets pretty much vertically.

That's all Mr. Wizard has for you today. Remember, kids, sleep with your hands above the covers.

Comments, yay! I've switched services, so you should be able to comment now, if you haven't already moved along to newer, more user friendly blogs. Go ahead. See if I care.

Trip report, a few days late:

Just flew in from Bangkok, and boy are my arms loose and relaxed, kneaded into a doughlike consistency. We took a last minute escape on the weekend of Chinese New Year. A quick trip report:

Friday night: we arrive, and spend ten minutes head-scratching as to how to get into town, and bemoaning our lack of preparedness. Finally we just get in the taxi queue and ride into town without much fuss. No seatbelts, fast driver. The town smells of exhaust. We check in (Windsor Hotel) and discover to our chagrin that the door to the adjoining room is paper thin. A woman is chattering away in Thai (we presume). We go for a walk in hopes that things quiet down. Spot a very interesting small bat, not much bigger than a moth, and not flying much faster than one either, circling the lights of the adjoining hotel. Streets are dirty and smelly, but seemingly safe enough. Walk a few blocks, come home to quiet in the room. Our beds are ungodly hard, and that includes the pillows.

Saturday: Get up late. I point out to Marjorie that the world is now officially our oyster. YA GET IT? Make a run for the Grand Palace. We stop for Marjorie's required Starbucks at a nice, new, upscale mall by the Sky Train station. Take the Sky Train to the river's edge, where we hope to catch river taxi. Decide to have lunch instead. Eat lousy food at a Hot Pot restaurant: cold dim sum, average pork and duck with rice. Realize that we aren't going to have enough time to do the Grand Palace proper (it closes early), so we get back on Sky Train and go to Bangkok's famous market, off the Mo Chit station. Made the obligatory pun with that name. Among countless other things, numerous animals were for sale: puppies, kittens, rabbits, hamsters, miniature squirrels, GIANT fish. One food hawker was selling the following items, all deep fried:

Crickets

Grasshoppers

Water bugs (look like giant roaches)

Grubs

Fetal -- chickens, I guess? Some sort of baby bird, whole.
Sky Train back to Siam station area. Walk by Jim Thompson's House. Area overrun with students in either a red shirt or pink, rival fans attending a local soccer game. Beer at the Dallas Pub. Foot massage next door -- ohhh, migod that's good. Marjorie wonders why she was reluctant at my initial suggestion. We bliss out, for 200 baht each ($8 Sing, about $5 US for an hour). Back to our hotel area (Sukhumvit). Decent German food at Otto Bei across from our hotel -- Marjorie: some sort of schnitzel, me: Jager Schnitzel (pork) mit Spaetzle, my favorite dish. It's okay, but half the mushrooms in the sauce are shitake. Hand and arm massage up the street. At this point we are counting time and money in terms of the amount of equivalent massage. This time is was a half an hour for 100 baht. Back to our severe beds.

Sunday: Determined to get an earlier start, we are out the door by about 11am. Sky Train again to river. We board a river taxi without much fuss and ride upriver surrounded by locals, including monks in full robes. At only 20 baht, this is the way to travel. Pass several other wats on the way. Disembark by the palace. It's closed lunchtime, so we buy some satay from a street hawker (me: marinated chicken, marjorie: chicken wings on a skewer). Walk down to neighboring Wat Po; impressive tiled temple complex featuring one of the world's largest reclining Buddha statues. On to Grand Palace. We were both secretly expecting it to be overly gaudy or ostentatious, but we were both quite impressed. You would know you're a king if you lived here. Eat expensive Haagen Dazs at their snack shop (Marjorie: 1 scoop coffee, 1 macadamia nut; me: 2 scoops macadamia brittle). On river taxi back to Sky Train station, chat with American tourist from California who just got back from a month in Burma. Overhear another pointing out a high rise apartment building that has never been occupied, and we can see why: it is leaning like it's from Pisa. We plan to just go hang out in Lumpini Park, but get sidetracked by some stores and finally decide that it's "massage o'clock". Perhaps even "half past massage o'clock". Back to our hotel area, we opt for hour-and-a-half Thai massage. I love it; Marjorie afterward feels like she's been pistol-whipped. Bad massage is worse than no massage. We shower, then Thai food dinner across the street at Saw Sam Sai. Drinks at a pub up the street, which turned out to be right in front of a "lady-boy" cabaret. The crowd and performers spill out after a while, and we learn from our bartender that they make most of their money posing for pictures with tourists. I snap a picture from a distance.

Monday: After check out we scramble to find ATM so we have cash to pay the 500 baht airport departure fee. Sandwiches at German deli across street. Wait (forever) for Airport Bus. Pet mangy, lame (but collared) dog while we wait. Arrive early at airport, get through customs without fuss. Two hours in plane and we are back.

