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!

Back in ATL: We've already been able to indulge our craving for Nuevo Laredo, now it's on to Burrito Art with our friends Rick and Stephanie. Later this evening I suspect we'll rent another uncensored movie, since we feel deprived in Singapore. It's been nice to spend some time with Beau and Sadie (doggies), and with my parents, plus I finally got my first full-night of sleep since returning to the States, as the jet lag is finally fading.
Mark didn't mention that we also saw a beautiful bald eagle at the Enchanted Forest. My first siting our our national symbol in the wild.

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 (like Duran Duran) 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. 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.

Out out damned snot! Mark's given me his headcold as an early Christmas present (is this like a lump of coal?). I'm hoping it will pass through my body before I have to get on a plane. Long-distance plane rides are already so fun, throw in a head cold and I'm sure it will be pure bliss.

20 Years ago, I saw my first concert at the Hampton coliseum in Hampton, VA. Duran Duran were my favorite band then, as depicted by the hundreds of posters of them I had plastered around my bedroom walls, and the scrapbook of shoplifted and legitimately acquired teenbeat magazine photos with their favorite ice cream flavors, movies, and eye colours.
Full circle: Tonight I again saw Simon LeBon and the boys gyrating around on stage singing "Save a Prayer" and the other classics. It was much fun, but I can't help but feel ancient thinking about my teen fanatic self. To their credit, I think my interest in the band developed, not only my fetishism for men in make-up, but also a more sophisticated taste in music through forays into other New Wave bands such as the Split-Enz, the Psychedelic Furs, and later on The Smiths and New Order. By the age of fourteen, I'd already become embarassed by my earlier devotion to the "fab five". Maybe now it's time to pull out the old albums again.

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.

Bah, humbug. Christmas's opening act is a month made of Mondays. Serving suggestion: garnish with head cold. "Most wonderful time of the year"? Don't make me hit you.

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 (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!

Marjorie and I have that psychic connection (that's so annoying in other married couples ;-), where we know what each other is thinking, often saying things at the same time, and being instantly able to read each other's moods. Which is why it was so surprising to me tonight that for the first time in forever, while we sat and watched Love Actually, I totally misread her body language, and got up as the credits rolled expecting her to totally love it. But despite the chick-flick theme, I was the one who dug it, while she apparently couldn't wait for it to end. Strange. So, go see it, or, as Marjorie would advise, don't.

Squeaky wheel gets to bitch: Fed ex isn't very express here. My lovely father, who has been very good to us lately in our attempts to scrounge up information for Australia, fedexed a package to me on Dec. 3 (or was it the 2nd Dad?). Anyway, I understand that there are time differences and weekends, but after checking their website today and seeing they claim to have attempted to deliver my package at a time when I was here, I called to complain, and no, tomorrow morning isn't good enough, it's supposed to be express damn it. Anyway, they're supposed to try again this evening. I'm not holding my breath.

Selfish gifting promotion: Anyone (family) looking for ideas for gift ideas for us, we both have amazon wish lists. Just FYI.

After the movie 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?

We found a bit of "Christmas cheer" yesterday: We saw Elf. Will Ferrell is very funny, and this movie has the potential to be a huge Christmas classic. It's funny, without being cynical, and there's no reason the kid couldn't see and enjoy it.
We also got an early present for me (us?), by way of altering Mark, but I'll let him blog about that.

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 little gem of a movie. We also rented Hulk and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which were bad and "meh", respectively.

I've been so depressed by the weather here lately. I'm sooo sick of being hot, and at this time of year, when Christmas trees and decorations are everywhere, it seems wrong that it's not at least a little chilly. I can't wait to be home and be cold. Of course I'm sure I will complain about this too. The countdown's started though, it's going to be a long month until I get on the plane homebound.

Write write write. 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.

Our "Thanksgiving" was indeed successful. We managed to turn out a reasonably tasty turkey breast, as well as mashed potatoes, green bean casserole, fruit cocktail, sweet potato souffle, salad, and a gravy of questionable beginnings but that managed to be good in spite of itself. I even baked a pumpkin pie. And nothing sucked. And we didn't fight during the cooking process. We were amazed at how well it all turned out. It might have even given us the confidence to attempt this again.
I even managed to avoid the hangover (caused by two bottles of red, one bottle of white, and a six pack of Foster's between four people) by drinking a lot of water and taking an aspirin before bed.

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.

Lucky for us our friend Ashim, whom we know from Atlanta, had a layover in Singapore today on his way to India so we had a chance to catch up. In three hours we managed to take in Thai food at the Golden Mile complex, check out the Raffles hotel and Raffles City, then walk over to the Esplanade to have a drink while admiring the Merlion in the distance. It was great to see him, and even luckier, he's coming back with his wife and son for four days in December before heading home. Can't wait to see them again.

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.

The Veteran

When I was young and bold and strong,
O, right was right, and wrong was wrong!
My plume on high, my flag unfurled,
I rode away to right the world.
Come out, you dogs, and fight! said I,
And wept there was but once to die.

But I am old; and good and bad
Are woven in a crazy plaid.
I sit and say, "The world is so;
And he is wise who lets it go.
A battle lost, a battle won ~
The difference is small, my son."

Inertia rides and riddles me;
The which is called Philosophy.

--Dorothy Parker

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.

How great are my parents? I mentioned not being able to watch NFL on Thanksgiving, and what came in the mail today from the other side of the world but a video cassette of one of last week's games. True, it turns out they are going to show one on TV here, but they aren't showing a game I'm interested in. Now I have to scare up a VCR. Thanks, Mom and Dad!

