dsng.net - the daryl sng blog

Yes, I'm back in Singapore and despite coming down with a case of a post-flight cold/fever, I shall be liveblogging for the New Media @ Arts House event today, on the "Future of Business 2.0". Promises to be an enlightening event.

Beatles reference in the subject in honour of the 40th anniversary of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band . But yes, am going to be travelling again. Regular blogging service will resume in a week...

Rihanna's "Umbrella" may be my candidate for the song with the best beat but most overwrought lyrics of this year. That beat's so damn catchy, but she takes the umbrella metaphor and fair beats the life out of it.

By the way - while this is hardly anywhere near a food blog - Buono, the new Italian place in Lichfield Road, is excellent, and worth the trek to the Serangoon Gardens area. Still thinking about their seafood soup. Almost like a fine wine, in that it had such a complex interplay of flavours.

I have to say, one thing I had totally not expected when I got my iPod was how hooked I would get on podcasts. And not just the podcasts I might've expected to get hooked on (NPR's All Songs Considered, the Economist, the Ethicist - which is actually funnier when read, and ESPN's Baseball Today, among others), but the language ones. I'm currently alternating between Coffee Break Spanish, trying to pick up rudimentary Spanish, and Deutsche Welle's "Langsam gesprochene Nachrichten" - the news, read in German, slowly. It's funny and sort of surreal hearing about, say, the G-8 summit in German while walking down Sims Avenue. But I do know I also speak along to the podcasts, to get some practice in, and have startled people in the process. So if you pass by a guy with his iPod on who seems to be muttering to himself oddly, please forgive me...

I like to think of this as the Persephone myth recast as gorgeous music:

S o we sat around the table with the peanuts, exchanging stories of Grandma. Tales that were long buried resurfaced. How she sat in my overcrowded kindergarten class, the only parent/grandparent allowed to do so, barking out orders in Teochew to 40 screaming kids to keep them in line. Apparently my mother went to the teacher to apologise for my grandma sitting in, and she was told that no, actually her presence was much welcome. Of course, stories from my early childhood are all a little fuzzy - that's a tale I only know in the telling, not one in my memory. What I remember: I remember her taking me to some shop in Geylang, and she needed to get down the road, and back then you could actually took a trishaw for transportation, rather than for any novelty value. I remember going to the wet market with her and nibbling at the dried shrimp. I remember going to the hawker centre where she would take me to my favourite Western food store, probably the only place in Singapore where a ham...