Friday, December 30, 2005
how science is sometimes trumped by your mom
me: dogs rely more on smells and sounds than visual cues i think.
me: and anyway, even if they could tell us apart by sight, they probably wouldn't be very good at it. animals' brains evolve so that they're specialised at distinguishing members of their own species but not others.
mom: that's not true. i can recognize all the lizards in the kitchen.
and...winner.
(this is a lot funnier if you know the history of my mom and lizards)
the last time i had spoken with him was over kopi peng in the smm canteen, 9/9/2000, so there was five years to catch up on. still, there was time by evening's end to chat about intelligent design and schroedinger's cat (and why the sea is boiling hot, and whether pigs have wings) -- and there always should be. my ringing cry: don't be defined by what you do!
so it was fun, and he'd like to catch up with y'all as well (unless i was the only person among us who was nat's friend back in rj in which case please return to your regularly scheduled lives).
Wednesday, December 28, 2005
Tuesday, December 27, 2005
so that we don't inadvertently land up in jail
a thought
Saturday, December 24, 2005
Merry Christmas
Wednesday, December 21, 2005
futureme
1) i trust that by now you'll have accomplished ________
(an obvious setup for disappointment)
2) please remember to continue eating your vegetables/getting sunshine and exercise/loving your neighbour etc.
(as if failing to keep resolutions one year at a time is not enough, you can now look back over a span of five or more years and realise what a failure you've been during that time.)
3) you are a child of the universe, no less than the trees or the stars, etc.
(if you know it, you know it. if you don't, there's no point telling yourself)
4) the mundane
(keep a journal)
5) the random
(get a life. yes, that refers to me as well. and you.)
so, eliminating all the above, i guess i'd be left with something like this
dear j_______,
this message was written on the 22nd of december, 2005. lots will happen between now and when you next read this. some of it will be awesome, and some of it will make you wish you could vanish into a singularity and never re-emerge.
i hope more of it was awesome.
sincerely
~j_______
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
Thursday, December 15, 2005
golden globes
after the meal, cp, jiahao and i ended up with dan (long story) which was awkward until it turned out that he was kind of cool. he wanted to see the town, we were tempted by sneaks for the monkey show, so we scrambled for tickets and got seats for an 11 o'clock. our consensus adjective for the movie: fat. a little too much of peter jackson's style poking through where it really shouldn't have, but it did keep to the spirit of the original, and i definitely can't say that i hated it (although cp and i ended up riffing about half the movie: the brother would be pleased).
Tuesday, December 13, 2005
2. the mother left for CM last week. she's back on wednesday night with the other brother, and i'm looking forward to that because the house has been intolerably quiet in the mornings and i have no one to watch arrested development with at night.
3. in a scintillating burst of efficiency, i managed to finish a large chunk of my christmas shopping over the weekend. this was no mean feat -- i do tend to think rather hard about what to buy for people, and dither.
4. no more night shift - back to regular schedule till february at the earliest. it was definitely fun while it lasted.
5. word to su-lin on the bonuses.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
in my mailbox today:
Monday, December 05, 2005
one thing i did not foresee: people start looking at you...differently when you tell them that you do shift work. askance? i guess i see the associations, but it's a bit unenlightened to be a slave to such stereotypical views, no? my mom's friend, whom we met for coffee today, suggests that when they follow up by asking me what i do, i should tell them that i'm a bartop dancer, and that i get lots of tips. i must say that i'm tempted.
Currently reading:
The Discovery of Slowness - Sten Nadolny
Friday, December 02, 2005
words that aren't #1
e.g. "procedures in event of lift breakdown and mantrap"
cf. womantrap, dogtrap etc.
Tuesday, November 29, 2005
because 2.5 years isn't enough
Sunday, November 27, 2005
Saturday, November 26, 2005
overnight
Wednesday, November 23, 2005
happy turkey day!
if you don't have anything to give thanks for, you're probably in the civil service.
7.08
Joey: All right, Rach. The big question is, "does he like you?" All right? Because if he doesn't like you, this is all a moo point.
Rachel: Huh. A moo point?
Joey: Yeah, it's like a cow's opinion. It just doesn't matter. It's moo.
Rachel: Have I been living with him for too long, or did that all just make sense?
heh.
neal stephenson
Thursday, November 17, 2005
Penn
Ok, so Columbia? That's how you put a university in a city.
Spent most of the morning with JJ in radiology talking about labeling planes and positioning issues in ASL, and trying to sell our new experimental idea to him as a check that we're not being complete morons. He liked it. I hope he wasn't just being polite.
Was brought up to see David Dinges (aka The Man Himself tm WC) at 11, only to be shooed away by his PA because he was already triple-booked for the slot. Rebooked appointment for 2 pm, then cleverly went and bought myself chicken fajitas stuffed to bursting so that I could spill salsa all over my t-shirt.
2 pm: Ultra-brief meeting with DD: TMH, details unpublishable, ask me if curious. Short tour of sleep lab. The rest of the day was round the campus on my own and perched in Starbucks with gingerbread and latte trying to write.
And in the evening there was beer.
Greyhound ride
Wednesday, November 16, 2005
cont'd
24. nothing much happens really.
25.1. h.y. has us for dinner, and his wife and kid tag along. i spend the entire journey to silver spring listening to their one-year-old daughter telling me that "we're going to go mum-mum". what starts out as "precocious" quite quickly degenerates into "annoying as all hell". but you know how i feel about kids.
25.2. it's "chinese" again. the restaurant is zagat-rated, and i'm beginning to think that that's a sham. (am i right von?)
25.3. the more i eat, the more i realise that all i really want is a $2 bowl of lor mee with heaping amounts of garlic, vinegar and chili.
25.4. on the journey back, h.y.'s daughter is still of the opinion that "we're going to go mum-mum". i try to disillusion her, but she's most adamant.
26. i don't win the lottery.
Monday, November 14, 2005
cont'd
17.1. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.
17.2. dissatisfied with just that, he also makes a bloody twenty-minute long-distance call back to singapore to make absolutely sure there is no possible way i could still be asleep.
18. i sit in on jamie and michelle's presentations. i worked with them back when i was in biac, so even though i'm not really into social cognition any more i go out of a sense of loyalty. the talks are good.
19. there's not much else in the way of neuroscience for the day.
20. the boss grabs me to explore chinatown. everything is tacky to the nth power. we eat in a little hole-in-the-wall place that's supposed to be one of the best bargains in washington dc. admittedly, for $4.95, the bowls of noodles are big - it's quite frightening to think how much msg goes into each one though. we also have duck that is 100% skin, and vegetables that have been boiled into submission.
21.1. i've been worrying about accommodation for when i visit penn for a while now (actually, since a week before, when i asked cp if we still know anyone there (answer:no)). things get a little worse today when i find out that rooms near the school are either (a) taken, or (b) cost $200++++ a night.
21.2. i e-mail the ssa. one edward wee replies to say that he'll ask around. his email signature is the ocs creed. my hopes flag.
21.3. my boss rescues me. i'm going to be shining his shoes for the rest of my life. his very first ra is a penn grad who's still working there and who lives right on the outskirts of campus. things are put into motion.
22.1 at the drugstore, while looking for chapstick, i decide on impulse to buy a powerball ticket. 8 20 28 37 54 and 24
22.2 the odds against winning, incidentally, really suck. 1:146,107,962? i mean, come on.
