dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: April 2005

Japanese school experiences

I am a Japanese School Teacher - a funny series of columns by a black American guy teaching in Japan.

I went to a hip-hop club with a friend a few weeks ago, and pretty much everyone there was wearing the exact same thing. The guys ALL wore NY Yankees caps, to the side, a sweater, a coat, some "bling-bling" for good measure, and big pants. The girls all looked like a tit-less, ass-less version of Beyonce from one of her videos. I swear, it's like they went to K-Mart and bought "Hip-Hop in a Can" for $9.99 and popped it open....voila! I'm ghetto now! ...No you're not! The other thing that depressed me about this club was that no one really danced...they all "swayed" to the music, while holding cigarettes. In neatly arraigned lines. That's Japan for you. (Link)

There's funnier stuff where that came from.

The Adelphi Hotel

The Adelphi Hotel, Singapore

Speaking of prewar Singapore, here's a picture of the Adelphi Hotel on Coleman Street, one of Singapore's big 3 hotels in the 1900s, along with the Raffles, which of course still stands, and the Hotel de l'Europe, which is now our present Supreme Court building. The Adelphi was acquired by Arathoon Sarkies and Eleazar Johannes in 1903 - adding to the Armenian domination of the hotel industry then - and I'm trying to figure out when it was torn down. (There's a reference to the Adelphi still being around in 1962, since that's when the Singapore Contract Bridge Association was formed.)

One thing a little web sleuthing led me to learn was that the Adelphi was the site of a simultaneous chess exhibition by grandmaster Alexander Alekhine back in 1933:

For four hours, Dr. Alexander Alekhine, the world’s chess champion, battled against 25 members of the Singapore Chess Club at the Adelphi Hotel yesterday, and in winning all the games demonstrated that uncanny skills which enabled him to beat Capablanca for the world’s title in 1927. (The Straits Times, Feb 27, 1933 - cited in Olimpiu Urcan's excellent article on Alekhine's chess exhibitions in Singapore in ChessCafe.com)

Alekhine would return a month later and do a blindfolded simultaneous exhibition, in which he won 9 of the 10 games he played. Cor blimey, as they say. The Urcan article also gives a good sense of prewar Singapore as a roaring little corner of Asia, with occasional visits by celebs - Fairbanks and Pickford, Chaplin, Will Rogers, and the like.

On a more sober note, the Adelphi also gets mentioned in this diary entry from 1942, from a couple - Nobby and Annie Clark - who managed to make it out just before the Fall of Singapore.

Feb. 7th. Shelling and bombing all day, nervous of staying in the bungalows it is on the northern slopes of Fort Canning (Military Headquarters) and will be in line of attack... Stayed all day in the lounge of the Adelphi Hotel where we helped ourselves to food cooked by the Swiss chef, the waiters having fled. Drove to the General Hospital trying to locate M. B. wards and corridors and verandahs were crowded with military and civilian wounded and dead. The doctors and nurses doing a wonderful job but all worn out by work and anxiety. (Link)

There's some personal interest here in figuring out the history of this place - my office today is in the Adelphi building that replaced the hotel, and I used to go to school up the road, at what was then the Anglo-Chinese Primary School and is now the National Archives. So I've seen this part of town for countless years in my life, but I'd never thought to look into the history of this particular spot. Glad I did.

Technorati Tags: singapore, history

A patchwork history

Many thanks to fellow Singaporean blogger Mr Miyagi for the link. Miyagi took time off his schedule of teaching Ralph Macchio to wax on and off to blog about an effort to collate the voices of Singaporeans - a sort of folk history or oral history of Singapore and Singaporeans via podcast. Recording down the voices of our grandparents and others who've spent time on this island and preserve their stories - I think this is a very worthy project.

When I travelled around England and Wales and stayed at little bed-and-breakfasts around the country, I would occasionally meet people who said "you're from Singapore? I served there". As I was walking around Holyhead, I was randomly approached by an old drunk man who immediately said - proclaimed, really - "you're from Singapore!" Clearly, I was stunned, and just said, "yes, I am", to which he responded "I served there", and promptly listed out all the roads named for London streets near Seletar - he thought, as I do, that it was funny that there was a Leicester Square and an Oxford Circus and so on in this random corner of the world.

