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.