23. house is on. the week's episode is, coincidentally, about drugs and performance enhancement. i rediscover the fact that hugh laurie really is awesome. do you still have season 1, su-lin?
(tbc)
cont'd
13. the boss wakes up at 4:30 to go for a run
14.1. we meet stefan and geoff for lunch. geoff's a student in ucl who did a short internship in our lab over the summer. he paid his own way to sfn, and managed, in a week when accommodation was booked more solid than bethlehem at yuletide, to find a room in a cheap-ass international hostel. this would have been totally great except for the fact that it burned to the ground on sunday night. he got out in time and managed to rescue his passport, but the rest of his stuff was in cinders. this should not really be amusing, but somehow, it kind of is.
[i go conveniently deaf as fs tells me that there's a lesson to be learned here]
14.1.1. apparently his stuff would have been ok, except that the firemen had to hack through the floor of his room to get to the flames, which meant that everything upstairs ended up very much not.
14.2. a very deep discussion of ica and artifact removal ensues. i give up about 10 minutes in and start meditating on a far more engaging issue: if lost is such a crappy show, why is it still consistently #5 in the nielsen's, and, more importantly, why am i still watching it?
14.3. stefan leavs to give his presentation. geoff and the boss and i get lunch. i have "chinese" "food".
15.1. the ethics of cognitive enhancement sounds like it will be a great talk, and it is, even though there is no mention whatsoever about the recent issues with dope tests in the acbl
15.2. the speaker is thomas murray. he talks about how immeasurably difficult it is to talk about ethics when it comes to cognition, because (a) we don't yet have a good framework for where the lines should be drawn, and (b) whether cognitive enhancement is "right" is highly situational (no one's going to crucify you for drinking coffee before an exam, for example)
15.3. he ends with an incredibly sad story. his daughter was murdered a few years ago, and he talks about how (obviously) that cut to the bone. he goes on to tell us about this drug for ptsd victims that lessens the subjective feeling of trauma -- and how, for all the money in the world -- he wouldn't have taken it if he had been offered it at the time, because the pain - though agonizing - was necessary to honour the memory of his child. that dulling it would somehow have been robbing himself of all-important, healing grief. my granite heart is moved, just a little bit.
16.1. dinner with geoff, josh, h.y. (a singaporean psychiatrist working in nih) and two random grad students/freeloaders. it's supposed to be a lab outing, but it really isn't. my boss asks me to book the place. steakhouses call out my name, but i resist mightily.
16.2. we end up in a very decent seafood place (i'll pop the name in here when it comes to me). it's the first ok-ish meal i've had since landing, and i tuck into my crabs with gusto. there are also $5 martinis and plenty of chardonnay, and i don't even care that some people at the table think that singapore is the BEST. PLACE. ON. EARTH.
16.3. it's a very good advertisement for why i should be intoxicated, like, all the time. i'd get along so much better with everyone.
16.4. we walk back to the hotel. geoff has managed to get one of his colleagues to let him crash at his hotel room. we pass the capitol, splendidly lit, and take about a zillion pictures, most of them slightly out of focus.
(tbc)
Sunday, November 13, 2005
cont'd
8. the boss wakes up at 4:30 a.m. to go for a run.
9.1. the nearest church is four blocks away. everyone at mass is
(i) italian-american
(ii) above fifty years of age and
(iii) dressed immaculately
meanwhile, there's me, cowering in a corner in yellow timberland shirt and levis jeans. for the second time in as many days, buddhism's appeal ratchets up a notch.
9.2. the sermon, as it usually is in the weeks running up to advent, is highly eschatological. this does not help matters one bit.
10. back at the conference, i strike up a conversation with someone from tononi's lab. we have a fascinating discussion about sleep spindles. i actually learn something. somewhere in hell, a snowball thinks: 'wow, this must be my lucky day'
11.1. we have dinner with ex-lab-josh, denise park, three of her RAs, and two other random people. e-l-j started on his phd in uiuc a couple of months ago, and has already acquired (a) an american accent, (b) the suggestion of a goatee and (c) intellectual airs.
11.2. denise spends 20 minutes talking about her bichon frises (bichons frise?). the conversation turns towards various gastronomic catastrophes that people have experienced in china and other places that serve cat.
11.3. we discuss christopher guest and john berendt. no one has actually been to savannah.
11.4. i have the duck pate, swordfish, and orange cake. it's adequate, and once again, i'm awfully glad that i'm not paying.
12.1. somewhere in all this mess, i manage to squeeze in the walking tour of dc. i've done this before, but with company, and i do like rambling about on my own. the weather is impossibly beautiful for november - after a point i don't even need a jacket. i walk the triangle that has vertices at the capitol, the washington monument and the white house (ridiculous security there, even though dubya was out of town).
(tbc)
Saturday, November 12, 2005
the conference
0.1. backdated, obviously. my boss has been breathing down my neck for the past 5 days, and i've been loath to blog.
0.2. i'll try to get through this with a minimum of technobabble, because that's just boring (for you, anyway).
saturday
1.1. in the grand tradition of american excess, the convention center is beyond huge. 30,000 neuroscientists coverge on it early morning, and miraculously, there are not only no traffic jams, but there's enough coffee for everyone. talk about your five loaves and two fishes.
1.2. and i mean huge. they use the main hall to test jumbo jet turbines.
2. i almost immediately run into my boss hobnobbing with allen song, a genius who apparently keps turning down multi-million dollar grants because he likes duke so much. or something. he gave us a lecture on mr physics once which went so far over our heads they couldn't even catch the pitch in the stands. i tell him as much. he does not remember me.
3. there's FREE INTERNET access everywhere. they've covered the convention center with one enormous wi-fi dome so powerful it extends two blocks in every direction outside the building. i say a silent prayer of thanks to the gods of technology
4.1. the poster displays cover an area about the size of two football fields, but only about an eighth of that is cognitive neuroscience, and of those only a fraction of studies involve fMRI/EEG/simultaneous fMRI-EEG/TMS etc. I talk to a bunch of people in d'esposito's lab to try and be cool by association even though I don't understand what they're saying half the time.
4.2. when it comes to the occasional molecular study i've been asked to go to, i'm even more overmatched. if college has taught me one thing though, it's how to nod and look intelligent even when lost in a fog of ignorance.
5. i have lunch with this one girl from scranton university. scranton is a jesuit school, as you may be aware, and she's the one person i've talked to in my life who's heard of the atom-sized college that the brother attends. i'm inwardly pleased.
5.1. she puts mustard on her fries, which i find exceedingly weird.
5.2. coincidentally enough, she's also applying to do grad school in clin psych in the university of pennsylvania.
5.3. her undergraduate thesis involves removing goldfish telencephalons to see if that evinces changes in their startle response. she's first author. i try to act nonchalant, but the green-eyed monster does a tapdance behind my eyes. i resolve to get my name on a paper - any paper - by next year march.
5.4. fine, june.
6.1. the dalai lama is the keynote speaker. he's simply adorable. i suddenly want to become buddhist all over again.
6.2. he says that he would have become a scientist had he not opted for the religious life. he speaks of wonderment and proof, of how religious teaching must bow to science if the evidence is irrefutable, but that science must respect ethics as well. he struggles with the english (there's a translator offstage who helps him through the difficult bits), but the points are made. there is much figurative hem-touching.
7.1. dinner is meatloaf. it's expensive, and kind of sucks, but my boss is paying so i stay quiet as a mouse.