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.

Other people's blogs: I've noticed that we have been popping up on some other people's blog links. It's strange, especially if you've never seen the blog before. That said I certainly enjoy many other people's blogs and even in the worst mood (as lately. I blame hormones) three in particular always seem to cheer me up:
I am the monkey- she's Australian, frequently hilarious, and rather warped.
Eeksy-Peeksy- for a silly name, the man is clearly brilliant. He seems to express the biggest thoughts using the most succinct words. Subtle, eloquent. I'd love to read a novel by him.
Metamorphosism- Very witty, and doesn't take himself too seriously. He almost never fails to put a smile on my face with his wry humour.
Eeksy and Metamorphosism are both professional writers I believe, and expats living in Europe. Our blog seems very clumsy to me sometimes after visiting theirs.
Note to Margaret Cho regarding her blog, the Elliot Smith lyrics you misquoted from St. Ides Heaven are "the moon is a light bulb breaking", not "alive. Ball breaking" and are published in the liner notes.

Feeling rather depressed today. Listening to KCRW on-line I heard Elliott's new single, and was reminded that there will be just a few more new songs from him, and then nothing more. Sucks.
The real reason for my low mood though is that it's just so lonely here for us. Mark and I rely so much on each other, and we both need friends. We have a few nice acquaintances we see socially on a semi-regular basis, but in general we don't get out much and the social isolation is getting to me.
At home when I felt lonely, I could always go to my parents house and borrow a buddy (Beau or Sadie or both) for a few days. No doggies here to borrow, and I'm not sure the land lady would allow it anyway. Sigh.

Mark's description of what happened at my office is flattering, but inaccurate. I'm very grateful he was there though. What really happened (as far as I can remember) is that the client, who had been suspected of surfing porn on our computers-which led to many porn pop-ups coming up on our computers at random times, including once while I was helping another client find information on a school (very graphic pics, I was mortified), anyway, the client came into the office and I told him he needed to leave as he had abused his membership privledges and was no longer allowed to use our computers. I based the decision to eject him on the proven fact that he had recently been rearranging our office equipment when we weren't looking even though he had been expressly told not to do that.
Long story short I told him to leave and he refused for a seemingly long time, he lingered for atleast 15 minutes, continually interrupting a session I was having with another client and basically really upsetting me. He's a freak, with a long history at our office of being socially inappropriate (i.e. interrupting sessions with other clients, continually asking the same questions, basically being an ass). I'm really hoping he doesn't come back, but I wouldn't be surprised if he shows up again.
Also for clarification I didn't tell the other student that Mechanical Engineering and Criminology would be an "odd" major, I said "unusual" and difficult due to the course load in most Engineering programs. I did make the McGyver comment though when asked what you could do with the combined degrees.

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.

The game. Science fiction writer Hal Clement writes:

"Writing a science fiction story is fun, not work. ... the fun... lies in treating the whole thing as a game. ... the rules must be quite simple. They are; for the reader of a science-fiction story, they consist of finding as many as possible of the author's statements or implications which conflict with the facts as science currently understands them. For the author, the rule is to make as few such slips as he possibly can. ... Certain exceptions are made [e.g., to allow travel faster than the speed of light, but] fair play demands that all such matters be mentioned as early as possible in the story..."

Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself, presuming that other people will actually end up reading this science fiction story I'm working on, but for the last few evenings I've been trying to do my homework on my hard-science subject matter, for the reasons he cites. It is fun. I've only written a few actual snippets of story written so far, but I have a page or two of solid plot worked out. I've been thinking about little else these days while on buses, trains, and toilets. Only occasionally is the little doubter in my brain chiming in. I'm wondering if maybe famous people are just people who are born without that little punk. Or maybe, in the grand tradition of American letters, they just kill him with alcohol. ;-)

No smilies in my story, I promise.

Update: Too weird. I quoted this Hal Clement guy, then in looking up more about him, found that he died only seven days ago.

Singlish.
If you were interested in how much of the population in Singapore speaks, this is an excellent example of Singlish in the form of a well known fable. I personally do not understand all the Singlish words (I'd need my Coxford Singlish Dictionary). I stole this off somebody else's website, who stole it from a defunct website, so I don't feel too guilty.

The 3 Little Pigs – Singapore version

Ones apron a time got tree little pig, call them Ah Beng, Ah Seng and Ah Tee. They think they big already and no wan to liv with mama, because liv with mama sometimes quite pek chek and also can become suaku! So they say goodbye to their mama and go out of house. Mama tell them to be careful of the big, bad woof, because you know, this big, bad sabo king want to eat them. They tell their mama, "we know lah, not scared one". We build house so woof cannot get us. If he try, he will be sorry.

The first pig, Ah Beng he think he very clever, he also cannot wait one, very kancheong type you know. So he build a house very quickly. Finish very fast- how? Aiyoh, he use straw lor, just tie and tie and tie together and then very quick okay already.

This woof very clever kay see, so he pretend and say nice things and ask Ah Beng to let him to inside house. Little Ah Beng also quite clever, he say, "No way man, I know you, don't bluff. Sorry you not welcome here".

The woof say "U no let me in mare? U dare mare? I blow your house down then you know". And he blow and blow and he poon and poon and he use all his inside strength and jia lat man, Ah Beng's house come down.

...

Moral of the story :->

Number 1 - do things slow, slow, must plan, think, plan, nowsdays they say strategic planning. No lush and lush and chin chai build. Chin chai do things ownself die - never think, how can use straw build house, how can house be strong, sure kanna one lah.

