dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

It's April Fool's Day an Tomfoolery , one of my favourite books in my childhood came to mind. It collated all sorts of nonce and nonsense, including this old chestnut of a rhyme: One fine day in the middle of the night Two dead men got up to fight Back to back they faced each other Drew their swords and shot each other. ( Full poem here - also includes a discussion of variants and related folk poems) To this day I can still quote that first verse by heart.

When I was young, it seemed that the big American TV shows would take forever to come to Singapore. I'd have to endure reading all the buzz about "Seinfeld" and other shows in Entertainment Weekly a year or two before the shows flickered onto our TV screens. Right now, the situation's better: we get some of the big reality TV shows ("American Idol", "The Amazing Race") live or within 24 hours, but it's still a bit of a crapshoot as to whether the cult hits will hit these shores. So I was very, very pleased to find out that "Arrested Development" is showing here ( Mondays, 12.30am ). Yeah, late to the party I know - only got into it when I was stuck in a Detroit airport Best Western with nothing to do but watch the telly.

Tanya Gold inveighs in the Guardian against the way Charlotte Bronte's image has been overly sanitised: As the 150th anniversary of her death on March 31 1855 approaches, it is time to rescue Charlotte Brontë. She has been chained, weeping, to a radiator in the Haworth Parsonage, Yorkshire, for too long. Enough of [Elizabeth] Gaskell's fake miserabilia. Enough of the Brontë industry's veneration of coffins, bonnets and tuberculosis. It is time to exhume the real Charlotte - filthy bitch, grandmother of chick-lit, and friend. Which made me think: one thing I despise is the need to clean up the lives of great people. Clearly Jane Eyre is rife with sexual undertones. I also hate the reduction of the work of great female novelists. The novels of Jane Austen, for one, seem to have settled into many people's minds as being twee little fantasies of English countryside life, filled with tea parties. Or worse, they are seen as some proto-Oprah confessional form, when really an...

I think it's funny that an elected official such as Governor Mark Warner of Virginia can issue press releases and responses in limericks: I took some grief for my nudist park pun. But resist I cannot on this one. I will sign this bill, more or less of free will. But I can't do it without having some fun. ( press release ) Nice to have some humour in unexpected areas. It even inspired Bob Lewis, the AP writer, to kick off the story with a limerick of his own.

I saw this funny livejournal bit from qwantz on putting songs in list format , including the Ghostbusters theme song. So I thought I'd translate the concept into a Powerpoint presentation (please save and open the file from your own hard drive to save my bandwidth).

Another earthquake hit western Sumatra early this morning. That region has really suffered. Reports on the earthquake differed initially on its magnitude, from 8.2 on MSNBC to 8.5 ( Today ), but the USGS seems to have it definitely at 8.7 now. That's about half the strength of December's quake, which still means it was pretty big, though fortuitously no tsunami ensued. Tremors were felt over here in Singapore (see Today and Mr Brown for info), but that was the extent of the effects here. Sadly, the residents of Nias Island were not so lucky - MSNBC has the estimated number dead at 1000-2000. The SEA-EAT blog has up-to-date news, as always (proud to have contributed in any small way to that site).

Dir. Peter Berg Based on the book by H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights is set in the oil town of Odessa, Texas, a world in which football is religion. The film is shot to emphasise the flat landscape of Odessa, all heat and dust, the sheer emptiness of a town that has nothing to look for but the Friday night lights of the title. That sense of urgency pervades the game scenes of the film: you can almost feel the crunch as the adolescent bodies slam into each other. With so much riding on each game, each play even, perhaps the best quality of the film is that it is not given to excessive sentimentality, understanding that any football season by itself contains a multitude of moving moments, a plethora of great storylines: the season-ending injury to a star player, the emergence of a rookie. Of course, every good film about high school sports has a mentor coach figure, and leading the boys here is Billy Bob Thornton as Coach Gary Gaines. Gaines coaches with urgency but has the ability ...