We must have looked a sight, an old drunk striking up a conversation with a Chinese backpacker in the middle of a tiny Welsh town at noon. It was certainly somewhat surreal, but it was at the same time enlightening, listening to this man ramble on about pre-war Singapore.

Not much time left to collect stories of the prewar generation, I fear.

Mr Brown is collating an oral history of Singaporeans.

Daypopped

Wow, I'm on Daypop's Top 40 Links, thanks to some weird way they've counted citations of my blog from Blogcritics. Number 35 with a bullet, baby! Welcome all. I'm probably going to be ousted tomorrow by news of Tom Cruise dating Katie Holmes, but I'll bask in the one day of Internet fame.

For anyone new to this site, here's the rundown: the most popular links seem to be to posts on why I won't buy an iPod, World Jump Day, the origins of English words, and Coconut, the world's cutest West Highland Terrier. I guess that's a nice representation of the grab-bag nature of my posts. I put up random fun links every now and then. In my other blogs, I review films and music and write about the Boston Red Sox. Um, that's it. Tarry a little, Internet sojourner.

Okay, I admit I just wanted to revive the use of "tarry", since I get a kick out of anachronistic-sounding words. Next up: how to incorporate "skedaddle" into my daily vocabulary. Oh wait, easy enough: time to skedaddle.

Penguins at the airport

Penguins in metal detector

You can tell that airport security has reached new levels of strictness when even penguins have to go through metal detectors. What, penguins can pack heat? If they could, leopard seals would be in for some serious whoopin'. At least they were smart enough not to wear shoes. Boy, that would be troublesome.

"I'm sorry for the inconvenience, but we've been told to look out for two short guys, dressed in tuxes"

Given how shiny the floor looks, I'm surprised the penguins didn't do a belly-flop-on-the-ice-floe-style slide through the detector.

(Pic taken from a Denver Channel slideshow on the penguins' journey. Lots of other funny pics, mainly of the penguins looking rightfully bemused.)

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft

Speaking of space, I'm a big Craigslist fan, and it's funny to note that their expansion has brought them to outer space:

Recent posters to craigslist may have noticed a little checkbox that asks if it's "ok to transmit this posting into outer space." In a few weeks everyone who answered "yes" will have their messages beamed into the heavens by the Florida-based Deep Space Communications Network via a five-meter parabolic dish antenna. A March test transmission of the first 138,000 messages went swimmingly. Act now and you, too, can offer our intergalactic pals a low, low price on your used computer peripherals. (East Bay Express)

Here's an actual Craigslist post to extraterrestials. And here's a personal that was quoted in the East Bay Express article:

It would be cool if you had like a transporter or something because I'm not good with LDR's [long distance relationships]. Either that, or a spaceship that goes really really fast but somehow doesn't affect the space/time continuum. I don't want to go see you for the night/weekend only to come back to find out that everybody I know is dead and 400 years have passed. That would suck.

Ah. Classic. I presume aliens would also receive the usual Craigslist hodgepodge of posts - attempts to give away unfriendly hamsters, rants about Microsoft Word, ninjas seeking ninjas, and other personals. Then they'd blast away our world for an interplanetary bypass.

Review: Far Side of the Moon

Wrote a review of The Far Side of the Moon, a wonderful film that I watched on Sunday during the Film Festival.

The Far Side of the Moon, Robert Lepage's adaptation of his own play, is a beautiful, quirky meditation on a pair of brothers in Quebec coping with the death of their mother from kidney disease. Reflecting the title, Lepage plays both lead roles: Phillippe, a grad student of the philosophy of science, and his brother Andre, a glib weatherman. The two form opposing faces of the same family, Phillippe the more distant, uglier one - the far side of the moon - and Andre the less cerebral pretty boy, and LePage distinguishes them successfully.

