dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

As seen from my hotel room, with Cesar Pelli 's Petronas Towers in the background. The KL sun was searing, nothing like the cool wind blowing around Singapore these days. ( "Cold Wind" is a great Arcade Fire song, incidentally.) Somewhere on the streets below, later that night, a black stretch limo with the tinted windows pulled into a club (Aloha) with a horde of screaming female fans chasing after. Guess Rain was in town. Save it for another day, it's the school exam and the kids have run away.

B ack in Singapore I slept an inordinate amount, and watched the Screen Actors Guild awards (quick thoughts: Mirren-Whitaker-Hudson seem like an unbeatable trio; how lovely to hear that rich Julie Andrews voice once more; British actors always seem to give better speeches). On the other end of the film quality spectrum, here's how to sell an awful film in 12 easy steps .

Off to KL for the weekend. Normal service will resume shortly.

Well, I finally got around to trying to upload videos onto YouTube. Here's my first one - my Cairn terrier Rerun playing with a towel, back from his puppy days.

I noticed this post on the first fast food restaurant in Singapore (A&W on Dunearn Road) and promptly sent it into Tomorrow , whereupon a nice nostalgic discussion broke out. One of my fond memories of childhood was meeting the A&W Root Bear at Big Splash. Shall have to dig the photos out. I kind of wish now I'd taken a picture of the big sign next to the escalator at the old Orchard Cinema - it was the first escalator in Singapore , and they kept the sign that gave instructions on how to use the escalator - don't ride the escalator barefoot, etc.

I chanced upon this story of Bullwinkle's in Bloomington closing , which led to this one of Velfarre in Tokyo closing . Which was an interesting coincidence since earlier today I was thinking about the clubs in Singapore that have come and gone and wondering if anyone's ever done any sort of history of them. Even just an oral history? I know there was the Zouk coffee-table book but besides that, will people's experiences of places such as Fire, Ridley's, and so on be remembered? (Couldn't seem to find anything on clubbing on Yesterday.sg , my usual source for Singapore-based nostalgia.) I mean, take something as central to the Singapore clubbing scene as Mambo Jambo - naff as it can be, it's arguably something many clubbers were weaned on. The Wikipedia entry seems to suggest that the "retro" style arose strictly from Zouk days, but Adam Low was spinning long before Zouk existed, and I would imagine his set at Rumours had some of that same music b...

My impression of Joe Rogan improved tremendously when I chanced upon his dissing of Carlos Mencia . (Hey, we don't get much stand-up here: all I know of Rogan is him watching spiders crawl over others.) Mencia also gets dissed in the Beast's 50 Most Loathsome People in America list . How does Carlos Mencia get his own show when great comedies such as Arrested Development go off the air? Lord knows.