You'd be surprised how many people from Singapore count on side trips to places like Bangkok just for a bit of seediness and chaos. And, conversely, how many people from places like Bangkok occasionally need to come to Singapore for a little peace, safety, and order. It would make an interesting human-nature study. Our trip was not exhaustive or exhausting (however exhaust-filled), but it was deeply satisfying. Bangkok is dynamic; the people are exceedingly friendly, the touts take "no" for an answer, and there are a wealth of places begging to be explored. Fun.

Other points of interest -- American franchises spotted: McD's, Pizza Hut/KFC (sans the Taco Bell), Dunkin Donuts, Burger King, Swensen's, and a 7-Eleven on every corner. "Rancid" T-shirts spotted: 4.

Comments seem to be broken. Am looking into the problem.

Wednesday night we attended the Wednesday Night Drinking Club, which is often touted on the Expat Singapore message forums. Over expensive beers at Liberte in Chijmes, we chatted with people from Germany, Netherlands, Indonesia, and the UK, and also an American, Ken, who was in town interviewing at Singapore's world-famous Zoo and Night Safari. He invited us out for a free night at the Night Safari, so that's what we did last night. They must really want him to work there, because we were given the VIP treatment; we were escorted to the front of every line, on one of their busiest nights of the year. Ken's a great guy, and we got lots of behind-the-scenes insights on the workings of zoos. I hope he decides to come work here.

Every zoo visit is a unique experience; you never know which animals will be active, or what they'll be doing. This time we had great views of the tarsiers, tapirs, and flying foxes.

Chiromancy. Up early today to go get our fingerprints done, or redone in Marjorie's case. We now have some on the official FBI card -- which we printed out ourselves, so who knows if that will be accepted -- and some on official Singapore forms. For our Singaporean we-haven't-been-arrested-here form, they had a cool digital scanner that read our fingerprints electronically. This part they happily do for free, no doubt so they can have our fingerprints on record.

Brian McBride will now be playing for Fulham, so I'll get to watch him on the telly occasionally. The English Premier League is starting to dip into the American well, not just for the talent, I'm sure, but for the potential market of new fans. Hey, it works. Go Fulham!

Chinatown, where I work, is all festive in anticipation of the year of the Monkey. I must've seen a dozen people today carrying pussy willows, which are a favorite to decorate with. Don't make jokes, but pussy willows are my favorite decorative plant. I mean, don't laugh just because I have a favorite decorative plant. What did you think I meant? We're going to get some of them, and an orange plant, like last year. Red lanterns and cards everywhere.

Turn your head and cough, lah. Today we went together to a medical clinic to get our official health exam for Australia. Eye exam, blood test, chest x-ray, the works -- even, no lie, checking our arms for heroin-use track marks. I had to wonder about the place. The first check they performed was a urine test -- Marjorie got a cup, and I got a little litmus-test swizzle stick. And we were told that the restroom was down the hall, past all the other offices on the fifteenth floor of this office building. So we went, and went, and carried our prizes back past the accountant's office and whatever else. The receptionist just needed a visual confirmation on my pee-stick, so I held it out for her over the reception desk, and she said okay, you can throw it out over there, in the tiny step-to-open trash can in the waiting room, right next to another waiting patient.

The rest of the exam went okay, I guess, except for the doctor having to play stabby-stab-stab with my arm trying to hit the vein. She asked if I exercised a lot, because my blood pressure and pulse were low, so I guess that's good. They do need to get confirmation as to the state of my kidney stones, though, so I need to go try to take of that tomorrow. Nothing about this process ever seems to get taken care of on the first pass.

Bowie fish. Two years ago when we were visiting here we visited Singapore's aquarium, Underwater World. Today we went back, and we arrived at the same consensus: it's too small and overpriced. Alas.

However, while we were out we saw in the newspaper that David Bowie is coming to town in March! So we went and got our tickets already. It can't possibly rival our last time seeing him (in a 1000 seat venue in Brooklyn), but we can't complain too much!

A great read. I read a lot, but not much of what I read do I feel the need to praise here. But I just finished The First American: The Life And Times of Benjamin Franklin, and wow. Putting aside what an extraordinary character he was, this biography was also the first really readable explanation of the factors leading up to the Revolutionary War. And Ben himself -- well, everything he touched, he transformed, it seems; his CV would be the most staggering in history, I think. Truly a Renaissance man. Hard to read without feeling like a worthless sack of shit. But I recommend giving it a shot.

Blogging live. About ten minutes ago, I heard a crunch, like a fender-bender, outside my second-floor work window. I looked down to see a young man lying on the road, motionless, next to a white van. He had just been hit, apparently, but there has been no blood. He eventually was helped up (despite my yells to not move him), and now an ambulance is here. (The ambulance siren as it approached is the first siren I've heard here.) It got here in less than ten minutes, and had the guy out of here in about another five. The victim had blood around one eyebrow, was all that I saw. He was awake and alert on the stretcher. The police are now trying to reconstruct the scene with the help of witnesses. They chalked the street to mark the position of the tires and moved the van away. Half an hour later. The police have called in the situation and are presumably waiting for advisement. The driver of the van, a pony-tailed man of about thirty-five, calmy waits. He seems unphased.