Number 2 - don't be so tum sim. Blow down one house, two house not enough want to blow until all tree. Given people some face, don't be too hao lian! In the end too tum sim also kanna - woof kanna heart attack.
Same lah we all also like that, enough is enough, some people pia until they mati.

Number 3 - those who got must kongsi with those who no got then the world sure better place. Remember : if you have and your neightbor no have, kongsi lah. And those who tumpang must know cannot tumpang too long, or else. But when kongsi right hand must not know what left hand give or else no use lah.
This mean kongsi quietly, don't let whole world know you give okay.
Very chim, right?

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 lot 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.

BBC List Part Two: I've done everything on Mark's list and a few more than Mark by virtue of living in Hawaii as a kid:
30. Trek through a rainforest- We went rainforest camping on Kauai when I was a kid. It was an amazing, and very wet family adventure. I lost all four of my front teeth on the trip, but not due to an accident, just the right age for it.
37. Fly over a volcano- I've actually hiked into Mt. Kilauea with my family. Hopefully, someday soon I can do this again with Mark.
I've also been Whale-watching (#4). We did that when we lived in Massachusetts.

I mostly agree with Mark's "will do, someday" list, but he's on his own for Antartica. Brrrrr.

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...

RSS. This blog now has an RSS feed, for those of you with a predeliction for aggregating. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, never mind; ignore this post.) I don't use an aggregator, so someone please tell me if it's working...

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.

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...

Some other differences about Singapore:
1. On any given evening, you can find people executing tai chi exercises outside their flats.

2. A frighteningly large number of men here keep there fingernails long and filed to a point.

3. Meat is frequently presented in "ball" form: Fish balls, beef balls, etc..

4. Some people seem very reluctant to admit they don't know something, and would rather tell you something that is complete and total pants before admitting they don't know. I believe this has something to do with loss of "face". A recent example of this would be our interaction with a waiter at a bar on Dempsey road recently. We asked him how to get to Sammy's Curry House from the bar, and then inquired if we could just walk up the road. He nodded and agreed we could just walk up the road, I asked how far it was, at this point he admitted he had no idea where it was. Truly helpful. In his defense, I think for many Singaporeans it is considered more polite to agree with someone who may be wrong then to admit you don't know.

5. Often when a person is agreeing to a possibility or looking for affirmation from you the word used is "can" as in "can this be done?" or "can" as in "it can be done" rather than saying "yes".

6. Questions are frequently asked by adding "is it?" to the end of a sentence. For example "You are American, is it?". This is probably the first Singlish expression adopted by expats here. You can gauge how long someone has been here by the number of "is it?"s they use.

7. Attentive costumer service is the norm here. It's hard to be ignored when you go into a store to browse. Even if you say you don't want any help, service people tend to linger just inside the discomfort range.

8. At the movies, you buy your tickets based on seating assignments; you can't just go in and sit wherever you want. We personally love this strategy as you don't need to rush to the theater to get a good seat once the tickets are purchased.

9. Eggs are sold unrefrigerated.

10. Meat is typically sold in packages advertised as "Frozen: thawed for your convenience". This always makes me wonder how old the meat is originally. There's no "frozen on this date" label.

A different tangent:
I was dive bombed by a crow this week. I must have been too close to it's nest/babies. The irony is that I've been somewhat obsessed with the limited number of crows I'd seen recently, as I'd heard there was a campaign to cull the crows due to their dive-bombing behavior and tendency to get into people's garbage. I'm still sympathetic to the crows, but must admit that it freaked me out having the one guy run his/her gnarly claws through my hair. The crows in question are located right next to the school where I work (which is right off Orchard road) and have attacked more people than just me. I wouldn't be surprised if these guys are killed by the cullers over the weekend.

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?

I was a fan of Elliott's too. In fact, Marjorie and I bonded over him on our first date. Here are some tributes to him out there on the web. I don't want to have to link to any more tributes any time soon.

Eliiott Smith killed himself; an apparently self-inflicted stab wound. Anyone who knows me well knows how much I admired this man. He was a tremendous talent, and frankly, a really nice person. What a waste.

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.

Sad news. A guy I knew, but never met (as is so common in the internet era), ended his life last week. He went by the name "Sofa". I've been on a couple of different mailing lists with him over the years, and we exchanged emails on occasion. He posted comments here frequently while we were in Vietnam. Here are a few tributes to him out on the web.

Freaking tragic. I had really hoped to meet him some day.

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?

"Don't be a sickie!" I'm ill. Fortunate timing too as we have our first visitor in town. To her credit, Jen's been super about my pathetic state and has gone off to Changi Museum, Palau Ubin, and now to Malacca on her own. I'm starting to feel human again after two days in bed sneezing and coughing. Mark's already feeling the beginnings of his own bout as well. The one thing worse than the symptoms of your own illness, is the guilt of passing it on to your loved ones. Hopefully Jen will manage to avoid all the germs floating around us, the 30 hour plane-ride back to Atlanta is bad enough without a cold.