Down where it's wetter

Seagrass Filefish

Thanks to Otterman leaving a comment and some clicking around his blog, I've discovered a whole set of Singapore nature blogs. So, for all the marine biology fans in my life (you know who you are), here's three of them: Pulau Hantu, Labrador Park, and the Blue Tempeh. Some great pictures in all of them - the one above, of a seagrass filefish, is taken from the Pulau Hantu blog.

Liverpool

The Guardian visits Liverpool, in preparation for the upcoming Champions League semi-final. Stories such as this one make me nostalgic. Despite the stereotypes, Liverpool was a really great city to visit. Unless you have no interest in either football or the Beatles. Then I weep for your soul. Random travel tip: if you do go, check out the loo in the Philharmonic.

Embassie hostel - one of the most fun hostels I've stayed in, run by Everton supporters.

You say orchid, I say Joaquim

The Vanda Miss Joaquim is Singapore's national flower, appropriately for a city that's a hodgepodge of ethnicities, since it's a natural hybrid (of Vanda hookeriana and Vanda teres). But here's the part I never did figure out: how do you pronounce "Joaquim"? Apparently Agnes Joaquim was a member of Singapore's small Armenian community, but that gives me no sense as to whether I should pronounce the name "JOE-kim" as I've always heard around here, or "wah-KIM", as in Spanish names (as in Joaquim Phoenix, even though I think he isn't Latino).

Of course, the right answer is "you pronounce any surname the way the person wants it to be pronounced" - if your last name is "Smith" and you want it to be pronounced "Tan", more power to you. But unfortunately I don't know anyone with the last name Joaquim in Singapore, so there's no way of using that avenue to clear up the question.

So I sent out an e-mail to Bert Vaux, linguistics professor and editor of the Annual of Armenian Linguistics. His response:

That's definitely not an Armenian name, so I would do it in the Spanish or Portuguese way (the two are different, I believe) depending on where the person is from.

Interesting, I hadn't considered that the Portuguese pronunciation might be different. A little bit more poking around the Inta-Net points to the fact that Joaquim is likely to be a Portuguese surname (not surprising, given the strong Portuguese presence in this region - many Eurasians in Singapore have a Portuguese last name), so I guess it's probably pronounced something like zhwa-KIM (following the pronunciation of Joaquim in Brazilian names) assuming, of course, that no anglicisation of the pronunciation occurred. Hmm.

Site of Agnes Joaquim's tombstone.

Linksfest: Old news

Remaking the pill bottle.
Bill Watterson, artist of Calvin and Hobbes, gave this commencement speech at his old college, Kenyon College.
Viagra is good for climbers and those with pulmonary hypertension. "It was good to be able to breathe freely again and no longer feel that oppressive feeling on my chest." I don't want to know where all the blood went.
KarmaBanque sells the idea of selling boycotted firms short. Interesting economic experiment - it's the reverse side of the idea of "ethical investing", but I'm not sure it'll be as successful.
Famed New Orleans restaurant Uglesich closes. Po'boy, you bound to die.
RanKing RanQueen in Tokyo, where only the most popular products make it on the shelf. The very opposite of the Long Tail idea that we're moving away from mass to niche markets.

JC days

Was in Anderson Junior College for work today. Funny that while we Singaporeans don't use the word "college" to mean "university", we still have the phrase "junior college".

Songs I learnt to play over the weekend

Some noodling on my guitar this weekend, as I figured out (mostly) how to play Franz Ferdinand's "Dark of the Matinee" and Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" (ah, 4 chords and the truth).

As film festival denizens will know, there's a great CD sale going on at Shaw Tower - the one with Prince and Jade cinemas. Apparently Gramophone bought over the stock of some firm that was closing, or so someone I overheard was saying. Picked up copies of albums by the Inmates, Bob Dylan, the Bad Plus, and 50 Cent. Woo!

BusinessWeek - Blogs Will Change Your Business

BusinessWeek has an article on how "Blogs Will Change Your Business". Some predictable blogs-as-Gutenberg stuff follows, but I'm more interested in how blogs change BusinessWeek - and the magazine industry - itself. As I noted before, the Guardian has adapted quite nicely, and so it'll be interesting to take a look at BusinessWeek's newly started blog.