(tbc)
anyway, it's 9, and i'm full of sausage egg and cheese, and it's time to go and learn something and try not look too much of a fool.
Thursday, November 10, 2005
FREE INTERNET
ok. to the other side.
time for a nap.
more social psych
also, while we're on the subject of "six degrees of separation", stockard channing* is set to leave the west wing along with dule hill and richard schiff. what's with the exodus? the show's actually getting good again.
* (who gets five stars out of five)
*su-lin knows this story. i found the system of the world and the confusion among the various piles of fiction, but, in exactly the same way that they never have book i of soseki's i am a cat on the library shelves, quicksilver was nowhere to be found. i eventually got it half off at this weird place i don't even remember the name of, and - here's the part where su-lin laughs at me- i got it in the wrong size. they have big and small versions of the paperbacks, and now i have a mismatched set which sits most awkwardly on my shelf mocking me every time i look at it. curses.
why good people do bad things
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
away on friday
if you want anything brought back, speak now, etc.
Sunday, November 06, 2005
fare thee well
a couple of minutes before evans arrived, i was asking cp if it wouldn't be a bit nerve-wracking for him, what with not having seen most of us for so many years and not even remembering who we are. as it turns out, i don't think i had any recollection of what our old dynamic was when i was his student. cp constantly tells me about how much we mythologize him, and after last night i guess i have to agree. not that he's just another teacher - he always was larger than that, and that i remember - but neither is he the gentle porcupine of sardonicism that i've replaced him with over the years as the real memories faded.
there was lots of sake and good food (thanks su-lin, i've now fallen madly in love with bacon-wrapped enoki mushrooms), and conversations about rj 2005 that were a lot more interesting to listen to than usual. then there was repairing to a bar down the road for more sake and edamame and more talk of medea and larkin and the crying of lot 49 and british thespians and ecclesiastes and students protesting about being made to do dickens (never in our day!) and where all of us are, and where we are going.
so thanks to you and you for cobbling the outing together, and may-the-wind-be-at-your-back to the one who's headed back to suffolk. not all is vanity, no matter what the bible says.
Friday, November 04, 2005
The trouble with college math classes - which classes consist almost entirely in the rhythmic ingestion and regurgitation of abstract information, and are paced in such a way as to maximise this reciprocal data-flow - is that their sheer surface-level difficulty can fool us into thinking we really know something when all we really 'know' is abstract formulas and rules for their deployment. Rarely do math classes ever tell us whether a certain formula is truly significant, or why, or where it came from, or what was at stake. There's clearly a difference between beign able to use a formula correctly and really knowing how to solve a provlem, knowing why a problem is an actual mathematical problem and not just an exercise
* this is an infinity sign, but blogger does not like it.
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
bake shop
background
Sunday, October 30, 2005
cookies again
which reminded me of su-lin's bakery-opening aspirations and set me thinking, for the umpteenth time, why not?. there's margin for error in the food industry, you can afford some missteps, i reckon, and there are all those entrepreneurial-whatever-funds that the gahmen has, and, really the only excuse is inertia. that's the only excuse. i want to admit it and move on with life.
4 months in
Monday, October 24, 2005
Sleep; and my song shall build about your bed
A paradise of dimness. You shall feel
The folding of tired wings; and peace will dwell
Throned in your silence: and one hour shall hold
Summer, and midnight, and immensity
Lulled to forgetfulness. For, where you dream,
The stately gloom of foliage shall embower
Your slumbering thought with tapestries of blue.
And there shall be no memory of the sky,
Nor sunlight with its cruelty of swords.
But, to your soul that sinks from deep to deep
Through drowned and glimmering colour, Time shall be
Only slow rhythmic swaying; and your breath;
And roses in the darkness; and my love.
Sunday, October 23, 2005
more cookies
Friday, October 21, 2005
nobels
I was reading about Kahneman's work the other day, and have been showing it about ever since as an example of how winning the Nobel prize can just be a matter of expressing obvious truths in elegant ways.
Prospect theory, Kahneman and Tversky's brainchild, has to do with how we make decisions under conditions of risk and uncertainty. It begins with the observation that expected value theory does not explain a lot of real life behaviour - for example, if you walked up to an average person on the street and offered them either (a)$49, or (b) a coin toss where he could win $100 if the coin comes up heads but nothing if it comes up tails, most people would choose (a), this despite the fact that (b) offers the better expected return.
The point: value is not equal to utility - and risky decisions are weighted by the utilities we associate with their various outcomes. Humans have a fairly predictable set of risk attitudes that colour our decisions. We overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities; in other words, we are risk seeking for low-probability gains and high-probabiliy losses, and risk averse when we stand a good chance of winning something, or a low probability of losing. On top of this, we are in general loss averse, we need a far greater amount to compensate us when there is the potential that we may lose something we already have.
Thus, the cornerstone of prospect theory is the one equation:
V (x,p) = v(x).w(p)
where v measures the subjective value of the consequence x, and w measures the impact of probability p on the attractiveness of the prospect.
After which you're off to the races. Neat.
A couple of years ago, I had a few conversations with Justin about the wisdom of buying Toto (or any lottery ticket for that matter), and why playing a negative expectation game still felt like it might not be an irrational decision. And -- with no prior knowledge of Kahneman's work -- we constructed, verbally, a pretty good approximation of what (in theory) he would say (i.e. that the utility of having a 1 in 4 million chance of winning 1.5 million dollars can be more than the utility of having 1 dollar, even in a repeated game situation)
It pleases me that we thought of that, and that it's important, and I admire how prospect theory has been constructed because it articulates so cleanly all the ideas about value and utility that have been swimming around in my head for a while now. This has to be the first time a mathematical model has given me a warm tingly feelnig inside. More people need to win Nobel prizes for things like that.
Ig Nobels (ii)
Ig Nobels
Ig Nobels hail world's longest-running experiment
...John Mainstone of the University of Queensland in Aistrlia accepted the physics prize for the 'pitch-drop' experiment started back in 1927 by the prize's co-winner, the late Thomas Parnell. It shows that an ostensibly solid tar derivative can behave like a liquid, forming drops at the rate of about one every nine years.
Shortly after arriving at Queensland in 1961, Mainstone found a curious piece of equipment tucked away in a cupboard. He had unwittingly stumbled across Parnell's experiment, by then three decades old.
Parnell, Queensland's first physics professor, had taken a sample ofpitch, heated it, and placed it in a funnel. He hoped to show that this appparently solid substance - britle enough to shatter on impact - has fluid-like properties. Sure enough, the material did form drops, albeit at an exceedingly slow rate. Its viscosity, Mainstone and his colleagues calculate, is 100 billion times that of water.
It is hard to know what motivated Parnell, but Mainstone suspects it had to do with the quantum revolution - the idea that "things are not what they seem" - that had overtaken physics. "This was his way of showing there are strange things in classical physics too," Mainstone surmises.
The experiment has attracted a cult following, he says, yet it also raises some serious scientific questions. No one knows, for example, how each drop actually detaches. Mainstone believes that fibres supporting the drop in its final stages become unstable and fall catastrophically, but this hypothesis is unconfirmed.
Part of the problem is that in the experiment's 78-year old history, no one has seen a single drop fall. That's not surprising, says Mainstone. "We're talking about a descent of a few centimetres, lasting a tenth of a second, that occurs just once a decade." The last drop, which fell in November 2000, should have been recorded on a webcam, but technical problems intervened. "We'll have to wait until next time, which could be 2010 or later," Mainstone notes.