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 now officially have two jobs, which is nice, but I've been running since we got back from our trip, so this is the first chance I've had to blog.
Tokyo notes:
*There are VERY LARGE crows there who say "caw" as if taught to crow by humans. It's as if their hearts aren't really in it. "Caw, caw", it almost sounds sarcastic.
*Toyko-ans are a very well groomed lot, and they seem to be big on hats, which is cool with us because Mark enjoys it when I try on hats on our vacations. He thinks I look good in hats. For many of the vacations we've taken together you can find a picture of me trying on a hat
*We went to an interesting temple/cemetary, the Zojoji Temple, in which there where several rows of Jizobosatsu statues, which are the protectors of the souls of still born or otherwise aborted babies. Their parents write messages on tablets that hang near the Jizobosatsu statues; one of the messages was in English, it was a letter to an unborn child from berieved parents, very sad and touching. The statues themselves are dressed in little red bonnets and surrounded with little toy windmills. Some people might find the place very bizarre, personally I thought there was a really beautiful gesture in the whole idea.
*One of my favorite excursions was to Shimo-kitazawa, a really cute and funky neighborhood that took us away from some of the neon overkill of Shinjuku or Ginza (not that we didn't love that). The neighborhood seemed a bit like East Atlanta or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a bit less expensive than other areas in Tokyo, but still cool and trendy.
*We purchased the new Rufus Wainwright Cd when we were there. I'm really enjoying it. Rufus rocks the house.
Overall, we both really enjoyed ourselves in Tokyo, and found the subway system much easier to negotiate then we expected it to be. Tokyo's well worth seeing if you have the chance. Hopefully we'll get to see more of Japan in the future.

As Marjorie mentioned, we just got back from Tokyo, and boy are our feet tired. We thought we walked a lot in Singapore, but we earned our Urban Hiker merit badges this weekend.

It was a very short trip -- a day traveling, two complete days there, and a day traveling back. It was all we could afford to take off at this point. We never realized before, that it's as far from Singapore to Tokyo as it is from Atlanta to Anchorage, Alaska. When I was living in Atlanta it was inconceivable that we would ever bop up to Anchorage for the weekend, but now that we're so far from everything we've developed an amazing tolerance for spending a day in a plane. What's bad is that we seem perfectly willing to bankrupt ourselves in the process of taking these trips; as soon as we get a few hundred saved up, it seems, we wander over to Travelocity.

We had a teaser visit to Tokyo once before -- a one day stopover two years ago. We coulda shoulda woulda stayed for longer but we were chicken. We loved our one day there, and it wasn't that scary, so we decided to go back, for TWO whole days this time.

ANYway. On the bus ride into town, we oriented ourselves by the Tokyo Tower, which we remembered from last time. It's Tokyo's answer to the Eiffel Tower. We lost sight of it eventually, until we got to our room, open the curtains, and it was RIGHT THERE. Across the street. Crazy.

Our first day was spent figuring out the train system, which we handled pretty well during the trip, as long as we had two brains and sets of eyes working together on it. Many of the signs, quite rudely I must say, didn't even have English translations. We rode out to some of the funkier districts and shopped all day, then had a few Bass Ales (which we had been missing) then tried to find the restaurant in Roppongi that we ate at last time. No luck -- they seem to have moved around the streets and buildings or something. So we just picked a different one at random and had another fantastic meal.

Monday we explored more districts, including the one famous for its "love hotels", that have hourly rates posted. We made a late try for the Imperial Palace only to find that it's closed Mondays. So we just wandered some more, cleaned up, then went out to the Ginza district for dinner. Ended up in "Yakatori Alley" which is lined with small sidewalk eateries serving up fried
veggies and meats and other animal parts. The "pig intestine" was bad enough, but then you read down the menu and see "pig intestine END". We found some safer sounding things to order, and it was all delicious. Much to the amusement of some surrounding customers, Marjorie tried to pay for the meal with about $700 worth of yen. We are lucky the lady was honest!

So mostly it was just random exploring and shopping, but Tokyo is one of those cities where just being there is enough. There's always something to look at or smell or taste or listen to. We even had an exploratory conversation about trying to move there, but I think we really can't afford to make the move right now.

There was a special treat on our final day. We awoke right around sunrise to catch our plane, and when we finally opened the windows, we caught a rare glimpse of Mount Fuji, right through the supports of the Tokyo Tower. It's not often that the air there is clear enough to see it.

We just crawled in, back from Tokyo. We had a terrific time and will definitely write more about it after a decent night's sleep. Tokyo is definitely among the world's most fun (and most expensive) cities.
Thanks to everyone who sent me birthday greetings here and via e-mail. I appreciate it, especially now that we're so far from home.

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.

Things are looking up! I found the super cheap Tokyo flight that I was hoping to come across (S$418 ea.) so we're off for Tokyo for a couple of days soon. I'm very excited about our trip. Mark and I spent a little over 24 hours in Tokyo two years ago and loved it! It will be great to have a bit more time to poke around.
Other good news:
* Our friend Jen is coming to see us in mid-October. She'll be our first visitor and is lucky enough to have scheduled her visit around Thimithi, a Hindu festival in which some of the faithful walk across fire in Little India. Should be weird and wonderful.
*My volunteer position will probably turn into a paid position sometime in the next two weeks (keep fingers crossed).
Other things I'm hopeful about and are looking forward too as possibilities:
*Mark's possible contract in Tasmania. If he gets it, I'll go down to spend atleast a week with him. Hopefully we'll have a chance to check out Melbourne too.
*Coming home for Christmas. We haven't booked our tickets yet, but should have them in hand by early October. It will be Mark's first trip home in a year, and my third. Guess who's more home-sick?
If all these things happen I think the next 3-4 months might be pretty cool.
Things that suck: We heard back from Australia, with an acknowledgment of receipt of our application. They told us to expect the visa processing time to be 50 weeks and not to contact them in that time because they're busy and BTW may put your application on the bottom of the pile if you harass them. Oh well, I can't say we were surprised by the 50 week estimate. Still sucks though.

