dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

I of course have a personal interest in the subject matter of An Inconvenient Truth , but I was also fascinated by the idea of a compelling PowerPoint presentation - I tend to hate the tool, if only because it's so badly used so many times. (I even own a copy of Edward Tufte's "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint" .) So this Presentation Zen post on Al Gore's quality use of PowerPoint was quite inspiring as a reminder that it's possible to use PowerPoint as something compelling - as long as one refrains from bullet points overloaded with text and information! Not sure if the film's coming to Singapore, but I'll be getting the DVD once it's out. PowerPoint Does Rocket Science

M y friend Michelle points out the McSweeney's "Lady Macbeth on Ambien" bit - frankly, not as funny as many other McSweeney's pieces, if only because it wore out the joke - but that reminded me: back in secondary school, when we were studying Macbeth, my teacher played a part of a jazz recording about Macbeth: all I can remember is the tune (which I can't reproduce in text, of course) that there was a female vocalist, and that the chorus ended with "I will not fear death and bane / Till Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane") - anyone have any inkling what this recording might be? It isn't Duke Ellington's "Lady Mac" .

Ah, Bonn - how fast the two weeks flew by. And more schinitzel and pork knuckles than you can swing a haxe (multilingual pun there) at. Here's a photo of the Rhein (okay, Rhine) from the one night I stayed in Koenigswinter, the neighbouring town. Last night I walked by the banks of the river by the UN compound here, and went in to touch the water and watched an otter swim by. There was something very calm and peaceful, almost therapeutic, about that. I'm seeing the Girlfriend's point about Europe more and more. And am now writing this from the airport on my laptop while waiting for the plane. Ah, modern technology.

A m reading the Financial Times , which is the hotel's choice for an English-language paper, and they reviewed Edgar Allan Poe & the Juke-Box , the recent collection of Elizabeth Bishop's uncollected poems. And I thought the quoted extract from "Good-Bye", on the sadness of departure, featured very precisely chosen, exquisite words: You are leaving the earth but only a little distance ... but just that much is hard to do, it has cost other people centuries of effort and is costing us centuries of grief

J ust a quick one: A.O. Scott summarises the NY Times Book Review's survey of the best American novels of the past 25 years - Beloved is, indeed, beloved, with DeLillo's Underworld a close second. I did like the offhand reference to one of my favourite novels (which admittedly wasn't written in the last 25 years), Richard Farina's Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me .

B onn is pretty much how I remember it - a quiet, sleepy little town, although this time I'm staying in the outskirts, which makes it even quieter and even sleepier. Had a nice meal at Tao Restaurant on Sunday, and then kept trying to figure out in my head how to say "check, please" in German. Incidentally, the Nena count: Days in Germany - 3 Times "99 Luftballons" heard - 2

I 've ranted in the past about the stupid untrue "Space Pen" urban legend and about how people like to believe that story about the Russians seemingly using a pencil. The Space Review further elaborates on the true origins of the Space Pen : The Million Dollar Space Pen Myth is just that, a myth. The pens never cost a lot of money and were not developed by wasteful bureaucrats or overactive NASA engineers. The real story of the Space Pen is less interesting than the myth, but in many ways more inspiring. It is not a story of NASA bureaucrats versus simplistic Russians, but a story of a clever capitalist who built a superior product and conducted some innovative marketing. That story, however, is a little harder to sell to a public that believes what it wants to believe. Speaking of credulity and people believing what they want to believe, check out the New Yorker 's account of how a Massachusetts psychotherapist fell for a Nigerian 419 scam . I hadn't realised ju...