There is enough pitch left to sustain the experiment for another century, he estimates, and he hopes it will continue, despite the constant battles he has waged with the "philistines" who believe the experiment wastes precious time and space. Mainstone's labour of love, along with Parnell's pioneering work, were recognized in 2003 when the Guinness Book of Records named the pitch-drop experiment the world's longest-running laboratory experiment. The Ig Nobel prize, which Mainstone shares with the late Parnell, provides further recognition.
...
Mainstone is a great believer in the Ig Nobels, and not just because of his award. Science has become a "rat race", largely as a result of the pressure to compete for grant money, he claims, adding that it's important to get a break from that sometimes. "When we cease to see the amusing side of science, it's all over," he says.
Steve Nadis
Thursday, October 20, 2005
at least my intolerance for the general slowness of progress diminishes. (glass half-empty: perhaps that's also a sign of waning ambition.) i used to be convinced that i would suffer massive internal hemorrhaging if i didn't get a phd before age 30; now it matters so much less. one day at a time, right?
Monday, October 17, 2005
random things that don't quite qualify as whole posts, or even significant news:
* things at work have been routine for the past two months, thus the accelerando of perceived time. more days than not i eat out and get home late, and weekends get gobbled up by chores and admin and restoring my sanity with wine and song. cue my favorite steinbeck quote: from nothing to nothing is no time at all.
* dukegabe's patience in getting the singaporean class of '04/05 together is inexhaustible. he'salso one of those people you kind of don't really want to meet until you do. on the agenda: various juicy things about people breaking up and finance chiefs making egregious errors of judgment during interviews. journalists are right up there on the waiting list for hell.
* does anyone want to go to any oktoberfest events while it's still oktober? i like beer and sausages. very vimesian.
* there's a new cd/dvd store (gramophone) in the basement of scotts next to the rotiboy. i thought i'd advertise for them because they had monty python and the holy grail and priscilla queen of the desert, both cheap, both dvds i'd been looking for for ages.
Currently reading:
The Line of Beauty - Alan Hollinghurst
Thursday, October 13, 2005
booker
"Any of us would hate to have our future happiness placed upon another person. It relinquishes the power to make ourselves happy, rendering us quite useless. To be needy leaves us women in a highly volatile situation. Even sadder, a male scrape goat at whom we can point fingers and exclaim, 'I'm not happy because he's not!' In this day and age, we would like to think ourselves more self-sufficient than our 60s Doris Day apron touting counterparts.' (sic.)
Sunday, October 09, 2005
Longer life span calls for longer protection
"From actuarial statistics, about 30 percent of males and 40 percent of females at the age of 55 are expected to live beyond 82. This proportion is expected to increase. Many people decide to invest in a life annuity as it offers better protection against living too long."
Excellent.
Friday, October 07, 2005
question
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
corpse bride
Currently reading:
Have Mercy On Us All - Fred Vargas. (Indeed)
Saturday, October 01, 2005
Monday, September 26, 2005
* with great difficulty, i might add. nlb, though shiny, is quite useless when it comes to stocking new pratchetts.
Saturday, September 24, 2005
Thursday, September 22, 2005
minor gloat
ow
Wednesday, September 21, 2005
it's actually there!
(if you're still not watching arrested development, please go and kill yourself now. and take ray romano with you.)
Monday, September 19, 2005
emmys
(silver lining: geoffrey rush won. and TAR.)
mid-autumn
* between durian ice-cream mooncakes and power rangers lanterns, i'm going to say that as far as zhong qiu jie goes, tradition is strictly optional. enjoy the lights, everyone!
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Tuesday, September 13, 2005
Sunday, September 11, 2005
cookies
Thursday, September 08, 2005
Wednesday, September 07, 2005
expressions of mirth, divers
i'm going to try and break the habit, mostly because i'm getting annoyed with myself. 'haha's in IM/SMS will henceforth be kept to a minimum...and it doesn't mean that i hate you.
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
chuffed
Monday, September 05, 2005
i enjoy how such simple statements can spawn the exorbitantly complex proofs that they do. once upon a time, before my brain died and i started punctuating and spelling completely at random, i downloaded andrew wiles' proof of fermat's last theorem to see if i might understand anything of his argument. (i know. we were young then.), that was around the time i *almost* embarked on a second major in mathematics (bet you didn't know that), the time before better sense prevailed. what i enjoyed most about the wiles paper, i think, was just having it on my desk. while it sat there i owned it -- on some level at least -- even though (to me) not a word or symbol within it made sense.
note to self
Currently reading:
The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Sunday, September 04, 2005
Saturday, September 03, 2005
(a) one is obliged to use the word "vagina" and/or "clitoris" once each poem and
(b) at least one reference to suicide during the course of your reading is an absolute must
seriously, though, it was a little disturbing how angry most of these people's stuff was, all "fuck the establishment" and "let's go get high" and "what the hell am i doing here anyway?". the particular problem with angst-ridden locally-written verse (aside from the fact that it's, well, cliched), is that even on the off-chance the poet actually has experienced something to warrant their anguish no one is going to believe them. the ready set of images from american pulp fiction that one can call upon - smoldering cigarette butts, stale black coffee, shiners behind sunglasses - make it so easy nowadays to portray yourself as the struggling abused artist that even the real mccoys have to work to get their cred, never mind ntu students here.
it's unfortunate. if the poetry isn't great you should minimally believe the sentiment, but even that's a stretch in this lousy place. and i do kind of feel for them; it's almost like i wish they really did have an opportunity to suffer, so that even with all the wrong words, they still might be able to say something genuine and right.
Friday, September 02, 2005
Thursday, September 01, 2005
mornings
i'm probably just all too infatuated with the hollywood schema of a weekday morning - bright sunshine streaming through french windows, waking up to the smell of a hot breakfast, time to read the headlines. reality is no match: groping for the snooze button in darkness; forgetting to shave; munching on oreos while marching towards the mrt. two more months of this, at least -- and to think that my wake-up time was one of the few reasons i didn't envy the teachers.
Tuesday, August 30, 2005
death to productivity
Monday, August 29, 2005
choonping
sfn (ii)
sfn
Sunday, August 28, 2005
grammar police
Friday, August 26, 2005
also auden
The Average
His peasant parents killed themselves with toil
To let their darling leave a stingy soil
For any of those smart professions which
Encourage shallow breathing, and grow rich.
The pressure of their fond ambition made
Their shy and country-loving child afraid
No sensible career was good enough,
Only a hero could deserve such love.
So here he was without maps or supplies,
A hundred miles from any decent town;
The desert glared into his blood-shot eyes;
The silence roared displeasure: looking down,
He saw the shadow of an Average Man
Attempting the exceptional, and ran.
The Novelist
Encased in talent like a uniform,
The rank of every poet is well known;
They can amaze us like a thunderstorm,
Or die so young, or live for years alone.
They can dash forward like hussars: but he
Must struggle out of his boyish gift and learn
How to be plain and awkward, how to be
One after whom none think it worth to turn.
For, to achieve his lightest wish, he must
Become the whole of boredom, subject to
Vulgar complaints like love, among the Just
Be just, among the Filthy filthy too,
And in his own weak person, if he can,
Must suffer dully all the wrongs of Man.
