Singapore is a different city when you're behind the wheel. We rented a car today, to drive around and look at neighborhoods where we might want to live. It was really strange, having not driven for almost six months, to suddenly have to do it from the wrong side of the road. It wasn't too horrible, but I did get to remember a lot of things I hated about owning a car. Had to blunder our way around a bit. It's quite easy to get lost, even on familiar roads, if you've never actually DRIVEN on them before. I had to come back home and zonk out for a few hours after a while; the concentration and tension involved in driving in this unfamiliar environment can be pretty exhausting. Anyway, we found some pretty nice areas, and didn't run over anyone or anything, so that's good.

Goooooooaaaaal! Today is a national holiday (Vesak Day) in Singapore, so we had a soccer game scheduled for 9 this morning. I was supposed to be playing defense, but at one point I snuck up... and scored! Collected the ball on the 18 yard line, beat a man inside and launched a beautiful curling shot into the far side of the net. I've been playing better and better with each passing week, and having more and more fun. I could do without these 9 a.m. games though. That nasty equatorial sun made the second half brutal...

We're thinking of renting a car this weekend, to drive around and look at apartments. I haven't driven in nearly six months; should be interesting.

We're also considering a trip to Japan in August, to coincide with the Summer Sonic 2003 music festival. Looks like a fantastic line-up. I don't know if I'll be able to swing this, work-wise, though.

Your quote of the day:

"You know the world is off-tilt when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest basketball player is Chinese, and Germany doesn't want to go to war." --Charles Barkley

Joke of the day.

Jason has a conversation with his new neighbour Pete:

J: So what do you do?
P: I teach deducive logic.
J: Huh?
P: Let me demonstrate. Do you have a dog?
J: Yes.
P: From this I deduce that you have a family?
J: Yeah.
P: And a wife?
J: Yeah.
P: And if you have a wife, I deduce that you are heterosexual.
J: That's amazing!

After this Jason visits his friend Chris:
J: I just found out this awesome field called deducive logic.
C: Say what?
J: Let me demonstrate. Do you have a dog?
C: No.
J: Fag!

Blast from the past. Dug this up recently -- something I posted on the internet on 22 December 1992, when I was going to school in Orlando, and working at Kennedy Space Center. Was this really more than ten years ago? I refuse to believe it.

WHY MY DRIVE TO WORK IS MORE INTERESTING THAN YOURS

Mile 7: Leave civilization, enter Bithlo. Home of more junkyards per capita than any other city. I don't mean to imply that the place is "redneck", but I live in morbid fear that my foreign car will break down here some day. If you're black, forget it.

Mile 12: Pass a local baptist church bent on ridding the nation of the evil scourge of evolutionary theory. They have a road sign with replacable letters -- past signs have read "FOSSILS -- WHAT DO THEY MEAN?", "DINOSAUR MYSTERY EXPLAINED", and "MYTHS OF EVOLUTION".

Mile 15: Enter the city of Christmas, famous only for it's post office (you can guess why, and you can guess when).

Mile 17: The chicken mailbox. Papier mache monstrosity of a chicken, that lasted about 3 days before a drunken redneck took a Louisville Slugger to it and knocked off its head.

Mile 20: Pass Gator Jungle, a tourist attraction. Basically an alligator zoo, remarkable in that the entire building facing the road is shaped like a huge gator. Tourists enter through the mouth, which is open to reveal sparkling white fiberglass teeth.

Just last week there was an accident immediately opposite Gator Jungle where a guy in a Cordoba plowed dead-on into a cow that had wandered into the road. They guy's car was totalled, and the cow was reduced to a steaming heap of beef.

Miles 22-27: Swampland -- airboat rides, poor people fishing, and a boiled peanut stand.

Mile 29: A gas station called "Space Shuttle Fuels". I resist the urge daily to pull in and ask the guy to fill it up with liquid hydrogen.

Mile 32: Space Camp, featuring a life-size mockup of the space shuttle overlooking the road. One day there was smoke coming out of the engines, but it turned out it was just a fire.

Mile 33: Cross the Indian River, replete with manatees (sea cows), dolphins and guys in clamming boats (who are out there at sunup, regardless of the weather).

Miles 35-40: During mating season, alligators can be regularly be seen haunting the canals on the side of the road. Once saw a tourist (or "touron" as they are known) who had pulled over and was taunting a gator, with his young son behind him. He was apparently oblivious to the fact that gators can move much faster than humans. Natural selection will swiftly weed out this sort of stupidity, I hope.

Mile 41: Spaceport USA. Features the multi-million dollar Astronaut Memorial, a black monolith with the names of dead astronauts engraved in it, which is supposed to continually rotate to face the sun, so that the astronauts names are continually emblazoned. It has never worked right.

Mile 43: Work: sit down, telnet back 43 miles to UCF, and bring up Usenet.

It's not a toomuh. The blotch on my gammy leg is nothing more than pigmented purpuric dermatitis (please note that the picture of the guy with the hairy ass on that page is NOT ME).

Rare, but harmless. Amputation will not be necessary.

Dig this crazy diagnosis:

Skin shows orthokeratosis, acanthosis and spaced out elongated rete ridges. Dermal papillae and upper dermis has perivascular lymphocytic infiltrate. Red cell extravasate is present. Numerous siderophages are seen.

The steroid ointment I'm to put on it cost S$1.70, or about a buck U.S. What sort of crazy health care system are they running here?

I've been meaning to do something like this; the May Day Project, where you document a day in your life with pictures. Soon, I promise. In the meanwhile, it's a fun site to poke around. A surprising number of Singaporeans participated.