I could have been the first to dial 999. I should have been. Luckily the guy seemed to be okay.

Celeb spotting, Singapore stylee! After a morning matinee of Good Bye, Lenin! (which was just okay), we went to the grocery store, and happened to spot Singapore's biggest celebrity, Gurmit Singh, AKA Phua Chu Kang. He was easy to recognize, even without his trademark big, ugly mole, since he's been in just about every sitcom this country has ever produced. If you saw the Amazing Race episode where they came through Singapore, he was the guy in the apartment that everyone had to go meet.

Today's new symptoms: tactile sensitivity (like, my skin is very sensitive), sore throat, and loss of apetite.

I brought my X-Arcade joystick back from the states (yay!) but it doesn't seem to work with my laptop (boo!). I do have MAME (the arcade game emulator) now loaded, and found a site from which I grabbed over 1000 old arcade games, but they only play from the keyboard as yet. I must figure this out.

Illin'. I managed a whole five hours of sleep last night, 11pm to 4am. Who knows why, but jet lag hounds the return traveler much worse than the departing one. And now, I think I'm getting sick. When you get a chill at midday while out walking in the Singapore sun in a long sleeve shirt, something is definitely wrong.

New pictures from other planets will always get a nod on this blog while I have any say so. I don't know how guys can work on those projects -- sixty percent of the Mars probes we've sent have failed. Can you imagine working years on something like that, all to have it disappear (and usually without any explanation)? I would have nightmares.

Home. Just flew in from L.A., and why am I not more tired? For the record, fifteen and a half hours to Hong Kong (ulp), then a layover where we got five minutes rest, then another three and a half hours to S'pore. That sounds like a long time, but we must be used to it or something; I don't know why, but it didn't seem that bad. Marjorie slept a good nine hours of the first flight, while I got a good fifteen minutes or so. I'm functioning purely on sunlight, jetlag, and Sudafed right now.

LAX was a madhouse, even worse than last time, and not without drama -- I got called out by an airport worker for cutting in on a line that I didn't cut in on. Luckily the people ahead of us in line vouched for me.

We brought a serious load of CDs, DVDs, and consumables back with us. Stuff. We like stuff.

Oh, Griffith Park was awful. In the old sense of the word -- full of awe. Our hiking trail took us up to the summit of a lookout with a 360 degree view, looking out over the entire sprawl of L.A. and the ocean in one direction, and the mountains in the other. Rain the previous day kept smog to a minimum, and the day was sunny as we could have hoped. Just stunning. Pictures to follow.

Celeb spotting -- we ran into Gary Jules, who's a former neighbor of Marjorie's friend in L.A. He's recently famous for his cover of Mad World that was the number one song in UK over the holidays. If you saw Love Actually, you'll understand why there's a particular emphasis this year on being number one in the UK for Xmas. The song was used in the movie Donnie Darko.

The Atlanta visit was most agreeable, if not exactly relaxing. Took care of a lot of the business that needed to be taken care of after being away so long, and saw old friends and haunts. New Year's we went to our friends Rob and Ally's house for a party with the old Posse.

In Los Angeles now for one day before we fly back. Yesterday driving around we saw the restaurant where the begin and end of Pulp Fiction was filmed, and later took a drive up and around Mulholland Drive, with its amazing view out into the valley.

While driving I spotted a car with the license plate "IMBJORK". Driving it was a smirking woman who looked something like Bjork. But I'm not sure. Having seen the footage of her taking down a paparazzi in an airport, I can't imagine the real Bjork wants to advertise.

Today we're going to hike in Griffith Park, where much of Short Cuts was filmed.

Depressingly, it occurred to me last night that this is now the year of my 20th high school reunion. Sigh.

Our day. Mailed off Australia paperwork (aah). Tried to get fingerprinted. To the bank: deposited checks, fixed ATM card. Lunch at Eats. Looked at $230 glasses -- just the frames -- at Pearle Vision. Bought $30 frames at Stefan's in Little Five Points. (We each bought frames. They are identical. What are the odds? We are now officially Twinkies.) Blew $100 on CDs at Criminal Records. Had lenses put in our new glasses. Dinner at Ma Li with Marjorie's parents -- their Pik King Pork may be my favorite meal anywhere. On to the Thrashers game -- we lost, 2-1, to the Canadiens. Hockey is such a great sport. Grocery shopping -- stocked up on things to take home (cold meds, Mexican rice, Shake and Bake). Night night!

On our last full day with my parents, we tooled around the area a bit, looking at wildlife and such. First stop was the Enchanted Forest Nature Sanctuary; then a drive north to Ponce Inlet, near New Smyrna Beach. We saw alligators, gulls, shrikes, tortoises, kingfishers, armadillos -- it's a neat area where they live, definitely.