                                           W.H. Auden
Thursday, August 25, 2005
admittedly
(su-lin, on the phone: omg! i'll never refer to myself in the third person again! i am heretofore i!
me: shouldn't that be su-lin is heretofore i?)
Monday, August 22, 2005
catachresis
Hankering for fulsome Italian cuisine, in an unassuming homey space?
very unfortunate. one really shouldn't use words one does not know the meaning of.
Attempted to read:
M/F - Anthony Burgess. I know when I'm in over my head; the introduction says that the novel is a riddle though..interested Minz?
Currently reading:
A Gun For Sale - Graham Greene
Saturday, August 20, 2005
*runs away and hides*
Other people. Other people interest me. How they manage. There are several possibilities.
1. They are just as confused as me but they aren't letting on.
2. They don't know they don't know what the point is.
3. They don't understand they don't know what the point is.
4. They don't mind they don't know what the point is.
5. They don't even know there are any questions.
The first is too paranoid. Paranoia is a joke. I will not be a joke, Rejected on the grounds of unpalatability. The second unlikely: it rests of the unpleasant assumption that other people can't work out what I can work out. Since modesty is a becoming trait in a woman, I reject the second. The third is interesting and enviable but gets things no further forward. One can hardly unknow something, ie I am in no position to alter the facts. The fifth makes me lonely and is rejected on the same modesty clause as postulation 2 (see above.)
That leaves me with the fourth.
Thursday, August 18, 2005
Preparation for the Doctor
A short exercise lasting anything up to forty minutes.
[The surgery is blue. The patient stands while the doctor scratches his neck, sits, rifles through pieces of paper. Some of the pieces of paper fall and he picks them up, sighs, grins tightly to himself, scratches the back of his neck with his ring finger then looks up.]
DOCTOR:
Sit. [Pause] So how are things what's new who are you anyway?
PATIENT:
I'm tired and I still need somebody to talk to. I need to get less angry about everything. I'm going nuts.
DOCTOR:
Don't tell me how to do my job. Relax. You can talk to me. I made a double appointment so we can have twenty minutes. Go ahead. I'm listening.
PATIENT:
What can I say that makes sense in twenty minutes?
DOCTOR:
Try. You're not trying. You're looking for something that doesn't exist, that's why you're not happy. Look at me. I'm under no illusions. That's why I'm in control.
PATIENT:
How can I be more like you?
DOCTOR:
That's not what I meant. That's not what I meant at all. Envy is a destructive emotion. Besides I had to fight hard to get to feel like this. I'm buggered if I'm giving away the fruits of my hard work for nothing. You must tell me how you are.
PATIENT:
I don't seem to know how I am except bad. There's nothing there but anger and something scary all the time. I don't want to get bitter because it will ruin my looks.
DOCTOR:
Maybe a hobby would help. Facetiousness is not an attractive trait in a young woman.
PATIENT:
I know I know. I can't help myself.
DOCTOR:
OK. We'll try these green ones for a change. And step up the anti-depressants. Don't drink or drive. Make an appointment for a few days time and try to be more helpful in future.
While I try to imagine him shouting the last bit, he comes out of the surgery and takes in a little boy with a huge stye on one eye. Maybe he guesses I sit out here rehearsing.
IMPATIENT:
OK let's talk straight. You ask me to talk then you look at your watch. What am I supposed to take from that? This whole thing is ridiculous. Can't you send me to someone who's paid to have me waste their time? You don't know what to do with me but you keep telling me to come back. And stop sending that woman to see me. All it does is make me guilty and secretive.
DOCTOR:
Look, this is reactive depression. I don't see that sending you to a specialist will help things. Talk to your family if you can't talk to me.
IMPATIENT:
I have no family.
DOCTOR:
Don't be melodramatic.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
laws of nature
social sciences, fuzzy as they are, still ought to be grounded in scientific logic. i shudder when people talk about "descriptive science" (these people are, on the whole, lawyers). if i were a sociologist, i think i would study the multifarious corollaries of murphy's law, for instance, the inverse rule of glass-filling in restaurants, which states that how quickly your water glass is filled is inversely correlated with (a) how full your glass is, and (b) how badly you need the water. now that's something that can be quantified. i'd even make nice little scatter plots. hell, i'd probably be able to spin an entire phd out of it.
fall TV
Hard to tell whether Surface is going to be fantastic or really suck. Of the several supernatural-themed dramas premiering it's the only one that has my attention at the moment. Part of its credibility, I admit, comes from the fact that it's on NBC.
HBO's Rome I have blogged about.
Prison Break has buzz and Wentworth Miller. That's good enough for me.
Reunion looks like it could be intriguing, despite my premonition that it won't be picked up for a full season order. Thing is, with the exception of Mathew St. Patrick I don't think I've seen any of these folks before. Playing the same character over the course of 20 years sounds challenging; I hope they can act.
I might also watch Invasion if I have the time.
Not much reality to speak of, and with the exception of AD I think I may not watch any American sitcoms ever again. Pilots aside, I'm going to soldier on with the somewhat disappointing Lost, if for no other reason than to mock it mercilessly on Internet forums. Veronica Mars, renewed by the skin of its teeth, is of course on the yes list. Alias for Lena Olin. And I think that about covers it. (Considered starting House since Su-Lin made me watch an episode but just can't bring myself to like procedural drama, no matter how glib the main actor.)
Sunday, August 14, 2005
Currently reading:
The Trick Is To Keep Breathing - Janice Galloway
Wednesday, August 10, 2005
the kind of thing von thinks of
Tuesday, August 09, 2005
(i didn't even get to go to japan because of quitting the-place-which-can't-be-named. not that i'm really complaining)
by the way, the food in en is really spectacular -- go for the okinawan dishes, particularly the pork belly which has about twice as much fat as lean. what's that you say? well at least i'll die happy.
Currently reading:
Aloft - Chang Rae Lee
Monday, August 08, 2005
Friday, August 05, 2005
bbq 2: electric boogaloo
while not exactly one of the great levellers, office bbqs do help bring people towards the median, and for that i was grateful. i've been feeling a little stupid since starting this new job -- particularly when people start talking about physics and statistics and math. the only academic environments i've been in thusfar have been full of people who are paid to build you up, to tolerate incompetence for the grander purpose of learning, and it turns out that in the real world there are incorrect answers and stupid questions and bad data and just plain pressing the wrong bloody button.
anyway, bbq. the highlight was a three foot salmon marinaded with lemon, salt absolut and very little else. surprisingly, it was perfect. also: steak, lamb shank, three-month old crab sticks (largely untouched), portobello mushrooms, various peppers, potato salad, mixed-leaf salad, vegetarian fried rice. marshmallows, but only for the non-vegetarians, because they apparently have gelatin in them (au revoir, numinousness). the best part, though, was that everyone was so full of sake that (a) it didn't matter to me that other people occasionally talked about work, and (b) other people were able to feign interest when i didn't. therein lay the levelling.
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
charlie and the chocolate factory, consensus opinion
Tuesday, August 02, 2005
backdated
Onwards and upwards. I’m thinking of getting an iBook as a replacement. Three (immature) reasons really:
1) I'm sick of the blue screen of death
2) Apple products have always appealed to my aesthetic sense,
3) I get a discount if I order it through the workplace
A little afraid that 12.1" will be small for video; worst comes to worst there's always the desktop for that though.