Happy Mother's Day to me mum!

Tomorrow should be interesting. We're going over to my boss's new apartment; he's having it blessed by a Sri Lankan priest (referred to him by his maid). There's some things we have to watch out for, like not to sit higher than him, and not to pass him anything. The maid is cooking lunch; a bunch of Sri Lankan food, whatever that is (supposedly a lot like South Indian).

During a jog the other night, I realized that we are spitting (sneezing?) distance from Tan Tock Seng, Singapore's SARS hospital. Maybe we'll go out to dinner on nights when we're downwind.

Trivial pursuits. We were regulars at bar trivia in Atlanta, so we had been trying to track down somewhere here to play it. Finally we found a British pub up the road -- The Yard -- that plays the first Tuesday of every month. Strange format, almost like a test; they read out the questions, and you just wrote all the answers down on a sheet of paper which they then graded. We did really good, thanks to American mass media, which seemed to be the source of most of their questions (there was a section on Singapore too, which we totally bombed on). Just the two of us nearly beat everyone. Marjorie had fun obnoxiously correcting them on one question, which led to this exchange:

Her: "Excuse me, but Sid Vicious killed his girlfriend in New York, not London!"
Other team: "Sheesh, you got it right, didn't you?"
Her: "Yeah, but people deserve to know the TRUTH!"
Me: "Yeah, you can't HANDLE the truth!"

The best part is, the rules are kind of lax, and we were offered the job of RUNNING the contest the next month. So we're trying to come up with some good (read: not America-centric) questions.

Geeks, yeah, we know.

Ick. Back on line again, from home. After several failed attempts to get an XP boot disk locally (I didn't want to have to wait for one through the mail), and a failed attempt to load FreeBSD instead, I ended up going with the most hateful option. I bought XP again. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go take a shower.

Rrrrr. I have my new hard disk installed on my laptop, but have run into the wall trying to reinstall Windows XP. I have a product key for it, but not the original installation disks, and any other installation disks will not work because you can't reuse license keys that way. My options are: 1. Buy it all over again, for US$200. 2. Get a pirated version. 3. Give Microsoft the finger and go install Linux.

I know everyone thinks Microsoft is scrupulous and honest and non-manipulative, but I'm starting to wonder.

Bother, bother, bother. The hard disk on our home computer has been screeching at us of late, and is about to take a dirt nap. I am endeavoring to swap it out and save all the info off of it, but it may be a day or two before we're back to being able to post regular blogs. Is our apartment building built on top of an ancient Asian burial ground or something?

Walking along yesterday when a flying lizard skimmed just over our heads, alighting on a thin tree just in front of us. How cool is that? We got a good look at him on the tree; about six inches long, brown with a blue-green head, and had a neck wattle that he could thrust out.

Mixed bag.

We (my cow orker and I) were supposed to have heard back already about the contract that would've had me going down to Tasmania for a month. The delay is having us think that it might not happen. We had a strong proposal, so I haven't lost hope.

We have AC again ("aircon" is the term that just rolls off people's tongues here). It is blessed relief.

Take a gander at my favorite movies as well as my least favorite.

SARS notes: Been seeing fewer masks this week, but have noticed many people kick doors open rather than touch the handle.

At the hawker center near my work they have "Sheep Scourge Soup". It's listed next to the "Sheep Tongue Soup", and has a very unappetizing picture of a bowl of grayish looking broth with some sort of organ floating in it. By the gods, they'd have no problem filming Fear Factor here.

I had no idea that Isaac Asimov died of AIDS.

Currently reading The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester, which, had I known it was published in 1956, I probably wouldn't have bought. But it's fantastic and I'm glad I did. Someone should really make a movie of it.

Singapore medicine. I have a lesion on my ankle that's been there for many years. Today I got it checked out, at Singapore's National Skin Center. Even without all the right paperwork, I was in and out in about forty-five minutes. That included an examination and a tissue sample taken after a numbing shot (which actually hurt like heck). Health care is cheap here, too, it seems, from the stories I've heard, although mine wasn't all THAT cheap -- S$210, or about $120 U.S. That's still probably a lot cheaper than it would have cost me back in the States. The big bummer will be missing soccer for a couple of weeks while the stitch heals.

A great game today. Played my best game of soccer in ten years. Even scored a goal -- against our own team. That was the only slip-up, and it wasn't really my fault (ball bouncing on near goal line, one of our guys tried to clear it right through me) . Very fun, beating a team that's better than you.

We went to the Night Safari again last night. The otters were the most amusing; about thirty of them were all screeching at each other, and us, at the same time. The malay tigers were pretty cool, too; they used to be native here, so they're perfectly adapted to the forest here. Last year when we visited the bat cage, one of the humongous flying foxes let us walk right up to him while he was eating, but this time they stayed on the roof (although we got buzzed a couple of times).

We took pictures, but the only good one was this shot out over the big lake in the center of Singapore.

When the apartment's running down, you make the best of what's still around. Guy came today to fix the AC which had been broken for four days. They seemed to fix it, but it quit on us again after two hours. Two words to describe the repair people in this town: for shit. Remember, we are already dealing with a washer/dryer that has already had FIVE visits from a repairman and now works worse than when we started. And I forgot to mention, the other day, just after we commiserating each other over how our apartment is falling apart, the faucet in the sink just fell off while we were cooking, spraying water everywhere.

We may just have to figure out how the British colonialists did it, back in the day, without air conditioning. I'll start by drinking more Singapore slings, and maybe get one of those guys to sit out on the porch, pulling a rope to work a ceiling fan inside.