dsng.net - the daryl sng blog: July 2005

Food crisis in Niger

Niger crisis

There's a growing food crisis in Niger (pronounced nee-ZHER, incidentally):

[France] said it would triple food aid to 4.6 million euros ($5.6 million) this year for Niger, where starvation threatens the lives of tens of thousands of children and has left millions of adults hungry after drought and locusts destroyed crops.

Very sad that malaria and diarrhoea may lead to many children's deaths. There's a UK Disaster Emergencies Committee appeal going round. Will make some calls to the Red Cross and World Vision to figure out if there's any way for Singaporeans to donate around here.

Edit: I should note that my calls seemed to indicate that there was no way to donate directly to the Niger crisis in Singapore, although of course funds will wend their way towards Niger.

Linksfest: I do not want what I haven't got... oh wait, I do

Sundays were meant for leisure reading...

Grammar.police on American Apparel's CEO Dov Charney's hands-on approach... and we mean hands-on. (Here are the American Apparel models, for people who just want to gawk.)
New Razr phone coming up, the "Q". I still want the Sony Ericsson K750i, the one with the autofocus camera.
Nick Hornby interviews Bruce Springsteen. I tend to agree with TMFTML, footnotes aren't really the best style for Hornby.
Since we're talkin' about the Boss, that brings to mind "Thunder Road", which brings to mind Thunder Road, which is a film mentioned in the nice long feature on director Jim Jarmusch in today's New York Times Magazine. Here's a good quote: "Throughout his life, he has courted and cultivated influences and mentors, and though many of his mentors have now died, they seem to float around his brain like wise, stubborn, pontificating ghosts. 'I really miss Joe Strummer,'' he said. ''Even though he's dead, I still get advice from him. He's very good at telling you to stick to your guns. I have Nick Ray, Sam Fuller and Joe - I have some great spirits when I need guidance. I hear William Burroughs a lot, too, but I don't really want to listen to his advice.'"

Life is Elsewhere

Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have travelled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination. - Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Third and Final Continent”

So this weekend I'm shifting with the family to a new place in Kembangan, which seems as good a reason to allude to a Kundera title as any. Moving always seems to invoke a whole flood of emotions. Once you spend enough time in any one space, once you hang your hat and claim it as yours, you realise it's not just that you occupy the space - the physical space ends up slowly, through some dim process of accretion, occupying your psychic space, infusing random corners of the mind with associations and memories. Which leaves me knowing two geographies: the one of physical corporeal dimensions, and my personal psychogeography, defined by imprints of the past.

My essay on leaving Harvard after graduation, writen 4 years ago.

Greek Tragedy

Congratulations to Stephanie Klein, whose blog was featured in a very flattering article in the New York Times as one of the "top 1%" of blogs (apparently if your Technorati rank is around 2000, that's the top 1%, or so Sifty is quoted as saying). She was generally quite pleased:

At the end of the day, this isn't about attention, an abundance or a dearth of it. It's about doing what I love. Being recognized for it feels extraordinary, it does, but really doing it, actually writing, is what really matters to me. Getting paid to do the thing I love most in life is a dream. The kind where when you wake up, you try really hard to fall back into just so you can ride it out a little longer. (From Greek Tragedy)

What struck me about Klein's post was what she wrote about the article's effect - or lack thereof - on her self-image, comparing the onset of "celebrity" to when she became thinner:

When I lost a lot of weight, it took a long time for my brain to catch up to my body. My shape fit into smaller sizes. My head was still a fatty, and to this day, if I overhear someone make a fat remark on the street, I assume it's directed toward me. Thin didn't really cozy up to me. "Oh, my God, I can't believe you were ever fat. You look like you've been thin your whole life." I hear the words come out of his mouth, but inside, I'm thinking, "Yeah, right. Okay. Whatever." Because it's still ME in here, looking out.

It strikes me as a sad comment on social conditioning that a woman should feel this way. Why is that people can dismiss weight-related compliments immediately, and at the same time be quick to leap onto any weight-related comments that affirm a negative self-image? I don't think I'll ever fathom the desire for wanting to agree with (perceived) criticisms... although a lot of beauty products do seem to be sold by creating a sense of inadequacy.