Sunday, July 31, 2005
ikea
2) bought: plastic wine rack (holds 6 bottes) and boxy bedside lamp (soft mood lighting)
3) to come: a new bed
correction
Friday, July 29, 2005
spss
Thursday, July 28, 2005
mysterious skin
anyway, mysterious skin. the plot: joseph gordon levitt and brady corbet play on the same little league team when they're young. coach has his way with them. jgl is his 'favorite', grows up to be a hustler, does drugs, fucks half the people in town, contracts vd, moves to new york, etc. cf angels in america minus him actually getting aids (thank god). bc develops retrograde amnesia, creates the false memory that he was abducted by aliens, investigates, remembers jgl from a dream, meets his best friend, finds out that jgl is in ny, spends about half an hour of the film forming an entirely inconsequential relationship with jgl's best friend, before finding out the truth (from jgl himself) in a tense and rather disgusting flashback at the very end of the film.
the movie did not live up to expectations created by its mostly-positive reviews. it was a little too blatantly anti-hollywood: too many weird editing choices and fade-to-blacks. lgbt films tend to do that - hide their cliches behind unusual cinematography and call it art. i don't buy it. i talked with cp about the movie at a later juncture, and it turns out he thinks the same thing: that it didn't really have any big point to make; it was just...disturbing. c'est la vie.
still, mary lynn rajskub is awesome, and there is, i suppose, still something left to be squeezed from the discussion of pedophilia in film, so if you want to, go for it -- it's worth the money.
Monday, July 25, 2005
butterfly - weezer
yesterday i went outside
with my momma's mason jar
caught a lovely butterfly
when i woke up today
looked in on my fairy pet
she had withered all away
no more sighing in her breast
i'm sorry for what i did
i did what my body told me to
i didn't mean to do you harm
everytime i pin down what i think i want
it slips away - the ghost slips away
smell you on my hand for days
i can't wash away your scent
if i'm a dog then you're a bitch
i guess you're as real as me
maybe i can live with that
maybe i need fantasies
a life of chasing butterfly
i'm sorry for what i did
i did what my body told me to
i didn't mean to do you harm
everytime i pin down what i think i want
it slips away - the ghost slips away
i told you i would return
when the robin makes his nest
but i ain't never coming back
i'm sorry,
i'm sorry,
i'm sorry
so?
Currently reading:
Half a Life - V.S. Naipaul
Thursday, July 21, 2005
Do you think he[Christopher]’ll go to hell?
Tony:
No. He’s not the type that deserves hell.
Melfi:
So who does?
Tony:
The worst people. The twisted and demented psychos who kill people for pleasure. The degenerate bastards who molest and torture little kids and kill babies.The Hitlers. The Pol Pots. Those are the evil fucks who deserve to die. Not my nephew.
Melfi:
What about you?
Tony:
What? Hell? You been listening to me? No. For the same reasons. We’re soldiers…and soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers…they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where…everybody involved knows the stakes, and if you’re going to accept those stakes…you’ve got to do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes. Orders.
Melfi:
So does that justify everything that you do?
Tony:
Excuse me, let me tell you something. When America opened the floodgates and let all us Italians in, what do you think they were doing it for, because they were trying to save us from poverty? No, they did it because they needed us. They needed us to build their cities and dig their subways and to make them richer. The Carnegies and the Rockefellers, they needed worker bees and there we were. But some of us didn’t want to swarm around their hive and lose who we were, we wanted to stay Italian and preserve the things that mean something to us: honor and family and loyalty. And some of us wanted a piece of the action. Now we weren’t educated like the Americans, but we had the balls to take what we wanted. And those other fucks, the J.P. Morgans, they were crooks and killers too, but that was the business, right? The American way.
*
also: elijah wood has the scariest eyes in tinseltown.
Currently reading:
Thousand Cranes - Yasunari Kawabata
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
i don't know. railway stations and train journeys are always so much more charming in concept than reality. in redang, my mom mooted the idea of a trip on the orient express, a discussion that rapidly focused itself on motion sickness, claustrophia, and how bored we might be. like, whatever happened to agatha christie and chris van allsburg and the hogwarts express?
Friday, July 15, 2005
hp6 tomorrow
Tuesday, July 12, 2005
hmm
Monday, July 11, 2005
update
6/7: met yen for neil gaiman's talk cum book-signing, which, unfortunately was all book-signing and no talk, at least by the time we got there. present: two-and-a-half million rafflesians bearing divers volumes of the sandman. beat a hasty retreat to modesto's for very decent pasta and conversation.
stuff happened the rest of the time, but it's not really worth speaking of.
Currently reading:
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
Friday, July 08, 2005
Monday, July 04, 2005
Thursday, June 30, 2005
All men should try to learn before they die
What they are running from, and to, and why ~~ James Thurber
No matter how well you perform there's always someone of intelligent opinion who thinks it's lousy. ~~ Sir Laurence Olivier
The only difference between a saint and a sinner is that every saint has a past, every sinner a future. ~~ Oscar Wilde
We cannot withdraw our cards from the game. Were we as silent and as ute as stones, our very passivity would be an act. ~~Jean Paul Sartre
Whether it is the best of times or the worst of times it is the only time we have ~~Art Buchwald
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
sms
su-lin: don't you start work soon? would you like to get lunch sometime this week, before you do?
me: i start on friday. hasn't term started for you?
su-lin: yes, but we scoot at twelve
me: i don't know what they pay you for. so wed or thurs?
su-lin: it's common test week, you bitch. tmrw? there's a staff meeting...will 2ish be too late?
me: me a bitch? i shall save that message to show cp. 2ish is fine
3 years in york with cp and look what happens.
Currently reading:
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
carded
Monday, June 27, 2005
Currently reading:
Foreign Studies - Shusako Endo
Saturday, June 25, 2005
the comeback
Friday, June 24, 2005
… and thanks for all the fish
1.1 We were in Redang, Trengganu, population 50, goats 512.
1.2 There are certain restrictions when young families come to choosing a place to go on vacation. Screaming young kids means (a) nowhere too far away (b) nothing historical, cultural or faux-historical and (c) no ecotourism, adventure tourism, or anything else involving Mortal Peril. The island of Redang epitomises what you have left.
1.3 When I was little, we did a lot of trips like this: Langkawi, Phuket, Batam. I think I even looked forward to them. Obviously then, observing the other families on our flight, the first thought that comes to mind is: was I so obnoxious when I was 8?
1.4 The second is: probably.
1.5 Jianyi’s idea with the leashes isn’t so bad.
2.1 It’s a 1.5 hour flight from Seletar Air Base. They’ve opened up most of Seletar Camp for civilian use. Singapore Technologies is still in there, and the bungalows that the British officers used back in the day, but as far as I could see a lot of the SAF facilities are gone. I used Seletar Camp once in my NS days, for a river crossing exercise, and the most memorable thing about that was how my socks turned mustard yellow afterwards.
3.1 The first thing you notice are the goats. They come in four flavours: brown with horns, black with horns, brown without horns and black without horns, and they all shit extravagantly.
3.2 And chickens.
3.3 The kids are extraordinarily friendly, and wave at us every time we pass. They seem to spend an unnatural amount of time wading around in the drains with their homemade fishing hooks. There is a school very nearby, and I’m almost positive they are playing truant.
3.4 My aunt thinks that it’s remarkable that they do not succumb to ringworm and other vector-borne diseases. They probably do.