We're up in Atlanta now with Marjorie's parents; we're about to head off to Nuevo Laredo for some din. Yum. Lots of work to do here tomorrow, which we're trying to forget for the evening...

So, what's weird about being back in the US?

Currency. There's a thing I (and many others, apparently) do when visiting a new country and trying to buy things, which is to just hand the cashier the smallest bill that will cover the cost, instead of trying to figure out the small change and such. Sadly, I've reverted to doing just that back in the US, since the currency denominations here are different than the ones I'm now used to S'pore.

Handing the cashier money. It's like, I've forgotten whether there's a proper way to do it, like there is in Asia (two hands). There isn't really a proper way here, but I still feel self concious doing it.

Malls. Lots of Americans running around here. It just seems kind of surreal.
A year is too long to go, not seeing your family anyway. Yesterday for Christmas Marjorie & I took a walk down to the ocean with my parents, and in the evening had our second bridge lesson. It's a game I think we're going to like a lot; most interesting. We also rented Donnie Darko, which the clerk at Blockbuster said was her "favorite movie ever!". I should have told her that it's a Christmas tradition for us.

The Petri dish. In Cocoa Beach now at the parents. My sister was down with her kids, who all had the flu; I only saw her for a few minutes, as she was laid up in her bedroom sleeping it off and quarantining herself. My brother and sister-in-law and their kids were down too; so the household was quite festive (and hectic). Got lots of goodies. Everybody's gone now except myself, Marjorie, and my parents. Ahhh, quiet. We're going to get them to teach us bridge tonight.

But what I really want to do is direct. We had a super time out in L.A. last night with our friends Michael and Kristina, who took us down to Santa Monica for dinner and shopping and then on to two house parties and a warehouse party. Met lots of fabulous people and (amazingly) stayed out until 3 pm or so, operating on two hours of sleep. Today we're off to the farmer's market for lunch then on to do some shopping. Might go see "Lost In Translation" tonight, which I'm really looking forward to.

USA bound! Tomorrow we head off back to the states. What great changes have occurred since we left? Will we see flying cars, moving sidewalks, microwave popcorn that doesn't burn? Watch this space for a full report.

On the plane I plan to write a program that will "screen scrape" all our old blogs into a single document, for archiving purposes. It will snip off all the title and sidebar information from each page, and automatically pull in all comments, pictures, and, if I'm ambitious enough, external web pages that our blog entries link to. I'm bitter that some of our old comments seem to have gone missing from the old comment site, just as of this week. I should have written this program a long time ago.

Duran Duran's all fun and stuff, until "Wild Boys" is stuck in your head for two days.

At the concert last night Marjorie mentioned how she thought it was great that Singaporeans could love something with unbridled enthusiasm. It's true. When there is no guilt, there's no such thing as a guilty pleasure; it's just pleasure. They aren't so much unhip here as anti-hip, at least in the music realm. In a society this multi-cultural, no one's going to tease you for liking Chinese opera, Bollywood soundtracks, or Duran Duran (which is who we saw last night). And so enthusiasm thrives here like a tropical plant.

It's unfortunate, though, that hipness seems to be a necessary ingredient to being a music producer, as opposed to a music consumer. Lacking ego, no one ever sees a show and says, "I could do better". Maybe we should go tease people more.

The Ultimate Geek Gift. If I were just a little bit more of a geek, all my nephews and nieces would be receiving this.

Singapore travel warning: when starting a fight, Singaporeans lead with the foot. An argument broke out in the parking lot underneath my office window today, culminating in an attempted kick at the other guy's kneecaps. Which missed. It broke up immediately; nobody wanted to go to jail, I'm sure. This is the second fight I've seen in Singapore, and both times the aggressor started with a kick.

What happened to the damn comments? If they're gone for good I will be most unhappy.

Bah, humbug. Christmas's opening act is a month made of Mondays. Serving suggestion: garnish with head cold. "Most wonderful time of the year", my shiny white ass.

Human jerky. Today was for visiting Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of the Human Body. It was really, really interesting. The bodies are actual human volunteers, "plasticized". Different displays showed the muscles, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, and the reproductive system (snigger snigger). Sometimes the organs were left intact; sometimes they were shown in cross-section. And they had many examples of unhealthy organs next to healthy ones. (The coal miner's lung looked like a lump of coal.) Most fascinating, and disturbing, was the cross-section of the pregnant woman. An interesting and edumacational excursion; highly recommended.

Tonight we are planning on our first visit to Zouk, Singapore's biggest and most famous discotheque, with our out-of-town friends. I don't know if we'll be drinking, though, after seeing the liver with cirrhosis earlier.

Friends good. Our Atlanta friend Ashim (and his wife, son, and mother) are passing through town. We did dinner with them last night at Boat Quay and are going out on the town with them tonight. Woop!

After seeing Elf last night (funny stuff), we set off for Chinatown and ended up having a round of drinks with a group of merchant seamen. Things got a little hazy after that. This morning I woke up down along the docks smelling vaguely of fish sauce, and with a new hole in me.