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.

Foodie alert. Here's a nice long piece on eating in Singapore from (of all places) the New York Times. I only know where to find about two of the places they mention. We've been missing a lot, it seems.

Trial by lack of supervision. Today is my first day in our big new office, all alone, as I will be for the next two to three months. Party time, right? Wrong. I am much happier when working productively and getting feedback. There is a constant temptation to slack off that I must overcome. The fact that our new neighborhood is borderline magical doesn't make things any easier. There are something like seven temples within two blocks of me, and a veritable cornucopia of food sellers.

I am determined to resist tempation and be productive. Woops, probably shouldn't be blogging.

Slow boat down under. We've mailed off our paperwork applying to migrate to Australia. A twenty page form, plus about as many pages of marriage records, proofs of employment, CVs, passport photos, all stamped, certified, and checked over four or five times... Together it all weighed exactly as much as a back monkey.

Optimistic estimate: six months to process. Pessimistic: eighteen months. Realistic: twelve. (Relativistic: negative six months. Sorry, geek joke.)

Art is dead. Apparently geckos don't have to be alive to stick to the wall. I knocked him down just awhile ago. He was already starting to decompose. Poor guy. He was alive a couple of days ago, wiggling around the kitchen. I wonder what happened to kill him.

Wildlife adventure, living room stylee. Marjorie knocked the tail off a gecko while vacuuming this afternoon. I held the tail in my hand while it twitched for over a minute. It was trippy.

There's another tailless gecko in our kitchen that's been sitting high up on the wall for over a day in the same position. We've named him Art. He looks like a Matisse cutout.

I'm still here! Generally, when I take a long break between posts it's either because a) nothing exiting is happening in my life or b) I'm really busy. This time it was B. I'm finally (semi) employed, working three days a week as a classroom facilitator for a child with special needs. I'm in a class with my charge and about 12 other three year olds. I love kids at that age, they're so funny. They are just getting beyond the babyish stage to the point where they're able to do a lot of things for themselves (like feed themselves and use the toilet), but are still so new to the world and have these fabulous observations and comments.
I'm also still volunteering at the education information center. My time there is really valuable to me in what I'm learning about Singaporeans. I'm hoping that (soon) my volunteering will turn into a paid part-time position.
On other fronts, we're both jonesing to get out of S'pore for a few days in the very near future. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that a great deal to Tokyo is going to magically appear.

We watched 'Bounce' the other night. Why is Ben Affleck famous again? We kept thinking they should've had a stunt-actor, to step in whenever some real emotion was required. There was one good scene, where he was almost mauled (and upstaged) by a rottweiller.

(Then again, last week we watched 'Shakespeare In Love', and it pained us to admit it, but he was actually good. He needs to play more pompous asses.)

New digs. I've been having a pretty hectic week. We're moving into a new office, and my boss is going to be splitting the country this weekend, for two, maybe three months, so we're having to get everything set up. The office is in a really great location -- a place called Club Street on the edge of Chinatown. There are restaurants, pubs, and all sorts of other interesting things within a block or two. I promise to do a photo series of the area once we're settled.

Thank God for the internet! Really, life would be so much harder and less pleasant for us if it weren't for modern technology. My latest joy is listening to KCRW on-line. KCRW rocks the house, NPR and good music too(I'm listening to radiohead now) what more could you want? I discovered them in LA on my most recent trip through (thanks again Kristina). They must be one of the coolest station in the world, guess I should subscribe, huh?

If you could invite any three people, living or dead, to a dinner party, who would it be? goes the old cliche. Until recently, my hypothetical dinner table had one empty seat (the other two being occupied by Richard Feynman and Benjamin Franklin). But, judging from my latest read, the last little place setting card will read "Dorothy Parker". She's best known for her satiric light verse ("Men seldom make passes/At girls who wear glasses"), but she did great short stories as well. And literary criticism. Did she invent sarcasm? Probably not, but the case could be made the she invented modern sarcasm. She was way ahead of her times. Dig this, from a review she wrote in 1927:

The professor starts right off with "No matter what may one's nationality, sex, age, philosophy, or religion, everyone wishes either to become or to remain happy." Well, there's no arguing that one. The author has us there. There is the place for getting out the pencil, underscoring the lines, and setting "how true", followed by several carefully executed exclamation points, in the margin. It is regrettable that the book did not come out during the season when white violets were in bloom, for there is the very spot to press one.

Love it.

We just got back from a live gig of original music, yes, original music, in Singapore, at The Substation. And it was really good. It was a listening room type of thing, and was packed to the gills too, leaving us to sit on the floor. Our uncomfortable seating arrangement drove us out before it might have, but we saw about ten songs by couple of bands.

Tomorrow is for WOMAD, which I'm excited about...

Elvis has left the building. If you know me, you know I've been a rabid Elvis Costello fan for years (I used to run this web page). Well, I recently procured an advance copy of his latest album, North. And wow, it really lacks goodness. He's trying to do some slow neo-classical lounge music thing or something. The word "godawful" springs to mind. It's not that I hate all his experiments. The Juliet Letters is my desert-island disk, and I really like Painted From Memory. But holy cow, he is going to be savaged by critics and fans alike with this new stuff.

Wireless world. During a crosstown taxi ride I encountered today's Something New -- on-demand taxi TV! A little console in the back, where I could bring up news, sports, city guides, or, much to my driver's chagrin, music videos (on MTV Asia, again). Probably not many sixty-year-old Chinese men like the White Stripes. I kept the volume low.

