Next week is K2 graduation (in spite of the fact that we have one more week of school afterwards). I'm recommending that one of my students not graduate, and spend another year in K2. He's a sweet kid, but he's extremely disorganized and my suspicion is he will probably be diagnosed as learning disabled at some future date (and I'm a Special Ed teacher usually). I've got to meet with his parents and tell them this next week, and I'm really, really dreading it. I've made more than one parent cry in my time working with special needs kids, I was hoping for a break this year. I hope they take the news well.

Wildlife spotting. Most of my wildlife spotting has not been in restaurants, unless you want to count animals that are already cleaned and gutted for cooking. Today, however, while lunching at a local restaurant, I spotted a little nose and whiskers poking out from under a refrigerator in a curtained-off cubbyhole. I first thought mouse, then rat. But then the little critter came out from his cover completely to sniff some section of the floor, and I could tell right away (from all the nature shows I've watched) that it was a shrew. Most probably an Asian musk shrew. For some reason I feel better that it wasn't a rat or a mouse, but apparently these guys are just as qualified to be labelled "vermin". I know every restaurant deals with things like this, but there seemed to be several of them there, and they were infringing on the guest area, so I don't see any need to go back to this place...

Enlightenment on the subway. I've always thought that, if I were a black person, say, I would just go around, boldly, into places that don't see a lot of black people. And if anyone said anything nasty, or gave me dirty looks, well then, why would I care what a racist thinks?

Today on the ride home I found myself feeling sheepish, because I was carrying home the dry-cleaning I took in earlier for Marjorie, which included a nice flowery dress. I even kind of folded it so that it wasn't so visible.

It dawned on me. What a hypocrite I am!

There are a lot of attitudes out here that I would consider sexist, and for some reason I was worried that some of these guys would see me as -- I don't know, not wearing the pants in the relationship? Just because I was so obviously doing something laundry-related for my wife. It's not like I was even doing the laundry; I was just a courier.

If I care so much about what sexist people think, what makes me think I would be so casual about racism?

Deep, huh. Riding mass transit gives you lots of time to think.

Today, before dismissal, my class and I sang a very interesting rendition of "Old MacDonald" where we ended up discussing animal sounds in several different languages (Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Russian, Hindi, and English). Apparently cats "say" the same meow and cows "moo" in all of our countries, there's some variation in the sounds of roosters, ducks, and horses though. I love these kinds of discussions with my class. And I love hearing them talk to each other in other languages. There are frequent Korean and Japanese conversations in our class. I'm ready for the school year to end, but I will miss these types of experiences.
On a completely different note......Singapore has a SARS channel on TV now. Really, a TV station devoted to SARS. Sadly, I suspect the ratings will be pretty good.

The Matrix, Retarded. Saw it with my boss, and we tried to figure it out afterwards, and decided that we might trying to make sense of something that the creator doesn't even have a clear picture of. When the audience is laughing at the movie, not with it, there's something wrong. Obviously, not without its entertaining points, but the fight scenes got boring, the psychobabble was laid on thick, and the plot was almost incomprehensible. I'm surprised as anyone that it sucked for reasons other than Keanu Reeves.

Spam, spam, spam. I've been getting more and more spam these days. One spammer in particular has been offering me a "free trial of HGH" every day -- sometimes two or three times a day -- for the past two months. He keeps varying his mailings to sneak around the filters I have set up. If they ever catch him, I hope it's in Singapore, although maybe a thorough caning is too good for him.

Bossman is reconfiguring our web site and mail server. He says that "dictionary attack" emails (which come from spammers who are trying every stinking word in the dictionary at your hostname -- like aardvark@yourhost.com, abacus@yourhost.com, abalone@yourhost.com -- in an effort to discover addresses they can send spam to) are coming in at a rate of more than one per second.

I can't believe this problem is still ongoing. In fact, it's getting worse. Spam accounts for something like 40% of all email traffic these days. Why can nothing be done? I've seen proposals for a pay system -- where it would cost you something like a nickel per email. I would be in favor.

By the way, it's a bad idea to leave your email address when you post comments; spammers seek them out and add them to their lists.

Pain in the *ss. For a while there, I was actually developing a butt. I even had to buy a pair of fat pants. But, now that I've been getting into some kind of shape, it seems to be disappearing. Aesthetic concerns aside, my job pretty much requires sitting on it all day -- and even with a fairly plush chair, it's been increasingly sore. I even had to use a pillow this past weekend when we rented the car.

In other local news, just when it looked like we were about to be declared SARS-free, somebody goes and mucks it up. And, they've declared martial law across the water in Sumatra. Nothing to worry about here, though; the only time Sumatra seems to affect Singapore at all is when it catches fire.

Some random driving today landed us way out on the west coast of S'pore, where there are acres and acres of cemetaries. Apparently this is where everyone who dies here ends up. Interesting, in that the cemetaries are segregated; we drove through the Hindu and Chinese sections, and also past a number of [something]-atoriums, where they had hundreds of little lockers, presumably for burial urns containing the cremated remains. On a small, densely populated island, what else would you expect?

Marjorie drove for a little bit, out in the middle of nowhere; her first left-side-of-the-road driving experience. She did well. But after I took the wheel back, somehow we suddenly found ourselves on the north part of the island, and almost drove into the Malaysia checkpoint by mistake.

We figured we had to go out to dinner, since we had a car. We did Mexican twice already this week, but it was at the places in Holland Village, which are passable at best. So this time we hit Margaritas, which, near as we can tell, is the only place in town that "gets" Mexican food. Num.

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