Actually, we just went to a department store and had it done, but the first way to tell it was better, don't you think?

Am I really that clichéd? MSN is listing the ten best spots to propose. The place where I proposed to Marjorie is listed there (Ile.-St Louis in Paris). What can I say, I'm a sucker for the classics.

Movies, bad and good. I recently remembered two movies to add to my worst movies list, "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock, and "The Lawnmower Man", with Pierce Brosnan. Be sure not to rent these stinkers sometime real soon.

We went and saw Igby Goes Down the other day, which was a great little flick. We also rented Hulk and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which were bad and "meh", respectively.

What, me author? I started writing my story today. Finished only 520 words in an hour and half. At this rate I would have had to put in about four and a half hours a day to win NaNoWriMo.

But it's a start. The beginning was the part I thought I had fairly well worked out, but it proved challenging to lay down the basis for the story while at the same time revealing just what sort of strange world it is where it's all taking place. I suspect things will speed up, but not by all that much. As you can guess, I've given up on finishing by the end of this month, but at least I haven't given up altogether.

Today marks one year here for us. For me, it has been one year in which I haven't set foot in the United -- what is it again? States? Not something I thought I'd ever do.

Yesterday Marjorie and I went to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Just a very nice, peaceful respite from the city proper.

Then, to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, we went and bought $300 worth of groceries.

Don't know much about art, but I instantly recognized the painting that this cartoon is based on. They say it's Goya, and I remember it as a painting of Zeus devouring his children. It's driving me crazy that I can't remember WHY I know this. At some point in my childhood I encountered this painting and it burned into my cerebral cortex. (Here's the original.)

I wouldn't call it art, but I just got back from seeing Master and Commander: The Far Side Of The World. It was definitely enjoyable -- the battle scenes especially -- but there were certain Hollywood touches I could have done without. (I'll give Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany passing grades if they promise never to make a movie together again. No, scratch that "together".)

Weird scene on the subway on the way to the movie. A grey-haired Chinese lady started talking inappropriately loudly. After a few seconds I realized she was railing about me, but I didn't understand what she was saying. She just gestured towards where I was standing and occasionally gave me the evil eye. Another grey-haired lady who was sitting next to her got up and moved away. At some point, or maybe it was all along, she seemed to switch to English, and finally she turned to me and said, "Take money, naughty boy. Take money, naughty boy".

Give a hoot. Read a book! Because I found myself only in the middle of three different books, I had to add a fourth; Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I chose this partly just because it was in the bookcase (Marjorie picked it up a while back), and partly to right a wrong I committed in 11th grade Russian Lit.

I'm surprised this book is ever chosen for high school reading. Not just because the writing can be a bit dry (five pages to describe a dream; another five or so for a letter from mother), but because in the first fifty pages it takes you into the mind of a killer trying to psych himself up to kill someone, and for essentially intellectual reasons. And then, a graphic description of the murder. I'm certainly not saying that it should be banned, but I'm just surprised it's not.

Australia apparently now only accepts immigrants who have ulcers. How else can you explain that our 50+ pages of applications and documents were insufficient -- they want more, as we were informed by mail today. They want more explanations as to hours and employment, profit and loss statements from my business, pictures of us in the shower... Ugh. The sure have swung a long way from their earlier simple entrance requirement of just a criminal record.

Ah, crapulence. Thanksgiving was a success. Even using what amounted to a single toaster oven on steroids, we were able to cook up a complete Thanksgiving meal. My boss and a cow orker of Marjorie's joined us in the gluttony.

The comic strip B.C. I usually find enormously unfunny, but I still read it for the same reason I rubberneck at traffic accidents. The author, Johnny Hart, is getting a lot of heat this week due to this strip. Read it first, and see if you a) get the joke, and b) understand what might be offensive about it.

Give up? The crescent moon is a symbol of Islam. Too, there's the word "SLAM" written vertically, like an I. (Get it? ISLAM.) The strip appeared right in the middle of the holy month of Ramadan as well.

Hart's politics are usually pretty transparent in the strip, and pretty stupid usually. But I have to think this was just an accident. People are saying they don't get the joke, and therefore the only interpretation is an attack on Islam. But I still see a sort of dry humor there, even if there were no moons and SLAM. And come on, the only way to laugh every day at B.C. is with nitrous oxide.

Now the BBC has listed 50 places you must see before you die. Let's see how I do. The ones I've seen are in bold.