Dinner with Tyler Cowen

I recently had dinner with Tyler Cowen of Marginal Revolution, the economics blog that's tucked into my blogroll - he also writes for the Avian Flu blog. Cowen's an economics professor at George Mason University, but was in Singapore to research his upcoming book on American regional food.

So fellow blogger Michelle and I took him out to dinner at Maxwell Road Hawker Centre to experience Singaporean regional cuisine - as you can see, on the table were our finished plates of (clockwise from bottom right) oh luat, chicken rice, Foochow oyster cake, claypot chicken, and XO fish soup (the best thing we had - clearly Michelle was helping herself).

Got to reminisce about college days with Tyler, as well as talk with him about the best churrascuria in the world (somewhere in southern Brazil, apparently), the slow death of small regionals sodas such as Moxie and Kickapoo, the wonder of seafood in small shacks in Louisiana (made me think of Uglesich), and, Michelle's boyfriend being Texan, the merits of Texan vs Carolinan barbecue (everyone voted for Texas). Good times. And good luck to Tyler on his book, and to Michelle on her new job.

Pirates of the Caribbean casting - ARRR!

Avast ye maties! There's an open casting call for extras for Pirates of the Caribbean II and III in LA this Saturday:

Pirates:
Extreme characters and hideously unattractive types, ages 18-50. Odd body shapes or very lean to extremely skinny. Missing teeth, wandering eyes and serial killer looks with real long hair & beards. Wigs & makeup are not what we're looking for. We also need little people, very large sumo wrestler types, extremely tall or extremely short people, albinos, amputees. Any size or shape that is NOT average is best. All ethnicities. Mostly men, very few women.

Asian Men & Women:
We need tons of Asian people of all ages and types to play Townspeople, Shopkeepers, Prostitutes, Pirates etc. All shapes, sizes and ages over 18.

(Link via Indri, whom I'm ripping off this week)

I love how they're all very specific about the way the pirate extras should look and then for the other types of extras they just go "oh, any random Asian will do". "Yeah, we really need you to look like a freak, otherwise you won't be in the film... oh wait, you're Chinese, ah, that's good enough."

And who will answer a casting call that asks for "serial killer looks"? I mean, do people really go, "hey.... that's me they're talking about!"? (Oops... in reading Indri's entry further I realised she made the same joke. Jinx!)

Albinos, amputees, sumo wrestlers, little people - the casting call could very well look like a scene from 8½.

Payola 'scandal'

Eliot Spitzer continues his run as the crusading Attorney-General of New York - this time, he sniffs payola:

"Our investigation shows that, contrary to listener expectations that songs are selected for airplay based on artistic merit and popularity, air time is often determined by undisclosed payoffs to radio stations and their employees," Spitzer said.
In one instance in July 2001, Buffalo radio station executive David Universal and a guest were flown to New York City in exchange for his adding the Jennifer Lopez song "I'm Real" to the playlist at WKSE.
...

In one e-mail, an exec trying to promote the band Audioslave wrote to a radio programmer: "What do I have to do to get Audioslave on WKSS this week?!!? Whatever you can dream up I can make it happen."

(The New York Post)

All well and good, but, as Gawker points out, no one could think "I'm Real" made it to the charts on artistic merit.

The Simpsons, the Math Instinct, and Borders

Exchanged my expiring Citibank credit card points for a Borders voucher which I promptly flipped around on the Simpsons Season 5 DVD set. Woo hoo! I just love listening to the commentary - so much effort goes into each episode, and unless you look up episodes on SNPP sometimes it's easy to let references and allusions slip by, not to mention in-jokes (characters that look like writers, that sort of thing).

While in Borders, I flipped through The Math Instinct, an interesting book by Keith Devlin (NPR's "Math Guy") that argues that most animals, humans included, innately have some computational ability - dogs, for instance, can solve the problem of catching balls thrown into a lake in a way that would require "knowing" calculus. The title, of course, is a parallel to Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct (itself a book I can't recommend highly enough); in both cases the books challenge what we think we know about how we learn, although Pinker's book is clearly more academic.

