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.