1 The Grand Canyon 2 Great Barrier Reef 3 Florida 4 South Island 5 Cape Town 6 Golden Temple 7 Las Vegas 8 Sydney 9 New York 10 Taj Mahal 11 Canadian Rockies 12 Uluru 13 Chichen Itza - Mexico 14 Machu Picchu - Peru 15 Niagara Falls 16 Petra - Jordan 17 The Pyramids - Egypt 18 Venice 19 Maldives 20 Great Wall of China 21 Victoria Falls - Zimbabwe 22 Hong Kong 23 Yosemite National Park 24 Hawaii 25 Auckland - New Zealand 26 Iguassu Falls 27 Paris 28 Alaska 29 Angkor Wat - Cambodia 30 Himalayas - Nepal 31 Rio de Janeiro - Brazil 32 Masai Mara - Kenya 33 Galapagos Islands - Ecuador 34 Luxor - Egypt 35 Rome 36 San Francisco 37 Barcelona 38 Dubai 39 Singapore 40 La Digue - Seychelles 41 Sri Lanka 42 Bangkok 43 Barbados 44 Iceland 45 Terracotta Army - China 46 Zermatt - Switzerland 47 Angel Falls - Venezuela 48 Abu Simbel - Egypt 49 Bali 50 French Polynesia

Thirteen down, thirty-seven to go... Actually I've only ever flew over the Grand Canyon, but I saw it, so I'm counting it.

We watched the finale of Joe Millionaire last night. I mention it here only in hopes that by publicly embarassing ourselves, we might refrain from ever again standing under the broken sewer main of American reality television. What an eloquent pair Joe and the Pyrrhic victor made. At one point Joe described the time he had with one woman as "really neat". They gave them a million dollars at the end (darn, I gave away the surprise). My comment was that with that kind of money, maybe they could buy some chemistry.

So what did YOU do to mark World Toilet Day? Some Singapore-based company declared it such. The article claims that Singapore toilets are among the cleanest in the world. Don't you believe it. Generally, they're okay, but occasionally... I'd rather not finish that sentence.

I have a free hour or two to work on this story I'm writing. And yet, I'm not. You can't make me.

I don't think I have what it takes to author.

I'll finish it, by the end of the month, because I said I would. I'm still plotting it out and such, but I've lost my head of steam. I'm looking forward to the actual writing of it about as much as writing a term paper.

We're planning on doing Thanksgiving next Monday, which is good news; as Marjorie pointed out to me last night, they've been showing the NFL Sunday night games here on Monday early evening, which is perfect. It's only Redskins vs. Miami -- eh. But I can't complain too much.

I'm excited to see Master and Commander will be starting here soon. It does star Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany, who combined earlier in A Beautiful Mind, and were annoying together well beyond the sum of their individual annoyingness. But on the plus side, it's based on a good book (which I've actually read), it's directed by Peter Weir, and I understand that it breaks a Hollywood taboo as far as the love-interest story, in that it doesn't have one. Yim, you seen it yet?

We also bought badminton racquets today, in an effort to be more Asian in our recreation. We had a little indoor how-many-times-can-we-hit-it-back-and-forth session in our living room, which was almost as fun as the time in Marjorie's old place when we moved aside all the furniture, put "Dancin' Queen" on the stereo, and discoed around in our rollerblades on the hardwood floors.

I've been helping Marjorie out at her job where she counsels students who want to study abroad in the US. I've proofread a few student essays now -- for some reason, I just love to proofread -- and it's an interesting perspective on at least one segment of the population here. Today I went in to help with their computers. Apparently they've been getting a lot of pop-up ads and such from websites of ill repute, so I installed some various scanning software and pop-up stoppers. Ad-Aware found a LOT of nefarious things going on on their system. The suspicion is that people have been treating the place like it's their internet cafe, or worse, their free peep show. Actually, they suspect it's mainly one kid in particular -- and he came in while I was there. So I got to see Marjorie take him by the scruff of the neck and send him crashing out through the plate glass window. Well, almost.

Marjorie had the quote of the week there that I overheard while she was helping out another student and his mother. The kid was looking to maybe double major in Mechanical Engineering and Criminology. Marjorie commented that that was an odd major, "unless you want to maybe be McGyver or something". They were Turkish, but they seemed to catch the reference, and laughed.

Zoophilia. The Singapore Zoo is considered one of the best in the world, with good reason. We went again yesterday. We're getting pretty familiar with it, but there's still new things to see every time. Among the new behaviors we spotted were a very bizarre ostrich dance, where he repeatedly banged his head on one side of his body, then the other, and a jaguar swimming underwater. I had no idea they did that.

The rains came just in time for my soccer game at 5pm. It was a total slogfest. It looked like a match played between five-year-olds at times, with players clustered around the ball as it moved up and down the field, because nobody could kick it out of a puddle any further than a few meters. On one of the few times when I got a hold of it, I almost scored the game-winner from 30 yards out, but the keeper tipped it over. A guy on their team hit a beautiful bicycle kick that beat our keeper but the ball just STOPPED in a puddle about a meter from the goal line. We later did get the game winner, and I saved the match in the dying seconds when an opponent had a shot at an empty net but I beat him to the ball. Pure muddy fun.