Devlin's book answers questions such as why a baseball player runs in an arc towards a fly ball dropping in, rather than in a straight line (it's so that the parabola of the ball's journey looks straight, I think, if I recall correctly). Dogs do the same arcing run when retrieving frisbees, apparently. I wouldn't know - if you've ever owned terriers you know one of their trademarks is that they will chase after things, but they won't ever let them go, so trying to play frisbee with them would probably fall flat after one throw. That, and they're probably both smart and lazy enough to realise "hey, it's going to fall to the ground anyway, let's just wait till it drops".

Interestingly, Borders occupies a different social "space" in Singapore compared to Borders in America. Borders in America is another chain bookstore, the main rival to Barnes and Noble. Here, it's arguably seen as a kind of an exotic importer of specialty books and known for its huge range. I suppose it's because we don't really have the equivalent of Powell's City of Books, Strand Book Store, the specialty bookstores of Charing Cross Road, or even your average college town independent bookstore.

The Man With the Golden Face

Another great mugshot from the Smoking Gun: Man gets arrested for abusing intoxicants after he was caught with dilated pupils - and spray paint all over his face.

"But how could you tell I was sniffing spray paint, officer?"

Old friends (bookends)

Some days I like to check in on old college friends' blogs, and so I was following Baratunde Thurston 's ascent as a liberal comedian, whereupon I chanced upon a link to singer/songwriter Mieka Pauley's site. Good to see she's still singing, and apparently doing well... I met her way back in '02, when she opened for Glen Phillips (formerly of Toad the Wet Sprocket) and did this awesome version of "Angel From Montgomery". Such a talent - she's got the guitar chops of a folk singer, but she can belt it like a soul singer.

Mieka Pauley MP3s - try "The Way It Is".

Paul Krassner and Scientology

Paul Krassner writes about Scientology. Just that combination of words is enough to make me want to read - Krassner, premier satirist of his generation, taking on the ripe subject of Scientology. But in this case it does sound like he was being serious about what Scientology said - still makes for a funny series of events:

In 1971, I announced in an ad the features that would be included in the 13th-anniversary issue of The Realist. Among them, "The Rise of Sirhan Sirhan in the Scientology Hierarchy." The Church of Scientology proceeded to sue me for libel; they wanted $750,000 for those nine words, the title of an article that I had not yet written.

The Realist was famous for its extreme satire (back in 1967, "The Parts Left Out of the Kennedy Book", most famously, described, um, an act of Presidential necrophilia; no less than Joseph Heller said "You practically write Catch 22 with every issue") so clearly the Sirhan Sirhan thing was a joke. Scientology was not amused, however. But you never end up looking good suing satirists. Especially famous ones.

(Link via Majikthise.)

Oh, and I can't believe this is the second time I'm referencing Sirhan Sirhan in this blog in as many months.

Interview with Paul Krassner

What's your humour style?

1. It is silly to put personality quizzes on one's blog
2. This one said I'm like 3 of my comedic idols (Jon Stewart, Woody Allen, Ricky Gervais), plus it guessed (correctly) that I loved "the Office".
3. Ergo, I'm breaking the first rule.
4. I'm an egoist. And hopelessly delusional.

(Via waterbones)

the Wit
(69% dark, 34% spontaneous, 22% vulgar)

your humor style:
CLEAN | COMPLEX | DARK
You like things edgy, subtle, and smart. I guess that means you're
probably an intellectual, but don't take that to mean you're
pretentious. You realize 'dumb' can be witty--after all isn't that 'the
Simpsons' philosophy?--but rudeness for its own sake, 'gross-out' humor
and most other things found in a fraternity leave you totally flat. I
guess you just have a more cerebral approach than most. You have the
perfect mindset for a joke writer or staff writer. Your sense of humor
takes the most effort to appreciate, but it's also the best, in my
opinion.

Also, you probably loved the Office. If you don't know what I'm
talking about, check it out here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/theoffice/.