3.5 This is my aunt.
She would have my head if she knew I had posted her picture on the Internet.
4.1 The seawater is calm, turquoise, and so clear that it’s almost unnatural. Along the private stretch in front of our resort, it appears that there is no marine life whatsoever. If you look really, really hard, you can locate the occasional dead bivalve. I despair, but just a little.
4.2 Fortunately, there are rocks. And where there are rocks, there are cirrepedia; and where there are cirrepedia, there are other macrofauna.
4.3 We spend a pleasant afternoon communing with the fish, as well as a knobbly sea cucumber that scares the bejesus out of a little girl with a Strawberry Shortcake wading ring.
5.1 The food tries to be average, and occasionally succeeds.
5.2 Drinks at 17 Rm a pop sweeten the deal a bit.
6.1 I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale has nothing to do with the Rossetti poem, and I’m beginning to think that Khushwant Singh did not even mean the title as a quotation. The book was dull, and suffers from being a dolled-up political statement, which I’m sure people know how much I hate. Don’t be tempted.
7.1 Kayaking reminds me of OBS, where Kenneth Gay thought it would be a good idea to cook a whole, unchopped onion into a cauldron of asparagus soup and canned chicken curry and call it dinner.
7.2 It’s a singularly inefficient way to travel, although I suppose you could look at it from another angle and say that it’s a great workout. .
8.1 There isn’t much to do at nights. The television is on the fritz, and the other recreational facilities they have are lame. I wish I had better books. (Currently reading: The 13.5 Lives of Captain Bluebear – Walter Moers)
9.1. We visit Pulau Tamun, MPA. It’s no more than a rock in the ocean, but it has a mosque, a few chalet bungalows, a cemetery and a research lab.
9.2. They study sea turtles in this lab, and it continues to amaze me that Chelonia navigate the world, avoid the soup pot, and have still not gone extinct.
9.3 According to a sign on the beach, SAFETY IS AT YOUR OWN RISK. ACCIDENTS are also AT YOUR OWN RISK.
9.4 There is life in abundance. The fish eat from your hands. In particular, one snout-nosed species is more than happy to swim right up to you and poke curiously at your fingers.
9.5 Even after much coaxing, the only person willing to venture far from the shore is The Other Brother. Everyone else: you missed out.
10.1 It wasn’t perfect, but I kind of needed the break.
Monday, June 20, 2005
and since she mentioned it
When I am dead, my dearest,
Sing no sad songs for me:
Plant thou no roses at my head,
Nor shady cypress tree:
Be the green grass above me
With showers and dewdrops wet;
And if thou wilt, remember,
And if thou wilt, forget.
I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain;
And dreaming through the twilight
That doth not rise nor set,
Haply I may remember,
And haply may forget.
           Christina Rossetti
Sunday, June 19, 2005
in babylon
I probably sped through it a little bit too fast (mostly because I was enjoying it); because of that I feel that I missed some of the superstructure that Moring built into the novel, and that might have taken something away from the reading. (In general, I find it harder to pay attention when reading now than in my JC days. Not sure why; perhaps it's amyloid plaque in the brain already). The translation (I read the Flamingo edition) was, as far as I could tell, quite well done -- it hardly resembled a translated work, in fact. Something to do with the fact that it was written in Dutch? Certain languages seem to survive translation to English better than others.
Loved: Uncle Herman, the picking-through-the-haunted-house bits, the fairy tales, all the descriptions of food, and the last chapter. Especially the fairy tales (I'm a sucker for stories within stories.)
(Minz: it's a book that really merits a fuller review; suffice it to say that I
think you'll like it.)
sermon
Currently reading:
I Shall Not Hear The Nightingale - Khushwant Singh (purely because the title caught my eye; we shall see.)
Friday, June 17, 2005
Monday, June 13, 2005
gift
Sunday, June 12, 2005
Friday, June 10, 2005
pink martini
(oh! they're all from harvard!)
like never before
tastes
if you recall, i told minz a few months ago that i thought pat mckillip's riddlemaster trilogy was a work that would be appreciated more by guys than girls. that idea was very quickly shot down, so if i get loud protests about my take on cormier, perhaps the conclusion is that i'm a bigot. isn't it true, though, that many children's books are gender-targeted? not just because writers feel they need to fulfil some unspoken social contract to maintain the gender identities of the next generation, but out of commercial necessity as well -- parents like clear-cut choices for their kids, I think: GI Joes and Barbies and all that.
or are Humans people genderless when it comes to taste in literature because we grew up reading everything? i kind of like that notion: transcending the social construct to appreciate something as it is. conveniently 21st century as well: no barriers, no lenses, just the snowy whiteness of objectivity.
i do like being recommended books -- there's a very different pleasure in picking a good book off the shelf and reading one because someone you know passes it off to you. the exercise then is not just 'why did i like it', but 'why did the other person like it', and if (s)he is someone you care about, that can be insight worth having.
Currently reading:
In Babylon - Marcel Moring
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
When long-left-alone jungle tribes are dragged into the spokes of civilisation, they get mangled. It's not simple matters that result in their destruction. It's not that they're not as well armed as the interlopers, that they can't manage to adapt, or that they have nothing to sell. They're flattened by the awareness that their beliefs have failed: it's not destructive to learn that there is a better way of hunting a peccary, that synthetic fabrics have their uses, or that you need to master another language to trade. All of us can be extremely adaptable when it's to our advantage to do so. One belief trampled is a nuisance, but to see all your answers as litter on the streets of your conquerors... Getting the numbers wrong for a lottery draw, or getting wet because you didn't take an umbrella because you surmised it wouldn't rain is radically different from discovering that your family all hate you and that the bank in which you had your life savings never existed.
Is the loss of the feeling that everything will be all right simply an indication that you've finally grown up or that you're not right in the head? I don't dream any more. Or I do, but not with any conviction. It's like watching a foot ball match when you don't support either team and you don't know any of the players and you don't have any interest in the sport: it passes the time, but you don't care.
Monday, June 06, 2005
Sunday, June 05, 2005
today i made latkes
(she has been promised one wrapped in a paper towel the next time we meet)
latkes because of all quiet..., and friedrich as well, in which they toss hot potato pancakes from hand to hand. wanted to add streaky bacon, but forgot to buy any, which is just as well because that would be sort of non-traditional. also forgotten: cranberry sauce; plain old strawberry jam on the side, however, worked just fine.
Thursday, June 02, 2005
hitchhiker's guide
1. Arthur Dent was too...sane. In the book, you got the sense that AD's head was always about five seconds away from imploding. I know CP is going to hate me for saying this, but I think I would have preferred someone like Bill Murray in the role, 'cos Martin Freeman just didn't carry it for me.
2. I really wanted the zany bits to be over the top, and they weren't. The one movie where they can legitimately smear cheese over everything, and they miss their chance.
3. It was too glossy. I guess I was expecting something like the Monty Python movies where there's this underlying sense of fakeness. Is it legitimate to complain that the production value of a movie is too high? Marvin was perfectly tacky, though. Oh, and so was the whale. More of the show should have felt that way.
4. I'm not sure what the Guide looked like in my mind, but it certainly did not look like That. (Concession: 10/10 for Stephen Fry's narration)
Oh well.
dinosaur redux
Currently reading:
Voyage To the End of the Room - Tibor Fischer
Tuesday, May 31, 2005
last day
Well. It's been a year since graduation, and I have not come very far. I suppose you could make an argument for strength of character and accumulated wisdom, but that's really neither here nor there.
