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

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

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

Sad passing. Tug McGraw, who gave me one of my greatest baseball memories growing up, has been taken out of the game. I still remember his strikeout pitch in the 1980 World Series.

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

Perverts. Just checked our blogstats to see who's been visiting our blog. We generally have the same regular visitors (we love you all), but occasionally someone finds our site on a search engine. Two of our recent visitors were searching for "zoophilia" and "overplucking". Glad to know the search engine directed them here.

It's surreal being back in Singapore, and I don't think it's entirely the jet-lag haze I'm in. I was really enjoying myself back home, I don't think I was quite ready to return. It's easy living here, but I was relishing not being a foreigner for awhile and blending in everywhere we went. Luckily I've lots of goodies brought home from our trip to keep me company.
L. A. was fantastic, thanks again Kristina and Michael! The hike in Griffith Park was particularly wonderful, as Mark mentioned. L.A.'s such a funny place because you can go from ugly urban sprawl, to amazingly beautiful natural surroundings in the blink of an eye. Griffith Park is truly beautiful, and also cool because it's been the set for so many movies/tv shows that it seems vaguely familiar even if you've never been there before. Hiking to the peak we saw the Hollywood sign, the Griffith observatory (set of Rebel without a Cause among many other films), snow-capped mountain peaks in the distance, and the Pacific ocean. Amazing.
On the Singaporean front, I discovered today that we missed an entire story line from Love Actually due to censorship. Apparently one couple meets on the set of a porn flick? We didn't see that. Maybe I would have liked the uncut version better. I gotta say I resent the Hell out of the Singaporean government for censoring movies/tv shows. The way they do it seems completely random and inconsistent.
Speaking of stupid government decisions, note to the Mayor of Los Angeles: The way you've centralized all the security checkpoints in the airport is stupid and has created a nice centralized location for a terrorist to target. Also, kudos on preventing people from diving up to drop off and pick up travelers, as a result you've increased the human traffic in the airport three-fold, creating potentially more casualties. Seriously, I hope they are reconsidering this new airport arrangement. As is a terrorist could easily drive up in a taxi or in a rental car van, they've prevented nothing, just made things more inconvenient for most travelers. I've been through L.A. recently before this bullshit and it was much, much, much better, and I felt safer.
For those of you considering visiting us here, the Singapore airport is great. Probably the best airport I've been through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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