PEOPLE LIKE YOU: Jon Stewart - Woody Allen - Ricky Gervais

My test tracked 3 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 88% on dark
You scored higher than 15% on spontaneous
You scored higher than 20% on vulgar

Link: The 3 Variable Funny Test written by jason_bateman on OkCupid Free Online Dating

Technorati Tags: quiz, humour, humor

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - There She Goes, My Beautiful World

I don't know why I haven't written about it when the song's been stuck in my head for months, but might I recommend to you the hyperliterate lyrics and the rollicking tune of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' excellent "There She Goes My Beautiful World", from the Abattoir Blues / the Lyre of Orpheus double album?

John Willmot, penned his poetry riddled with the pox
Nabakov wrote on index cards, at a lectern, in his socks
St. John of the Cross did his best stuff imprisoned in a box
And Johnny Thunders was half alive when he wrote Chinese Rocks

Singers that sound gospel enough to take you to heaven back up Cave's distinct gothic voice on lyrics about the necessity of suffering for one's muse - to paraphrase a former Cave collaborator, I just can't get it out of my head. Send that stuff on down to me!

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds site

Technorati Tags: music, nickcave

On nannies and class and gender

Rebecca Traister wrote a really good piece in today's Salon on nannies, and how nannies occupy a space of discomfort in people's sense of class and gender identity:

The stories are very different, but they both highlight an uncomfortable condition of middle- and upper-class life that we don't like to talk about very much. It's incredibly hard to wrap our heads around the tricky contradictions and muddled ways we view the people -- usually female, with varying degrees of education, money and racial advantages -- who help parents privileged enough to employ them balance the responsibilities of work, social life and child rearing. It's a powder-keg relationship, packed with class, gender and age anxieties, doused with the lighter fluid of psychological transference and jealousy. When it explodes, as it has in these two cases, neither nannies nor mommies nor jilted girlfriends come out looking good.

Traister does an excellent job of tying together two nanny stories. The first was the contretemps between "Tessy", a nanny who blogged about her life, and her employer Helaine Olen, who fired Tessy after reading her blog and discovering - shock, horror - that her nanny actually had a life outside of nannying, one that was unsurprisingly like the life of many other young women:

Olen's dismay at these activities betrays her sense of surprise that a woman who pursues an advanced degree might also have desires, quirks, pleasures, breasts. In short, it came as a shock that Tessy's nannyhood did not preclude her humanity.

.... Olen's staggering assumptions about her relationship with Tessy reveal how she conceptualizes class. That Olen should not feel in any way threatened by someone who works for her - simply because she works for her - is a major leap from the reasonable assumption that she should receive services from the person she pays. As for the moral lines we draw around things like marriages and bonds with children, they are certainly blurrier; but Olen gives no indication that Tessy violated those. Olen says that Tessy made her doubt herself; that's a transgression only if the base assumption is that those who work for us are, and should be by definition, less than we are in every way.

It's also clear that part of what chafes at Olen was the fact that Tessy did not use her blog as a forum in which to extol the joys of caring for her children...

The second incident discussed was the whole flap about Jude Law sleeping with his nanny, which apparently the New York tabloids have somehow turned into a reason for criticising his girlfriend Sienna Miller's devotion to her career as well as nanny Daisy Wright's apparent overstepping of her class in sleeping with Law, instead of being about, as someone very rightly pointed out, Jude Law's real-life continuation of his cad role in Alfie. What's it all about, Judie?

The nanny equivalent over here in Singapore tends to be maids, domestic helpers often from the Philippines and Indonesia. Today, the New Paper, the local tabloid, noted that 12 out of the 14 people convicted of maid abuse were women themselves, and used that to launch a discussion of whether women were more particular than men about maids' work. One quote from a psychiatrist caught my eye: "If the housework isn't done well, the women feel that they may be judged as poor household managers".

Coincidentally, today was also the day I packed up my books for an impending move to a new house, and I found my copy of "Bad" Mothers, a book on how society blames mothers who deviate from a certain view of how mothers "should" behave that I'd read for a Women's Studies class back in college.

So all that made me wonder about a whole bunch of questions. Is there still an implicit condemnation of women in Singapore who choose to go out to work and leave childcare in the hands of others? Is there still a sense that women must manage the household, leading to some sense of intra-gender conflict when a working woman delegates household managing to a maid?