Most of my heroes don't appear on no stamps. But they appear on MTV Asia, occasionally. We just caught Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" video, which was partially censored, but lots of things we didn't expect slipped through. MTV is often a whole lot better out here than back Stateside -- there are hints of what MTV used to be, back when we and it were cool.

We're surprised sometimes here, like the other day with The Secretary, which was apparently not edited either (according to Marjorie, who saw it in the States).

Maybe we'll go pop in "Do The Right Thing" now.

I forgot to mention that many of the animals in the zoo were feeling friendly as well. We saw some mouse deer (mice deer?) and a couple of some kind of monkey getting the freak on, always good for a giggle (we're so immature). Also saw some mild territory dispute amongst the lions with some territorial spraying for good measure. Mark also really appreciated the naked mole rat exhibit. They're pretty strange little animals; they have colonies sortof like ants and bees with a queen mole rat who is the only breeder. I love the zoo.

Mark and I went to the Singapore Zoo today. We're "friends of the zoo" here, as we were in Atlanta. The zoo here really is amazing. Many of the animals are in cage-free exhibits, including the howler monkeys, and large african storks.
We've resigned ourselves to being here in Singapore a bit longer than we originally planned. We're starting the migration process to Australia (truly painful) and have estimates that this process could take anywhere from 6 to 20 months. The reality is that it's not at all practical to move back to the States before going on to Australia; it just doesn't make since financially, especially since Mark has a relatively stable job here.
I've been keeping myself busy lately volunteering at the United States Education Information Center. I answer questions about U.S. colleges and universities. It's rather interesting, and it's amazing how many Singaporean kids think they can go to Harvard (not likely kids). I've also been taking Spanish classes " Yo soy alumna de espagnol". Still, I'd prefer to be busy with a paying job. I'm working on it.

Interesting Singapore Factoid #871: Many Singaporeans slow down at traffic accident scenes, not to rubberneck, but to get the numbers off the license plates of the cars involved. It's for the lottery. The belief is that the license plate numbers had bad luck, and must be evened out by good luck in the future.

Booted. No more spiffy downtown office. The guy I work with and the bossman of the office where I was squatting got into a bit of a row. Thought it was going to get ugly, but luckily it fizzled before anybody had to get escorted out of the office. I'm going to be working at my cow orker's house for a while, while we look for a new office. Ups my 40 minute commute to about 45, and mostly by bus now, too, so I'll get all pukey if I try to read. And he has no AC. Ratsafratsa.

We saw Secretary tonight. It was good. If you've seen it, maybe you can answer me a question -- I've been away from the States for a while; are law offices typically like they're depicted in Secretary, or are they more like on Ally McBeal?

Woo hoo 80's! The concert was more fun than we expected. It was a great venue in the middle of town, with lit up skyscrapers in every direction, and it was a nice cool overcast evening. We were cordoned off 50 yards from the stage, since we bought the cheap tickets. There was a local band who opened, who did covers (natch); we were treated to their interpretations of Coldplay, U2, the Beatles, Dave Matthews, and Lynrd Skynrd. Go West was next; they were okay. I only recognized one song. Then ABC. Unfortunately, if you're in ABC, you pretty much have to wear a suit, no matter how hot your concert venue is. The lead singer was resplendent in a purple one this night. They ran through pretty much all their hits; they sounded great, and were well appreciated. Level 42 was last, boring, and enough to send us home.

Why, why, why is this town obsessed with a glam ballad that's more than a decade old? I hated it when it came out; now I loathe it. Extreme's "More Than Words". I hear it nearly every day, in a restaurant, mall, or taxi.

Then again, who am I to judge? We're going to see Level 42, Go West, and ABC tonight, on the pretext that we both kind of like ABC. Shoot that poison arrow, baby.

This is your brain on drugs. Try this. While sitting at your desk make clockwise circles with your right foot. While doing your foot is circling clockwise, draw the number "6" in the air with your right hand.

What direction is your foot going now?

The forces of darkness are winning.

Worms. The new Blaster worm attacked my home computer yesterday. I didn't realize it at the time. I'm good about running Windows Update to get the security patches but somehow it still got through. If you get a warning saying that your computer will reboot in 60 seconds, that's it.

Viruses. I just got another virus mailed to me, which of course I didn't open, but it's still the fourth time in the last month.

Spam. I'm still getting twenty a day, five of which manage to oil their way into my Inbox. I love the new strategy of giving them an innocuous curiosity-inducing title, and coming from a common-but-not-too-common name, like today's batch of "Wanna know what I heard" from Natalie F. Hughes, "You forgot to respond" from Cameron Kelly, and "I don't think so" from Zoe Green. Respectively, these contained ads for -- chyeah, right, like I'm going to open them.

Pop-ups. More and more have been sneaking past my Pop-up Stopper. You'd expect that sort of thing from the likes of on-line gambling casinos, but I've been getting a bunch from Orbitz lately too.

Why can't a man surf in peace?

Bits of tid. A few morsels from the past few weeks:

Saw this giant moth (perhaps a butterfly?) at Mount Faber park a week ago.

It being full moon, there are a few people burning sacrifices in the street in front of their houses as part of the Hungry Ghost festival. One was an old lady who was feeding a rather sizable fire with fake money she was pulling by the handful out of an Ikea bag.

We took second in team trivia at the Yard the other night, and won five Heineken t-shirts.

InstallAnywhere is a damn fine piece of software. That's not a compliment I throw around lightly. Highly recommended for building installers for your software.