Lush. There's a big lush somehow-untouched area of near-rainforest just a block or so from our house that we went to check out today. There are plants that look like they're straight out of the Jurassic area -- with leaves about a meter across. Lots of bird activity -- we think they were cockatoo or parakeets, but after a minute or two of trying to figure it out, we discovered that our legs were swimming in mosquitoes. Ran screaming. We lasted less than five minutes out in the real wilderness. I'm sure we're already legends among the mosquitoes living there. "Remember the time those big dumb humans came out here without any repellent and just stood there?" While we're at it, what's the first symptom of malaria?

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday of the year, usually; all the good food and family cheer of Christmas without all the bunkus. Since we're devoid of family (and friends, mostly) in this hemisphere, this year we're at least trying to do the meal properly. I've inherited from my dad -- if not love for the meal, at least a slavish insistence that certain things about it be just so. Dad always had to have the cranberry sauce that comes out in a cylinder shaped like the can. To me, the proper Thanksgiving meal should have:

Turkey, the sliced-off-the-bird kind.

Mashed potatoes.

White gravy.

Stuffing.

Green beans.

Salad.

Sweet-potato casserole, with the melted marshmallows on top.

NFL football.
That last part might be a problem, but we've been stocking up on the other necessities. We found a tiny Butterball turkey breast that will actually fit in our tiny oven. Marjorie's adding her own touch this year, her family recipe fruit cocktail.

Some further tribulations of writing science fiction:

1. How do you even name your characters, if they're from a species that doesn't even use sound to communicate? In most science fiction of this sort, they'll make up some random string of letters, like "Q'flth", which is just cheating to my eyes. Or, they'll have some quasi-Native American sounding name, like Speaker For Ancestors or StarToucher or some other such nonsense. It's a real problem.

2. Similies and metaphors are pretty much right out. You can't very well say a character has, I don't know, skin like tissue paper if there's no tissue paper within fifty light years. Just about everything you'd want to compare something to is man-made or earth-specific.

Mandarin harangues. We've had a student volunteer coming in every Friday, and he's been giving me a weekly snippet or two of Mandarin. Last week I asked him to translate the subway announcement I've phonetically memorized. I wrote it out on our white board as it sounds to my ears; then, he came and figured out exactly what the woman is saying from my very bad attempt. I reproduce it for you here. The first line is my guess; the second line (in bold) is what's actually being said (transliterated to western characters), and the third line (in italics) is a rough translation. Some of the characters are a little off, but they're the closest I could find (the two dots over a lëtter should be one, and the cîrcumflex should actually point down):

Tha cha chi choo hi
Dà jiã qî zhù yì
All of you, please attention

Willamee tsu tsi de ah chien
Wèi lë nî zhì jî dë ãn quán
For your own safety

Sin chun tan qua sen ho vien
Qîng zhàn zài huáng xiàn hòu miàn
Please stand (at) yellow line back side

Tsie-tsien
Xiè xiè
Thanks

The dà jiã part is actually made up of the character for "big" plus the character for "house", but together means "all of you". He wrote the Chinese characters, too, and I could reproduce them here, but I have no idea how to look them up.

Yikes. One of the things on that Things To Do Before You Die list -- "See orang-utans in Borneo" -- just got a little scarier. On nearby Sumatra (not Borneo, but close) a whole lot of people at one of these camps were killed last night during a flash flood. Another article put the death toll at 92 and counting. That's a shitload of people, and it could easily have included us. The horrible irony is that most of those killed were eco-tourists, and they're blaming the floods on over-logging.

The Hajj. They've been showing an amazing thing on late night television here. The Malaysian channel has been having live (I assume) coverage of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, where thousands of Muslims come each year as part of the Hajj (pilgrimage) they must do once in their lifetime. The coverage is just a slow camera sweep from various angles, and the priest's chanting is subtitled. Incredible stuff. It's understandable, but a shame, that they don't allow tourists; it would really be something to see.

I found this BBC list of 50 Things To Do Before You Die. I'm doing pretty good on it, I think. I'd break it down this way:

Done:
1. Swim with Dolphins
12. Climb Sydney Harbour Bridge
13. Escape to a paradise Island (I'd count Tioman, definitely)
15. Go white-water rafting
24. Ride a motorbike
40. Ride a rollercoaster
42. Go paragliding
47. Visit Walt Disney World, Florida
48. Gamble in Las Vegas

Will do, someday:
2. Scuba dive on Great Barrier Reef (though there are plenty of just-as-nice places)
4. Go whale-watching (seen a whale, but not as part of a trip)
5. Dive with sharks (missed a great chance in South Africa)
7. Fly in a hot air balloon
9. Go on safari
10. See Northern Lights
11. Walk the Inca trail to Machu Picchu
14. Drive Formula 1 car
16. Walk Great Wall of China
20. Grand Canyon helicopter ride
22. See elephants in the wild
23. Explore Antarctica
27. Wonder at a waterfall (well, a REAL one)
29. Explore the Galapagos Islands
30. Trek through a rainforest (sorta done this, but not really)
32. Ride a camel to the Pyramids
36. Climb Mount Kilimanjaro
37. Fly over a volcano (I've done this from a distance, but I want the close up experience)
38. Drive a husky sled
39. Hike up a glacier
45. See tigers in the wild
49. See orang-utans in Borneo (hopefully very soon!)
50. Go polar bear watching