And further more - do people see maids as lesser persons despite them holding the very important task of caring for kids? Sure, they may not be grad students in the making such as Tessy, but do people forget that these maids are (often) 20-something women with the hopes and desires of ordinary women in their 20s?

Technorati Tags: nannies, women, gender, identity

Linksfest: The new pollution

Man opens fake bank. A different kind of robbery.
Using Google to write poetry.
The Boston Herald asks why Myspace is so popular. (Still using my Friendster account myself.)
Non-errors in English, for those who wish to boldly split an infinitive.
Posters of various music gigs. Check out this Interpol poster, for a concert on my birthday 2 years ago. Or this great Jon Spencer Blues Explosion / Yeah Yeah Yeahs / Liars one.

Technorati Tags: robbery, poetry, myspace, english, music, posters

Other Asian bloggercons

Just as Singapore's own bloggercon took place in DXO, a club, other bloggercons around the region are meeting in interesting locales as well... the Bombay one, true to that city's rich acting tradition, is being held at the Prithvi Theatre at the end of this month, while the Chennai one will take place in the "wonderful and elite Madras Boat Club". No Wi-Fi in the Madras Boat Club, unfortunately. I think buildings that date back to 1867 in general tend not to have Wi-Fi.

(From Global Voices Online, which very graciously featured my post on Xiaxue being hacked. My alma mater's law school seems to be doing a lot in the blogging field...)

Botox for Boxers?

Plastic surgery for dogs grows in popularity in Brazil.

He uses Botox to fix inverted eyelashes. He has even tightened the mammillae of a couple of female dogs, whose owners wanted to show them after they had given birth.

A dog with a boob job. Now I've seen everything. Well, everything but disguise kits for dogs. (Links via Puptastic)

Am I Hot and Near Your Place of Residence?

Now that Google Maps and Hot Or Not have opened their data to let users create their own apps, someone combined the two of them. Brilliant, eh? Ah, open source.

Pint of bitter, please

Talk about bitter cuckolded husbands.

Mixtape: Music for the Melancholy

There are some days when all you want out of your playlists is melancholy, when you want the drums to hit in slow, when you neither want music to soothe or to heighten, but just to be there, to articulate for you. Which is to say, there are some days when what you want are the tones of Al Green in "For the Good Times":

"Blow softly against my window pane late at night
Make believe you love me one more time
For the good times".

Ain't nothing like the Reverend's voice. Some other good songs for my melancholic mixtape:

Moby "Why Does My Heart Feel So Bad?"
Solomon Burke "Got to Get You Off My Mind"
The Velvet Underground "Pale Blue Eyes"
Elliott Smith "Miss Misery"
Emmylou Harris "You Don't Know Me" (still looking for a recording of the Robert Downey Jr. version from Two Girls and a Guy)

And I still say the more I listen to Outkast's "Hey Ya!", the sadder the lyrics seem.

Oh, speaking of Two Girls and a Guy reminds me of the time a few of us were having a Fiction Board meeting at the Harvard Advocate building, and then James Toback (director of said film) comes in with these two huge bodyguard types. Apparently he was in town to promote Black and White, and he decided to come by the building where he'd spent part of his college days. Then he proceeded to ramble to us strangers about life, the universe, and everything, while the beefy bodyguards just stood around. Bizarre.

Back on point: in Blaise Pascal's immortal quote lies verbal sustenance - The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.

Technorati Tags: music

Xiaxue hacked

One of the more well-known Singaporean bloggers, Xiaxue, just had her Blogger account hacked, and over 3000 blog posts deleted. That's, to put it mildly, a shitty thing to do. It's probably even criminal. I know she's controversial and that some people don't like her tone of voice - but to hack into an account and actually delete years of effort and leave a horrible message below? That's disgusting.

Fortunately, Blogger backs up everything on Blogspot (I think they backup everything, full stop, since when you publish it goes through their servers), so it seems she'll get everything back. But this is a good moment to remind people to back up their blogs.

Git yer kit off!