Had my worst soccer game yet the other day, gifting the other team a goal when I tripped over the ball instead of tapping it wide. Gave myself a nice bloody hipper in the process too. This was just when we were fighting our way back into the game, and it totally killed our momentum. I hate having to wait a week for any chance of redemption.

News! The Tasmania deal is now apparently a lock. We're just waiting for the final formality confirmation in the mail. I'll likely be heading down end of September/beginning of October. We've got lots to do before then. Marjorie will join me for a week of it, probably, and then hopefully we'll get a few days to do a side trip to Melbourne. Woop!

I just spent about 30 minutes reading the archives of our blog. It's amazing how "normal" life in Singapore has become for us. So many of the little things that were so exotic when we got here have become normalized or commonplace. I suppose that happens to everyone living abroad.
Another thing that's interesting to me, is tracking my attitude; little glimmers of culture shock denied. Singapore is certainly one of the easiest places in Asia for a westerner to become acclimated to, but it's still Asia. Is it ethnocentric to think spitting and picking your feet in public are gross? Other differences hard for me to accept are the tendencies of some people to drag their feet and/or walk slowly, seemingly oblivious to other people (painful to me when I'm in a hurry and want to get around them).
All in all, living in Singapore isn't bad. It's hot, and sometimes (frequently) I wish there were more entertainment options (I.E. good live music-not cover bands, uncensored movies, uncensored t.v., etc.), but, for the most part, the people here are friendly, it's safe, and there are plenty of great restaurants. Truthfully, I think I'd be mostly content if we just had more friends here. We miss the old posse.

Happy National Day! Singapore is 38 years old today. I believe Malaysia is 40 now. You may not know that Singapore started it's independence as part of Malaysia but was booted out. That's right, Singapore was forced into being the independent country that it became. I don't know the whole story, but I've been reading/skimming Lee Kuan Yew's book "From Third World To First" for the past 6 months and I know the story's in their somewhere.
Anyway, in an attempt to do our part at learning a bit about our country of residence Mark and I went to see the "Homeland" Imax at the Science center.
We also went iceskating at the Fuji ice palace. Big fun, except they made us buy gloves to wear while skating. Cloth gloves. How were these supposed to help us? I smell shakedown. We also tried to go see the facilities at Snow City but they wouldn't let us sneak a peek. Their loss.

Work. A sneak peak at what I've been working on all week. This will only make sense to you if you can read Thai, and even then, it probably won't make sense because all the text was translated using one of those automatic translators which often produce humorous results. The technology has a long way to go.

In addition to Thai, I can now generate similar versions of our product in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, as well as Malay and all the standard European languages that use standard English-like letters. We're still hoping to be able to do Hindi someday, but their crazy script is only just recently being tackled by computers.

It's been something a revelation to work on this stuff. I'm reminded of Huckleberry Finn:

"Why, Huck, doan' de French people talk de same way we does?"

"No, Jim; you couldn't understand a word they said -- not a single word."

"Well, now, I be ding-busted! How do dat come?"

"I don't know; but it's so. I got some of their jabber out of a book. S'pose a man was to come to you and say Polly-voo-franzy -- what would you think?"

"I wouldn' think nuff'n; I'd take en bust him over de head -- dat is, if he warn't white. I wouldn't 'low no nigger to call me dat."

"Shucks, it ain't calling you anything. It's only saying, do you know how to talk French?"

"Well, den, why couldn't he say it?"

"Why, he is a-saying it. That's a Frenchman's way of saying it."

"Well, it's a blame ridicklous way, en I doan' want to hear no mo' 'bout it. Dey ain' no sense in it."

"Looky here, Jim; does a cat talk like we do?"

"No, a cat don't."

"Well, does a cow?"

"No, a cow don't, nuther."

"Does a cat talk like a cow, or a cow talk like a cat?"

"No, dey don't."

"It's natural and right for 'em to talk different from each other, ain't it?"

"Course."

"And ain't it natural and right for a cat and a cow to talk different from us?"

"Why, mos' sholy it is."

"Well, then, why ain't it natural and right for a Frenchman to talk different from us? You answer me that."

"Is a cat a man, Huck?"

"No."

"Well, den, dey ain't no sense in a cat talkin' like a man. Is a cow a man? -- er is a cow a cat?"

"No, she ain't either of them."

"Well, den, she ain't got no business to talk like either one er the yuther of 'em. Is a Frenchman a man?"

"Yes."

"WELL, den! Dad blame it, why doan' he talk like a man? You answer me dat!"

I'm a little like Jim, in the way I've always assumed that languages used a discrete set of letters that correspond to sounds, and build words out of them. It just isn't so. Symbols get combined, lines are drawn to connect things in weird ways, and symbols are used to represent whole words, giving no clue as to how they get pronounced.

Having a small set of discrete letters may even be one of the key reasons for Western advancement; first because they made the printing press feasible, and lately because computers can deal with them much easier. (Recently the Chinese have gotten in step with the times through widespread use of a simplified form of their alphabet.)

Thai is pretty cool looking, no? Definitely one of the more interesting-looking languages out there (though I would give the nod for beauty to Arabic and Hieratic).

It's the seventh lunar month in the Chinese year, otherwise known as the Hungry Ghost Month. During this month Taoist Chinese believe that the gates of Hell are opened and the dead are allowed to enter into the world of the living. To appease the "hungry ghost" food offerings are laid out and ghost money and accessories (paper clothes, cabinets, dinner wares, anything a ghost might need) are burned. Believers do not buy property, get married, move, or do much of anything that may be affected by "luck" during this month. It's interesting stuff and I'm trying to find out more about the holiday, but it's harder than you might think. A trip to Chinatown this weekend is definitely in order. Also, I believe there will be a lot happening on the full moon. Anybody have any recommendations?