Mash-ups

Grey Album and Jay-Zeezer be damned, I don't think I heard a better mash-up last year than Party Ben's "Boulevard of Broken Songs". His "Finding Out Sharona is Blind" - which combines the contagious sound of Louis XIV's "Finding Out True Love is Blind", the Knack's "My Sharona", Devo, and Fatboy Slim's "Rockafeller Skank" - is a bit on the side of stoopid fratboys jumping around, but damn if it isn't catchier than fleas.

How to build a Singaporean quilt

A shot from the Fabric of the Nation exhibition at the HDB Hub. Massive project - reminds me of the AIDS quilt in its collaborative aspect.

Nick Hornby - A Long Way Down

The Guardian has a good interview/feature on Nick Hornby since Hornby's about to release A Long Way Down, his new book. The article uses Hornby's dual life as a theme - the duality of being a Cambridge-educated football supporter at a time when football was equated with yobbery, and this bit:

Hornby's history is rather complicated. One potted biography could read: age 48, son of successful businessman Sir Derek Hornby, graduated from Cambridge University, became a literary critic, then bestselling author and friend to the great and good. Another potted biography could read: lower-middle-class son of secretary mother Margaret, drifter, failed teacher, failed journalist, failed screenwriter, achieved surprising success with memoir of a football fanatic and loser. Both biographies would be equally true.

I'm excited about the new Hornby novel, even if it sounds closer to How to be Good than High Fidelity...

Hornby's column in the Believer.
Further discussion of Hornby novels at Delta Sierra Arts.

Zouk hair show

I went to a hair show at Zouk yesterday - my friend was launching a line of Italian hair care products in Singapore. A slightly surreal experience. The Italian hairdressers that had been flown in from the event were clearly very skilled - it's quite interesting how good hairdressers can cut so swiftly and deftly, with their scissors flying seemingly randomly but with a hidden sort of order. Still, I can't say watching people get their hair cut on stage is my cup of tea.

Actually, come to think of it, I don't drink tea, so nothing really is my cup of tea.

Linksfest: News of the weird

Blue Oyster Cult's response to the famous "cowbell" sketch on SNL.
Man turns self into cat.
As expected, the Wendy's "finger in food" case is probably a hoax.
Cookie Monster goes on a diet. What's next, the Salad Salamander?

Eating worms

Poor Coconut is sick with an upset stomach, most likely caused by eating worms during his walk (vet's best guess). Ah, dogs, they're such scavengers.

All that reminds me of the classic campfire song "Nobody Likes Me, Everybody Hates Me, I'm Gonna Eat Some Worms". Here's the lyrics and an MP3 version. Searching for the lyrics led me to the entire treasure trove of bawdy songs that is Immortalia. I love folk music archives.

Immortalia also made me realise the source of the latter part of the title of Edward Albee's "The Goat or, Who is Sylvia?".

When You Say Nothing At All

In the cab today, the radio was playing the Alison Krauss version of "When You Say Nothing At All", which basically pummels the Ronan Keating version into the ground and makes it beg for mercy.

I discovered the Krauss version, admittedly, by watching the Notting Hill DVD with the commentary on and learning that it was Krauss's take on the late Keith Whitley's song that inspired the producers to hire Ronan Keating to cover it. Why not use the Krauss one, then? Of course, the same producers also hired Elvis Costello to cover Charles Aznavour's "She", but at least you could argue in that case that they needed a more straight-up and bright rendition, rather than Aznavour's somewhat louche melancholic rasp, for the context in which the film used it.

The original Whitley version of "When You Say Nothing At All" is great stuff too. The song needs singers with a country/bluegrass background to work, methinks.

Singaporean Bloggers

I suppose I talk less about what goes on in my personal life than other Singaporean bloggers, but to let everyone know, yesterday featured a meetup at NYDC (free Wi-Fi) of some bloggers to discuss a potential Bloggercon as well as Tomorrow.sg, a sort of Boing Boing/Slashdot for Singaporeans.

Present at the dinner: yours truly, plus Adri, Calm One, James, La Idler, Miyagi, Mr Brown, and Xiaxue. After the dinner, I went home and promptly ate a second dinner (mee pok tah), instead of being diligent and blogging about it like some of the others, so I'm a day late and a dollar short. Mr Brown has the report of what went on and Adri has the pics.