Would do, but doubt i'll ever be able to:
3. Fly Concorde to New York
8. Fly in a fighter jet
26. Climb Mount Everest
28. Go into space (would drop everything for a chance)
33. Take the Trans-Siberian Railway, Moscow to Vladivostok
43. Play golf at Augusta, Georgia
44. Watch mountain gorillas

Already chickened out on:
6. Skydiving
17. Bungee-jumping

Surely would chicken out on, given the chance:
35. Go wing-walking

Huh?
18. Ride Rocky Mountaineer train
46. Do the Cresta Run, Switzerland

Don't care that much about:
19. Drive along Route 66
21. Ride the Orient Express
25. Try ranching
31. Gallop a horse along a beach
34. Catch sunset over Uluru
41. Fish for blue marlin (though I'd love to see one)

I feel good about this list not for the things on it that I've already done, but because there's so many things on there that I'd like to do, and are potentially within reach. And of the nine on there that I've done, six happened with Marjorie, just in the last 5-6 years. What a gal...

It's National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). Last year I vowed that this year I'd give it a go, but it's not going to happen. What I am determined to do, though, is to write up a science fiction short story idea I've been pondering for a while. I've told the idea to Marjorie, and even she thinks it's a good idea (which is a good sign, as not all that many of the books she reads have battling starships on the front cover).

I scribbled up a page's worth of ideas on the story yesterday on the way to work. There's lots of unknowns I still have to resolve. Fiction is hard. Especially science fiction, I think; my story concerns an alien race, which means that just about every little detail has to invented; their physiology, communication, social structure... I'm determined to make my aliens aliens -- I'm sick of stories featuring aliens that are basically humans with bug eyes. I'm also determined not to write a morality play, another science fiction peeve of mine.

Whenever I've tried to write fiction in the past, my prose has always struck me as so wooden you could build a bridge out of it. Fortunately, science fiction is very forgiving in that regard. Still, another guideline I've set for myself is to actually write the thing, not just describe what happens. There are some science fiction writers out there that can actually write, so the least I can do is try to lean in that direction. Rewriting will be the order of the day; I'm planning on doing as many drafts as I have time for.

My plan is to submit it to one of the monthly science fiction magazines, probably Asimov's, since they're probably most likely to be forgiving of my wooden prose style (judging by their founder's. Don't get me wrong, I loved the man). I probably won't be posting it publicly until I've received rejection letters from all the magazines. Wish me luck...

Weird things under the bed. Anyone care to take a guess as to what this is? We found it under our bed, presumably left there by the previous tenant. It's weighted so that it always sits upright, like a Weeble. The pencil is there to give you scale.

Twenty little differences about Singapore, versus the US. There are big differences, too, but these are the little ones:

1. I have yet to see any roadkill at all.

2. You can often pay for your cab ride with a handful of change.

3. Shopping cart wheel can rotate in all directions, so carts can be moved sideways.

4. No parking meters -- instead, you buy coupons at a gas station or something and punch them out to indicate the date and time you're parking there.

5. Doors to businesses often open in instead of out.

6. Some places sell drinks not in cups, but in little plastic bags with straws in them. I have yet to see a Westerner carrying one of these though.

7. In the grocery store, beer costs more when you buy it cold.

8. Old ladies are generally referred to as "aunties".

9. Many women, especially the aunties, carry around umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun.

10. Taxicab dashboards ding when they are exceeding the speed limit (that doesn't usually slow them down though).

11. Your waitron, after bringing the bill, will stand by your table until you pay it, and give you change on the spot.

12. Taco Bell, yes, but no salsa packets. The taco meal deal includes fries, too.

13. Bottled water is always called "mineral water", despited the fact that no minerals have been added.

14. Busy intersection? Singapore's answer is to simply build a bridge over it, so that drivers on the main road that want to go straight can just keep going. Brilliant!

15. To deposit a check at the bank, just write your account number on it and drop it in the box. No envelope or signature required.

16. It's only one city, but phone numbers are eight digits.

17. Taxis and other cars stop for you on crosswalks. The little off-ramp crosswalks, not the major ones, but still.

18. Wall outlets have switches on them.

19. The school kids all wear uniforms. The little boys all seem to tuck their shirt into their shorts then pull their shorts up to around their nipples.

20. I have yet to hear a siren. Surely they must use them, at least on ambulances, but maybe they don't!

Today is the official national holiday of Deepavali, the Hindu "festival of lights". It started last week, but today is the day everyone gets off (except Marjorie and myself).

One TV channel is having a "Special Deepavali Feature Movie Broadcast", of -- Shaft, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

Don't you hate how Deepavali is getting all commercialized?