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.