Avantblog

Trying out tools that use the Blogger API... this post was written on Avantblog for the Palm, on the back of a #77 bus.

Edit: Woohoo! Clearly it works.

Linksfest: Geek toys

A 7-day alarm clock, to take into account unusual schedules - like those of college kids.
A James Bond-style hidden camera.
You pay peanuts, you get monkey SWAT team members.

New Pope Elected

White Smoke

It's Ratzinger, who was the front runner. This bit about the new Pope is interesting:

Joseph Ratzinger, 77, one of the heads of the Vatican leadership, a conservative and a close aide to the late pope. He deserted from the German army during World War II. He is well versed in Jewish issues and admitted that "a certain insufficient resistance by Christians to this atrocity (the Holocaust) is explained by the anti-Judaism present in the souls of more than a few Christians." (Link)

Ratzinger becomes Pope Benedict XVI, which is what the oddsmakers were saying.

Jargon

Do you hate corporate-speak? So do lots of people:

Warshawsky, a "recovering jargonaholic," said he hopes to rehabilitate otherwise smart business people who pollute their communications with terms like "results-driven" or "paradigm shift."
"Copernicus's revelation that the Earth revolves around the sun brought about a paradigm shift," he said. "Your revelation to outsource the payroll department probably shouldn't carry equal cachet." (Boston Globe)

I've used Bullfighter on presentations and documents for a while now, and it was a pleasant surprise to learn that the people who developed Bullfighter also wrote the Why Business People Speak Like Idiots book that the Globe article refers to.

And yes, that last sentence ended with a preposition, and this one begins with a conjunction.

Plain English Campaign.

Had we but world enough, and time

Over at SPASTIC, the Society for the Preservation and Acknowledgement of Subjunctive Tense In Communication, there's a post that captures what annoys me about Gwen Stefani and Eve's "Rich Girl": they changed the nice subjunctive of "If I Were a Rich Man" to "If I was a rich girl". Does no one respect the subjunctive tense? It's my only peeve about Sophie B. Hawkins' "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover".

Of course, since Gwen Stefani is rich, perhaps she's just going with the rule that the subjunctive expresses improbable or hypothetical occurrences and the indicative expresses probable ones...

Marvell, "To his Coy Mistress": "Had we but world enough, and time..."

The Oscar Meyer song (well, the other one, not the one about baloney having a first name): "if I were an Oscar Mayer Wiener / Ev'ryone would be in love with me"

Ayn Rand at 100

Reason has an evaluation of Ayn Rand by Cathy Young, 100 years after her birth, noting how "Objectivism remains, for most people, a way station on a journey to some wider outlook". These two extracts struck me:

In its pure form, Rand’s philosophy would work very well indeed if human beings were never helpless and dependent through no fault of their own. Thus, it’s hardly surprising that so many people become infatuated with Objectivism as teenagers and “grow out of it” later, when concerns of family, children, and old age—their own and their families’—make that fantasy seem more and more impossible.

...

Rand’s philosophy admitted no contradictions or paradoxes in reality; but reality is full of apparently irreconcilable truths. The truth of what Rand said about the heroic human spirit and individual self-determination does not negate the truth that human beings often find themselves at the mercy of circumstances beyond their control and dependent on others through no fault of theirs. The truth of the self-sufficient soul coexists with the truth of the vital importance of human connections.

It always seemed to me that the love of Rand's philosophy often depends on never being out of control: Young makes the point that Rand refused to acknowledge her own cancer, and that Rand seems to dismiss the emotive meaning of family.

Apropos of nothing, back in college we had this running joke about creating an Ayn Rand musical that somehow conflates Randian objectivist philosophy with Caliban from The Tempest. And the fact that she was chummy with Alan Greenspan, back in the days when Greenspan had just stopped being a boho jazz musician. You had to be there, I guess.

