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?

Elliott Smith is dead. That sucks. He was a favorite of both mine and Marjorie's. Here are some tributes to him out there on the web.

Accosted in the street the other day by a well-dressed, well-spoken Indian man who said I had a lucky face -- three lines across the forehead. Also, March of next year will be a wonderful time for me. But, all was not good for me. The alignment of my cheeks and nose told him that I had some inner conflicts. I have a joyful face, apparently, but it reveals too much to my friends and business colleagues. He then showed me his business card and asked if I would like to schedule a face or palm reading. Ha ha, thanks buddy, but no thanks. Me, reveal too much with my facial expressions? I'm notorious for the opposite. This is me: :-|

In a term borrowed from another blog, Marjorie and I have taken to calling these people "Human Pop-up Ads". They need to have a little "X" on their forehead, that we can click to get rid of them.

Product of the month: I now have a can of Crispy Curry flavored Pringles on my desk.

Marjorie's friend Jen has gone back home. Jen set a new standard for graciousness in a house guest, being inobtrusive to a fault and showering us with several gifts. In turn, we gave her our cold germs just in time for the flight home. Sorry Jen!

Our guest bedroom is again empty. Who's next?

Hobbled. Went knee-to-knee with a guy on the other team who was at full sprint last night. It was early in the match, but I still finished. As soon as the game was over, though, it began to stiffen up like heckfire. The human body is a strange thing.

There was a guy, Ari, playing with us that's usually on the morning team, so I had never met him. He had a really strange accent that I had never heard before -- turns out that he's Finnish. Nice guy; got to chat with him a bit after the game while we played pool and had drinks at the O Bar. I've been meaning to list out my teammates here, just for my own benefit as a diarist, so if I read this down the years I can remember everybody. There's three teams, but we end up playing with (and sometimes against) each other a lot. All are Singaporean except where otherwise marked:

Coach: Munnn

Goalkeepers: Derek, Ivan.

Defenders: Edward, Andy (UK), Chris (UK), Andrew (UK), Ari (Finn), Pomp, Wi, Michael (UK), Ricky (UK)

Midfield: David, Charles, Jeffrey, MJ (Korean), John (UK), Taufig (sp?), Wilson, Ali (middle eastern?), Tim (UK?), Kelvin

Attack: Ottavio (Italian), Steven, Gimson, Greg (American), Graham (UK?)

In other news, Marjorie is laid up with a bad cold, and with me working, her friend Jen has been having to go off on her own a bit. She's seeing all the things we've been wanting to see, like Changi Prison and the mosque on Arab Street. Now she's off to Malaka in Malaysia, where we've never been. The fire walking, btw, was a bust; despite what the web site said, it actually happened in the morning. The cleanup crew was dismantling everything when we showed up at the supposed starting time of 5pm.

Props to Germany for winning the women's world cup. Wish they'd actually shown a game out here. Maybe they did and I just missed it.

Marjorie's friend Jen is in town. Yesterday we dragged her all over and regaled her ad nauseum with our pithy comments about all the interesting little differences here. We did Chinatown, Boat Quay, the Merlion, drinks at Clarke Quay, and dinner at Little India, which is crazy on Sunday night.

Today they're checking out the botanical gardens, and later we're going to try to check out the fire-walking which goes on a block from my office, and is part of the start of the Thimithi festival commemorating the start of Deepavali. I doubt we'll be able to see much -- there's already about five hundred pairs of shoes out on the sidewalk by the temple entrance.

Does Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi have the best hair of any politician living or dead, or what? I predict in the future politicians' hair will be measured on the Koizumi scale. "Oh, he'll go a long way as a politician, but he'll never be president with that 0.6 Koizumi hair."

More naycha. After a visit to our neighborhood grocery on Saturday we spotted a flock of long-tailed parakeets, which was cool. Then on the way home we spotted four or five of these sulpher-crested cockatoos, which aren't even listed in our bird books as residents. Marjorie says they've been hanging out a block from our house over for a while now.

Sunday we went to the Sungei Buloh Wetland Reserve to see some more stuff. We got up too late, as usual, so missed most of the bird action, but did see some sort of storks which we couldn't identify, as well as sunbirds, egrets, and sandpipers. Along the path we spotted this snake, as well as turtles and giant mudskippers. The mudskippers were interesting -- they blink by rolling their eyes back into their head, and do it one eye at a time, presumably for safety's sake. They had several signs up warning of crocodiles (or caimans, maybe). At the end we climbed their aerie and spotted not a crocodile, but rather this giant water monitor lizard, lazily swimming up the canal. He was a good 5 ft / 1.5 meters long.

We recommend the place -- there's a whole ton of blinds and such built just to make your nature spotting easier. But go at dawn or dusk.

Once again I have been passed over for a MacArthur genius grant. Once again, they gave them out willy-nilly to people who actually accomplished things. If I don't get one next year, I am going to write a very sternly worded letter.

I've a little money and a take-away curry... Strange new find of the day: Indian fast food! It's vegetarian, too. A place called Komala's. I had to at least try it, so I got a veggie samosa, which wasn't half bad.

Still here. Uneventful week. Working a lot.

Anyone else getting slammed by this new worm-of-the-week that's going around? I'm having to empty out my junk mail folder every few hours as I'm getting about five of these huge, fake security upgrade warning emails every time I check. Hanging is too good for the writers of these things! We must come up with something more slow and painful.

Now, I know you are all going to watch the Women's World Cup of soccer, right? And not because Brandi Chastain might tear her jersey off again. Well, not just because of that. Watch it because you will see sports as they are supposed to be played -- without the egos and selfishness and poor sportsmanship. The level of play might even surprise you. These girls are good.

Gotta say -- McDonald's new ad campaign? I am hatin' it.

Wreid. Tihs bolg mkeas a good pnoit. I wlil bet it denos't hlod ture for sueliapidseqan wrdos toguhh.

Holy places. Today we wandered a bit through Chinatown, down near my new workplace, with a camera. Check out some of the holy places we passed by. We still haven't learned the proper etiquette for visiting these places so the shots are all external ones. I don't think they like you taking pictures inside anyway.