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.

Four reasons to be angry.

1. US just lost to Brazil, in heartbreaking fashion. I was so hoping for a US-Mexico final.

2. National Geographic reports that Singapore's biodiversity has been ravaged. Paints an awfully bleak picture for the effects of rising population everywhere.

3. The comments have stopped working again.

4. Ice cream, my newest kick, is really bad for you, according to a new study by the people who previously ruined Chinese and Italian food for everyone.

Playing around with the Terraserver web site. Here's an overview of where I grew up in Cherry Hill, NJ, age zero to ten, and a guide to the marked points:
1. Our house.
2. The church parking lot that I first rode a bike without training wheels.
3. The church (Pope Pius X) where we went every Sunday, and I had my first communion.
4. I used to catch big preying mantises here. I had an awesome insect collection.
5. I caught a ton of cool butterflies here, at a larkspur bush.
6. This used to be a field. One time playing softball(?) here, where if I remember correctly, my sister ended up with stitches after a collision.
7. My friend Dale's house.
8. My friend Terry's house (I think).
9. Here I knocked over a small tree in the yard of my friend Donny, and had to work it off in their garden.
10. Mean Mr. Taylor's house. Once our kickball went on his lawn and he took it and put it in his garage.

Up the street from the new pad is a hawker center and a wet market. Marjorie and I walked up there today for dinner.

I was hoping she could see the wet market, but it must just be a weekend thing. I scoped it out last Saturday, and it's a trip. Everywhere is fish -- whole fish to cook up, fish heads, aquarium fish, prawns, crabs... A bucket of dead squid in their own ink. And, a container with about thirty live bullfrogs. Also they have meat, fruits, and vegetables galore.

Tonight we found the grounds of a "bird club", which probably explains all the caged birds we see hanging outside area houses. Apparently, the old men bring their caged birds to this site in the evenings and hang them next to each other so they can sing to each other. They have larger cages in the back containing numerous birds. Interesting.

Dinner was a decent chicken murtabak and a Nasi Lemak that we tried unsuccessfully to order without anchovies...

At last, a photo from Sydney. I'm looking more and more like my dad every day, it seems... We have other photos, but they weren't taken with the digital, so this is all you get right now.

Nature walk. We went back to the Fort MacRitchie reservoir today, in an effort to check out the tree-top canopy walkway we recently learned they've set up. Unfortunately, the tree-top walk was about a 4.5 km walk in, so we only just walked some of the other nature trails. New bird: the terminally drab Olive-Winged Bulbul. Also saw another Greater Racquet-Tailed Drongo, some swifts, a kingfisher, a (water?) monitor lizard, a lot of turtles, and a lot of these guys. They weren't that happy to see us, it seems; they kept dropping sticks on us. Just one would've been a coincidence; after the third, we figured we ought to move on.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction contest results have been posted. This is the contest where the object is to come up with the worst possible opening line for a novel. I was going to enter this year, but I couldn't firm up my entry in time. Next year maybe. There's some good ones this year; as usual, they aren't the ones that won.

Unemployment sucks! Not that I expect anyone to be sympathetic. I was not fired, I quit. And even if I'd stayed with my job I'd be idle now due to the summer break. I don't handle the removal of all structure from my life well. But, now that Mark has his employment pass and my dependent pass is days behind, my days of idleness are numbered. As soon as I get my pass I'm going to look into to some employment options and sign up for some classes. There's an interesting night photography course on offer at the photographic society and some Indian cooking classes at the American Women's Association. As for the job, I may sub at my old school (the pay is good without the responsibility for planning), but what I'd really like to do is find my way back to early intervention. First stop, the Autism Research Group which is advertising a need for teachers. Wonder if they'd want someone part time (full-time Autism work takes a really special person, I'm maybe half-way there, therefore half-time capable)?

Random observation. If you were dropped here (by the hand of the Astronaut?) in Singapore, at some random place, within your frame of vision there would likely be:

Ten highrise apartment buildings

Twenty people

Thirty trees

Five cars

Five mynah birds

Two ravens

No litter

Birthday dinner. We just got back from our favorite Thai restaurant (Diandin Leluk), and again, we talked about it the whole ride home. This time, though, we talked about how disappointing it was. They must've changed chefs. We are so bummed.

During dinner we were also accosted by a manic, mostly-toothless man who walked up to our table and engaged us in a conversation that went something like this:

Him: You are Americans?
Me: Uh...
Him: From America?
Me: We, uh, live in Singapore.
Him: But you are Americans? They are friends with Cuba now, yes?
Me: I guess...
Marjorie: Not really...
Him: They are friends, and Jimmy Carter went to visit with them?
Us: ...
Him: They also have great music there, huh? [Imitates a trumpet player]
Us: ...

He left, finally. Not sure what that was all about.

Marjorie got me the new White Stripes CD, another CD by the Eels, a Ben Franklin biography (I've been on a biography kick lately), and a new shirt I like very much.

Aw, shucks. Yes, my 28th year was pretty crazy. Let's hope my 29th is even more so! *

I just, at long last, picked up my employment pass, making me an official resident here. That's a nice birthday present. I'm 2 Legit 2 Quit!


* Note: Figures presented may not represent actual age.

Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday Dear Mark(ie)
Happy Birthday to you!!
Hip Hip hooray!
Hip Hip hooray!
Hip Hip hooray!

Last three lines courtesy of our trip Down Under (that's how they do it there).

Happy Birthday Baby! It's been quite a year, hasn't it?

Words of wisdom:

BILL MOYERS: Which is funnier? CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL?

JON STEWART: CROSSFIRE or HARD BALL? Which is funnier? Which is more soul-crushing, you mean? Both are equally dispiriting in their -- the whole idea that political discourse has degenerated into shows that have to be entitled Crossfire and Hard Ball. And, you know, I'm Gonna Beat Your Ass or whatever they're calling them these days is-- mind-boggling.

Crossfire, especially, is completely an apropos name. It's what innocent bystanders are caught in when gangs are fighting. And-- it just boggles my mind that that's given a half hour, an hour a day to-- I don't understand how issues can be dissented-- from the left and from the right as though-- even cartoon characters have more than left and right. They have up and down.

Read on. Very funny stuff, and wise. I miss The Daily Show. We do get it once a week, but it's not enough...

Ouchy. More soccer follies. Marjorie came out to the game with me today, and got to witness me block a full-on shot with the worst part of your body that you can block a shot with. The sort of block that leaves you rolling on ground in a fetal position, hands cupped... I was able to keep playing, fortunately, but I'm still a little tender. We again beat a team that totally outplayed us, so bully for us defenders. I played like hell though.

New birds spotted: a pair of brown-capped woodpeckers, and a flock of Asian glossy starlings, who seem to be our new neighbors...