The thing is, I'm afraid of being judged, afraid that if I don't make a beeline for "success" -- whatever that is -- people will assume I'm messing around or making a hash of things. Which is stupid for two reasons: first, that the people who truly care probably aren't assuming/judging anyway, and second, my perceived failures are only failures to reach standards that I've set for myself. Life lesson learned? Get over yourself, you idiot.
I could use a jackalope though.
Saturday, May 28, 2005
on achievement
And, just for fun, here are the words for Boundin':
Here's a story on how strange
Is life with its changes
And it happened not long ago
On a high mountain plain
Where the sage brush arranges
A playground south of the snow
Lived a lamb with a coat of remarkable sheen
It would glint in the sunlight all sparkly and clean
Such a source of great pride that it caused him to preen
And he'd break out in high-steppin' dance
He would dance for his neighbours across the way
I must say that they found his dancin' enhancin'
For they also would join in the play
Then one day...
[Lamb gets sheared]
Then a-boundin' up the slope
Came a great American jackalope
This sage of the sage
This rare hare of hope
Caused to pause and check out the lamb
(Jackalope:) Hey kid, why the mope?
(Lamb:) I used to be somethin' all covered in fluff
And I'd dance in the sunlight and show off my stuff
Then they hauled me away
In a manner quite rough
And they sheared me and dumped me
Back here in the buff
And if that's not enough
Now my friends all laugh at me
'Cos they think I look ridiculous
Funny and pink
(Jackalope:) Pink? Pink?
But what's wrong with pink?
Seems you've got a pink kink in your think
Does it matter what colour? Well that gets a 'nope'
Be it pink, purple or heliotrope
Now sometimes you're up and sometimes you're down
When you find that you're down, well, just look around
You've still got a body, good legs and fine feet
Get your head in the right place, and hey, you're complete
Now as for the dancin', you can do more
You can reach great heights, in fact you can soar
If you just get a leg up and slap it on down
And you find you're up in what's called a bound
Bound, bound, bound and rebound
Bound and you're up, right next to the sky
And I think you can do it if you give it a try
First your leg up...slap it on down...
[Much boundin' ensues]
So every year, long about May
They'd load him up and they'd haul him away
And they'd shave him and dump him all naked and bare
He learned to live with it, he didn't care
He'd just bound, bound, bound and rebound
Now in this world of ups and downs
So nice to know there are jackalopes around
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- The Corgi of Mystery
- 1980: Born. 1989: Sudden affliction of self-awareness. Things downhill ever since.
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the way around is through8 years ago
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Quote of the Week
Blog Archive
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2005
(312)
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December
(17)
- how science is sometimes trumped by your mom
- wednesday: dinner with nat. i had bumped into him ...
- believe it or not, it's bob loblaw's law blog
- so that we don't inadvertently land up in jail
- a thought
- Merry Christmas
- futureme
- everyone is insisting that i change my blog templa...
- please god
- golden globes
- tuesday evening began with dinner at eng seng with...
- 1. it's 4:37, tuesday afternoon, and more than an...
- in my mailbox today:
- working nights does have its plus points. i've bee...
- just saying
- on saturday, there was a life-sized stuffed pooh b...
- words that aren't #1
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November
(30)
- because 2.5 years isn't enough
- Question:
- overnight
- happy turkey day!
- 7.08
- neal stephenson
- home. backdated entries to follow.
- Penn
- Greyhound ride
- cont'd
- cont'd
- cont'd
- cont'd
- a little bit of something very cute
- They cancelled Arrested Development. That sucks so...
- the conference
- i aten't dead, although a combination of circadian...
- FREE INTERNET
- if i end up sitting beside of one of those ****ing...
- more social psych
- as always, i had a difficult time deciding what bo...
- why good people do bad things
- old, but good
- away on friday
- I need a copy of The Last Temptation of Christ, an...
- fare thee well
- From A Compact History of ?*, by David Foster Wall...
- bake shop
- background
- i saw chocolate cheese in the store today. it look...
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October
(18)
- cookies again
- 4 months in
- going into a week of leave
- for the volunteers who come and stay overnight, i'...
- more cookies
- nobels
- Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added ...
- Ig Nobels (ii)
- Ig Nobels
- i am to start shadowing one of the clinical psycho...
- mid-october. tempus fugit. did september even happ...
- booker
- from a random woman's magazine:"Any of us would ha...
- From Today, 7 Oct 2005:Longer life span calls for ...
- question
- corpse bride
- my boss has asked me to check out mri made easy, a...
- i mentioned to cp to other day that i watch a coup...
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September
(22)
- acquired* and finished thud! over the weekend. aft...
- in my mailbox yesterday
- minor gloat
- ow
- i almost forgot to blog a whopping big thank you t...
- it's actually there!
- emmys
- mid-autumn
- caudate
- today: definitely the first time i've told someone...
- lunch today was at a new place across the road, a ...
- a colleague mentioned this morning how, in his you...
- cookies
- while i was doing a scan today, fs messaged me to ...
- expressions of mirth, divers
- chuffed
- while browsing through nature a couple of days ago...
- note to self
- be thou my vision
- there was an all-female poetry slam happening at t...
- yes, one should not laugh at elderly men who are h...
- mornings
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August
(24)
- death to productivity
- choonping
- sfn (ii)
- grammar police (ii)
- sfn
- grammar police
- also auden
- The NovelistEncased in talent like a uniform,The r...
- admittedly
- can you milk a whale?
- catachresis
- perhaps i'm being a smart-aleck by admitting this ...
- From The Trick Is To Keep BreathingOther people. O...
- From The Trick Is To Keep Breathing:Preparation fo...
- laws of nature
- fall TV
- finally got round to checking out the new library....
- the previous discussion arising because it transpi...
- the kind of thing von thinks of
- last night: after getting conned (once more) at al...
- got the ibook. does apple have a copyright on the ...
- bbq 2: electric boogaloo
- charlie and the chocolate factory, consensus opinion
- backdated
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July
(15)
- ikea
- correction
- ok. so we all have to buy this, like, now.
- spss
- mysterious skin
- butterfly - weezer
- while watching sin city last night with cp and jia...
- hp6
- we lunched today in the old tanjong pagar railway ...
- hp6 tomorrow
- hmm
- update
- the central problem in all research is thisin theo...
- Someone has murdered the neighbour's cat, the one ...
- every time i come out of a break i immediately fee...
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June
(27)
- while spring cleaning a couple of days ago, i relo...
- the break was nice. now deep breath, and here we g...
- The Brother is correct. Will Ferrell as Franz Lieb...
- sms
- carded
- i had forgotten how nice salads can be, but making...
- the comeback
- … and thanks for all the fish
- and since she mentioned it
- going to malaysiaback on fridayi aten't dead, and ...
- in babylon
- sermon
- worst book ever written
- cruise + holmes = grossCurrently reading:Too Loud ...
- gift
- with people from all over the world back for summe...
- dukegabe is back from NC and mourning the end of h...
- pink martini
- like never before
- tastes
- to someone
- From Voyage to the End of the Room, Tibor FischerW...
- anyhow, if anyone else would like the mystery of t...
- i logged on to complain about my numinousness bein...
- today i made latkes
- hitchhiker's guide
- dinosaur redux
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December
(17)