Yes, apparently my signature no longer matches... my signature. They have some serious check nazis down at the bank. I'd be willing to bet the signature checker's job title has the words "Anal Retentive" in it somewhere.

Always good to bounce your first rent check in a new apartment. This sort of thing is not a problem back in the states.

Another (probable) bombing in S.E. Asia. This one in Jakarta at the Marriot Hotel, no articles to link to yet as this just happened. The timing is telling as the main man suspected in the Bali bombings in on trial with a verdict due any day now, as is a general linked to crimes against humanity in East Timor.
On a completely different tone, I finally received approval for my dependent pass today. Finally.
Another thing to bitch about: Our second rent check to our new landlord bounced not due to insufficient funds but because our bank said of Mark's signature "he doesn't sign his name that way". Um, what?!

Upgrading from Windows 2000 Server to Windows XP on my work computer. A short list of all the software I have to install:

NVidia video card driver

TextPad text editor

Cygwin (all the standard pieces, plus: clear, crypt, cvs, doxygen, emacs, file, fortune, gcc, gdb, make, man, openssh, openssl, vim)

XEmacs

Panicware Popup Stopper

WinCVS revision control system

Apache Tomcat web server

Seti@home screen saver

Winzip

The Gimp (open-source PhotoShop)

Java 2 Software Development Kit

NJStar Communicator for chinese language entry

ElevenProspect License Manager

XP language support for Japanese, Thai?, Korean, Chinese

Google toolbar

Netbeans IDE
What a joy. That should take just about all of tomorrow.

The dream. When I worked at the Space Center, the stress of being responsible -- even in a very small way -- for a shuttle launch seemed to give everyone the same recurring nightmare. The nightmare is that it's launch day, and something goes wrong during the fueling, or worse -- during the launch, and it's your fault. Everyone I worked with had this dream at some point. It's not a good dream.

I still have the dream, every few months or so, including last night. It's changed a bit over the years; the shuttle still goes haywire, but it's no longer my fault when it happens. It's still distressing. This time, I was really close to the launch; only a few hundred yards, and it was really cloudy. Through a hole in the clouds I could see sparks flying out of the shuttle where no sparks should have been, and thought "Oh, no...". I told everyone it was going to crash, and while I didn't see the impact, molten lumps of debris started raining down on us, and we had to dodge them. Then I woke up.

I can't imagine working on some of the probes they are launching now. Each requires more than a decade of work to plan and build, and it all comes down to a single launch. I think the Mars probes they've launched have had less than a 50% success rate in just getting there. I sure those guys have The Dream a lot too.

Okay, this is a cool game. It's like Myst, you just have to figure out the right things to click on.

Our government-issue SARS kit has arrived. Contents:

A pamphlet, "Taking Your Temperature Correctly", translated into English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

Two surgical masks.

Mask instructions, also in English, Malay, Chinese, and Thai.

A rather nice digital thermometer, with instructions in English only.

Just in the nick of time, too.

Mark and I watched a documentary on Bhutan tonight and it struck me -- I'm the third generation in my family to spend at least a year in southeast Asia. My grandfather was stationed in Bhutan (then Burma) during or around World War II, my father spent a year in Vietnam, then another in Thailand, now Mark and I are here. Of course I'm here under very different circumstances than my predecessors.

A great site for movie reviews is Rotten Tomatoes. What they do is to collect and summarize views from critics around the world. A good review is marked with a red tomato; a bad one with a green splat.

It's a rare movie that some critic, somewhere does not like. But there is one out now. Maybe the filmmakers should have listened to their focus groups.

Update: Oops! Looks like they found one reviewer who liked it.

The latest "Awwwww...." My dad's been on a mission to scan in all our old slides. Here's Another picture from my childhood (me on the right). I love this stuff. Hey Dad, where the heck was this, any idea?

We hosted pub trivia last night at Shamus O'Donnell's. It all went pretty well, excepting the small turnout. We did make the mistake in one question of implying that the Boomtown Rats were British, when in fact they are Irish. This is not a good sort of mistake to make in an Irish bar. Marjorie, who was reading the question, received several indignant shouts. Proving she can "take the piss" with the best of them, she responded, "England, Ireland... Aren't they the same thing?" This cracked me up, and everyone else too.

I'm fed up will the old comments provider (klinkfamily.com) which kept going down, so I've swapped in a new one (haloscan.com). These will hopefully be more reliable. Now all I have to do is come up with some actual content that's worth commenting on.

There'll be two comment links at the bottom of each post for a little while, if the old comments come back up. Please use the one that just says "Comments".

We had a pretty nice day yesterday. We went up to the Chinese Gardens and walked around for a bit. It's a great area for birding. The first thing we saw there was some kind of Heron (perhaps a Purple Heron) eating a snake. The gardens were quite nice themselves, but overall I'd go for the critters (turtles, and fish, and birds, oh my!) The turtles were engaged in a rather bizarre behavior which involved the little ones repeatedly and persistently getting into the faces of the bigger guys. I have no idea what this was all about, but the big guys looked (understandably) annoyed.
After the Chinese Gardens, we went to buy plants for the new apartment. The nursery also turned out to be a nice place for birding (I know, we're scary) and we got the best view yet of a crimson sunbird. We also saw some cool pitcher plants, which Mark would have been happy to take home, but are a bit too creepy for me.