500 Internal Server Error

What's with Blogger and the dreaded "500 Internal Server Error" page these days? At least their support sent me a nice message when I e-mailed them yesterday, saying I apparently have to clear my cache and cookies. Wired compiles a litany of complaints, including the double-post problem (Blogger sometimes get stuck at the Publishing... 0% page - so you go back, hit Publish again, voila, double the pleasure)...

Blogger Status page.

Singapore Film

The Singapore International Film Festival recently kicked off, and Tokyo Godfathers screened last Sunday morning. I've seen it on DVD already, and it's a great film - it really speaks to the power of anime.

On a more sober note, Karen over at Snog Blog reminded me of Bertrand Lee, the Singaporean filmmaker who lost a leg filming in India, noting that he's now "on so much painkillers that he's become incoherent". Apparently there have been lots of further complications. Poor guy.

Light Rail in New York

Maybe of interest only to an urban-planning wonk-wannabe like me, but this New York Times article discusses the possibility of building a light-rail line across 42nd Street. I think it's a good, or at least intriguing, idea - I remember being stuck for a good half hour on the M42 between Fifth and Sixth... they still need a Second Avenue Line though.

Speaking of 42nd Street, former Ziegfield dancer Doris Eaton Travis is returning to Broadway to the New Amsterdam on 42nd St... let's put it this way, when she first danced at the Amsterdam, the flu pandemic was sweeping the world, and the Boston Red Sox had just won their third World Series in four years (from waterbones, who also linked to this really lovely story about a wholphin).

Break time

As a person who can't endure long car rides without the need for frequent rest stops, I think it's funny that Paula Radcliffe stopped to relieve herself in the London Marathon - and still ended up setting a world record. (The article uses "spend a penny" as a euphemism for using the toilet - now that's a phrase I haven't heard in ages.)

There is such a thing as too thin

Sometimes Singapore seems like it's populated by anorexics. I know, I know, the pressure to be thin exists in many developed countries: it's at the heart of Bridget's insecurities in Bridget Jones' Diary, teenage girls write to their Goddess Ana in America, and so on, but when I was in Boston or New York or London, I don't think I ever felt it to be as pervasive as it is here.

At the very least, even if the "ideals" being promoted through ads and so on in those cities were of inordinately skinny women, there was a sense that to make disparaging comments about a person's size in public would be inappopriate. Whereas here in Singapore, the newspapers are filled with ads for slimming centres which seem to depend on shame to succeed. I can't forget the one in which this woman said that back in school they called her "fat girl" - and then displayed her current size in triumph, instead of reflecting that she went to school with some seriously mean-spirited jackasses. Why should it be acceptable to tell women that you aren't very close to, even the ones who're so thin that they might want to avoid walking too near gratings, that they should lose weight? Why is it acceptable to hurt someone's self-esteem?

Sometimes you overhear women at lunch talking about the food they don't eat so longingly you'd swear they were in some country rent by war, rather than depriving themselves voluntarily. What would my grandmother, forced to grow tapioca just to survive during World War II, make of it all?

When I was in Miami with the Girlfriend, we went to this club where we saw this fairly large-sized woman dressed sexily and dancing and genuinely having a good time and we said to each other, it's too bad you don't get to see this much in Singapore: it's really nice to see someone strut out with self-esteem. And this was Miami, city of supposedly perfect bodies.

Which all leads up my theory of why people don't make enough babies in Singapore, despite all the exhortations to do so: they're feeling too lousy about the way they look, and when you're feeling that lousy, you can't really be in the mood. Self-confidence, after all, is the sexiest attribute.

Linksfest: the weekend has landed

How the Onion is written.
Looks like Herzog and de Meuron have another success in their revamp of the Walker Art Center.
Making fun of the New York Times' wedding page.
I can't read this Japanese page (literally - Asian fonts aren't installed on my computer), but it's got lots of pictures of old Singapore, such as this one of Victoria Memorial Hall. Intriguing. Speaking of which, on the 2nd floor of Shaw Tower on Beach Road, there's a nice set of photos of old Beach Road, back in the days when the Raffles Hotel was actually a hotel by the coast.
A dictionary of Singlish.

See-through toilet

Would you use this loo?

Caine admiration

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Alfie, Get Carter, and The Italian J