Spencer Tunick continues his public nude art series in Tyneside:

Spencer Tunick, a 38-year-old New York-based artist who creates and documents installations of large numbers of naked people, must be a man of no mean persuasive powers to have convinced 1,700 Tynesiders that getting up in the dark, stripping off and spending the next three hours with a brisk north-eastern wind whipping round their unmentionables was a good idea.

I've been to Newcastle in July. Yeah, it can still get pretty damn cold. But I suppose if you want to contribute to art you have to conquer your fear of shrinkage.

Malaysian restaurants in New York

One of the funnier sights of New York for me when I was working there was Allen Street on the Lower East Side, where, right at one end of the street of restaurant supplies, the Singaporean restaurant Sentosa stood near the Malaysian restaurant Proton Saga. If you're not from either country, that might not be funny, but it's hard to think of two names that are more immediately recognisable as belonging to the respective countries. Plus, besides the amusing naming, the places had great food - tucked away at one end of the LES, they seemed to attract smaller crowds than, say, Penang or Nyonya, but more hardcore diners.

Sadly, Sentosa moved out to Flushing a while back (I wouldn't be surprised if it was even better now), and now the Village Voice informs me that Proton Saga has been replaced by a restaurant called Skyway, whose name, while still based on a Malaysian icon (it's the tram that leads to Genting), doesn't quite carry the kick of "Proton Saga" in my opinion. But for those of you homesick Singaporeans and/or Malaysians in the city, it still sounds worth a go.

Those Carlsberg ads

Random thought: the point of the "no such thing as a quiet beer" Carlsberg ads they show before movies seems to be "Everytime you're about to get lucky, don't open a Carlsberg, otherwise some asses will barge their way into your life".

Quarterly Literary Review Singapore

The July issue of Quarterly Literary Review Singapore is out. Here's some lines from "Quarterly Report No. 2: Central City Waste Incinerator" by Yeow Kai Chai (music reviewer for the Straits Times), a poem that I thought tangibly tripped off the tongue:

the rhythm is a xylophone ribcage
bones scat like song

folio unfolding unto itself
at the cleft of such lavish chin (Link)

I don't think Toh Hsien-Min, Chief of QLRS, remembers me - we only met a long time ago, and I haven't been really participating actively in the creative writing scene here in Singapore. But I do think QLRS is quite a nice labour of love.

Hang the DJ?

The whole concept of "Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others" is somewhat bizarre to me - who makes a musical based on songs by the Smiths? Musical theatre, at least in the West End/Broadway style, often seems to involve a certain detachment between actor/singer and character, whereas the Smiths come across as so intensely personal, even when they're over the top, even when Morrissey is at his most theatrical and melodramatic. It really does sound like a mismatch:

"Some Girls" seeks the spirit of the Smiths' songs by transforming them. The arrangements are not for rock band, but for string quartet with electronics. Morrissey's heartsick legato croon is reassigned to four women and two men, who deliver anything from keening, primal unaccompanied wails to swing-era harmonies. (The New York Times)

I know sometimes shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you'd like to, but perhaps sometimes ideas need halting...

Also very disappointing was seeing that the New York Times' home page misplaced an apostrophe in referring to the musical:

NYTimes.com capture

Technorati Tags: music, musical, smiths

Stoicism

Tom Coates writes about the stoic manner in which Londoners have responded to the bombings. Quintessentially British: "We're going to make it absolutely clear once and for all that this is a city that has been burned to the ground, ravaged by Plague and bombed to hell and will not be moved by these terrorists. And then we're going to get on with our lives. As normal. Full Stop."

Technorati Tags: london, bombings

A big hello

By the way, thanks to all those who I met at Saturday's bloggercon, 'twas nice to put faces to the blog handles. So, in alphabetical order, a big hello to Amy, Faith, Faith (whose blog seems especially personal so perhaps I won't link), Grace, Sandra, Scarlett, Sheena, Terz, Tym, and Zhiyang. Um, if I missed you out, I do apologise - just leave a comment and I'll get right on it. Thanks for coming to our humble li'l affair. Same time next year?

Incidentally, a potential explanation for fellow panellist Mr Miyagi's lateness can be found in Japan Today:

Miyagi headline

Ah, blood, drowning, and you still managed to show up pristinely dressed. You are indeed a cunning man, Mr Miyagi. Wax on, wax off.

