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.

Human jerky. Today was for visiting Body Worlds: The Anatomical Exhibition of the Human Body. It was really, really interesting. The bodies are actual human volunteers, "plasticized". Different displays showed the muscles, the nervous system, the circulatory system, the digestive system, and the reproductive system (snigger snigger). Sometimes the organs were left intact; sometimes they were shown in cross-section. And they had many examples of unhealthy organs next to healthy ones. (The coal miner's lung looked like a lump of coal.) Most fascinating, and disturbing, was the cross-section of the pregnant woman. An interesting and edumacational excursion; highly recommended.

Tonight we are planning on our first visit to Zouk, Singapore's biggest and most famous discotheque, with our out-of-town friends. I don't know if we'll be drinking, though, after seeing the liver with cirrhosis earlier.

Friends good. Our Atlanta friend (and his wife, son, and mother) are passing through town. We did dinner with them last night at Boat Quay and are going out on the town with them tonight. Woop!

Marjorie and I have that psychic connection (that's so annoying in other married couples ;-), where we know what each other is thinking, often saying things at the same time, and being instantly able to read each other's moods. Which is why it was so surprising to me tonight that for the first time in forever, while we sat and watched Love Actually, I totally misread her body language, and got up as the credits rolled expecting her to totally love it. But despite the chick-flick theme, I was the one who dug it, while she apparently couldn't wait for it to end. Strange. So, go see it, or, as Marjorie would advise, don't.

Squeaky wheel gets to bitch: Fed ex isn't very express here. My lovely father, who has been very good to us lately in our attempts to scrounge up information for Australia, fedexed a package to me on Dec. 3 (or was it the 2nd Dad?). Anyway, I understand that there are time differences and weekends, but after checking their website today and seeing they claim to have attempted to deliver my package at a time when I was here, I called to complain, and no, tomorrow morning isn't good enough, it's supposed to be express damn it. Anyway, they're supposed to try again this evening. I'm not holding my breath.

Selfish gifting promotion: Anyone (family) looking for ideas for gift ideas for us, we both have amazon wish lists. Just FYI.

After the movie we set off for Chinatown and ended up having a round of drinks with a group of merchant seamen. Things got a little hazy after that. This morning I woke up down along the docks smelling vaguely of fish sauce, and with a new hole in me.

Actually, we just went to a department store and had it done, but the first way to tell it was better, don't you think?

We found a bit of "Christmas cheer" yesterday: We saw Elf. Will Ferrell is very funny, and this movie has the potential to be a huge Christmas classic. It's funny, without being cynical, and there's no reason the kid couldn't see and enjoy it.
We also got an early present for me (us?), by way of altering Mark, but I'll let him blog about that.

Am I really that clichéd? MSN is listing the ten best spots to propose. The place where I proposed to Marjorie is listed there (Ile.-St Louis in Paris). What can I say, I'm a sucker for the classics.

Movies, bad and good. I recently remembered two movies to add to my worst movies list, "The Net" starring Sandra Bullock, and "The Lawnmower Man", with Pierce Brosnan. Be sure not to rent these stinkers sometime real soon.

We went and saw Igby Goes Down the other day, which was a little gem of a movie. We also rented Hulk and The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys, which were bad and "meh", respectively.

I've been so depressed by the weather here lately. I'm sooo sick of being hot, and at this time of year, when Christmas trees and decorations are everywhere, it seems wrong that it's not at least a little chilly. I can't wait to be home and be cold. Of course I'm sure I will complain about this too. The countdown's started though, it's going to be a long month until I get on the plane homebound.

Write write write. I started writing my story today. Finished only 520 words in an hour and half. At this rate I would have had to put in about four and a half hours a day to win NaNoWriMo.

But it's a start. The beginning was the part I thought I had fairly well worked out, but it proved challenging to lay down the basis for the story while at the same time revealing just what sort of strange world it is where it's all taking place. I suspect things will speed up, but not by all that much. As you can guess, I've given up on finishing by the end of this month, but at least I haven't given up altogether.

Today marks one year here for us. For me, it has been one year in which I haven't set foot in the United -- what is it again? States? Not something I thought I'd ever do.

Yesterday Marjorie and I went to the Singapore Botanic Gardens. Just a very nice, peaceful respite from the city proper.

Then, to celebrate Buy Nothing Day, we went and bought $300 worth of groceries.