Technorati Tags: bloggers.sg, bloggercon, singapore

In praise of speaking

David Hare, playwright extraordinaire, praises public speaking, as opposed to other methods of public discourse:

Underlying this patronising conviction that no one person should be given the floor lies the idea that group discussion is more "democratic" than an individual being licensed to hold forth. My experience is the opposite.

...

When one person speaks and is encouraged to develop his or her ideas, then it is we, the audience, who provide the challenge. We provide the democracy. In each of our hearts and minds, we absorb, judge and come to our own conclusions. The dialectic is, thankfully, not between a group of equally ignorant people thrashing out a series of arbitrary subjects about which they know little and care less. It is between an informed individual who, we hope, has thought long and hard about their own area of specialisation, and an audience which is ready honestly to assess what the speaker has to say. Democracy, like everything else, thrives on preparation.

An interesting response to British institutions such as Question Time.

Gonna

Ruth Walker (who runs Verbal Energy, the Christian Science Monitor's language blog, and with whom I've had a short e-mail exchange on the transition of "shop" from an intransitive to a transitive verb) mellows on elisions such as "gonna", noting that there is a clear semantic difference between "gonna" in the sense of "about to perform an action" and "going to" in the sense of "about to reach a location" - no one ever uses" gonna" in the latter context. Will Smith, for instance, sang about "going to Miami", not "gonna Miami".

And my apologies for referencing a terrible Will Smith song.

Bloggers.SG - roundup

Queue at Bloggers.SG

So Bloggers.SG 2005, the first Singaporean bloggercon, went off quite well... the above pic is of the queue to enter the club. A queue! That we were not expecting. It was really great to see a random germ of an idea turn into a big shebang with proper speakers and bellydancers and sponsorship and all... And the fireworks at the end of it all were awesome! (Thank you, National Day Parade rehearsals!)

As those of you who attended know, I sadly was mobilised in the middle of the conference and had to rush back home to throw on a uniform, grab my gear, and report to Selarang Camp. Which meant I had to pass up the chance to moderate a legal panel which, by all accounts, went great. I hope those of you who were in attendance had your questions answered, and your answers questioned.

It was great fun helping to organise the thing, and also great fun putting faces to the blog names. Thanks to those of you who stopped by to say hi - always good to know someone reads this blog, I appreciate it.

More Bloggers.sg 2005 photos

Technorati Tags: singapore, bloggercon, bloggers.sg

Blogging and the Law: Bloggers.SG Panel

For tomorrow's Bloggers.SG blogging conference at DXO, I'm moderating the "Blogging and the Law" panel that starts at 4pm. I am very pleased that we have two major panellists to speak on the topic, Daniel Koh from Rajah & Tann and Tan Min-Liang from Tan & Tan Partnership. Their full bios are here, but here's a brief summary:

Daniel Koh is a partner in the firm of Rajah & Tann. Daniel is also the editor of The Law and Practice of Injunctions in Singapore, published by Sweet & Maxwell Asia and has also co-authored the chapters on Intellectual Property, Defamation and Employment Disputes. He has a broad based practice and a large part of his work includes claims for corporate fraud, breach of contract claims and resolution of commercial disputes

Tan Min-Liang is a technology lawyer with the boutique IT/IP firm of Tan & Tan Partnership. He has chaired, made keynote speeches and sat on expert panels at conferences and international seminars, and has spoken at length on the technology law issues such as IP rights issues. Min-Liang is currently the Chair of the Singapore Chapter of the Creative Commons.

I'm hoping for a good, informative session, so do come armed with questions about the relationship between blogging and the law in Singapore...

Linksfest: Detritus of my mind

Gödel and the Nature of Mathematical Truth. (I promise, not all the links will be this heavy.)
Ingenious uses for condoms in an Indian town. (See what I mean?)
The idea of Celine Dion being booed on Live 8 is very amusing to me.
The Cock, perhaps the most in-your-face name for a gay bar ever, closes down in New York. Actually, the Cock is not totally shutting down. It's moving into the Hole, another bar. The joke possibilities are endless.

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