Courtesy of Style.com, I’ve discovered that Miuccia Prada’s hired all the elves who steal socks and underwear to be her models.
You could also look like a sweaty man in a playground.
Paris Hilton’s fiance‘s name is Paris? How fucking bizarre. Seriously, what are the odds?
“As he was hitting me, I kept telling him, no I didn’t receive training. I was crying and finally I told him I did receive the training. My hands were tied behind my back and my knees were on the ground and my head was bleeding. I was in a lot of pain. … At that point, with all my suffering, if he had asked me if I was Osama bin Laden, I would have said yes.” — Gitmo Prisoners Told Panel About Abuse (via Sploid)
Will work for belly rubs. Heehee.
I evidently was a poor excuse for a child — I never reached the nag quotient that ensured me the gift of a remote control car from the parentals.
There’s this thing in the Sunday Times (the UK one), The intellectual’s guide to fashion. This week it’s babies:
There are currently more than six billion humans on earth, a figure that is increasing by 80m every year. In the time it took you to read that sentence, the world’s population increased by 13 people — unless you are Wayne Rooney, in which case, it was probably about 100 people.
Meow! It goes on to say that having babies is pretty much passe, go get a man-purse instead. Eh.
Hey, it sounds like tourists aren’t splashing the cash on Singaporean tourist attractions:
“It’s not too bad, a good place for shopping and eating, really cheap and you can try all kinds of food,” said one tourist about Singapore.
“There’s a lot to buy and eat,” said another.
“What attracts me most is the shopping.”
So, while shopping and eating are good (The Great Singapore Sale, Singapore Food Festival), we should despair because
Singapore’s uniqueness is not something that can be seen immediately. It has a lot of races and cultures, so its uniqueness is that all of them are living together on this small island, creating a really unusual culture.
Singapore’s culture is very unique, okay? So much so we have a whole tourism campaign / slogan built around it.
Lee Chor Lin said: “Perhaps there is more to buy and eat, and there is less focus on promoting the historical side of Singapore so tourists think that’s all there is to us. Singaporeans are the best ambassadors, because when foreigners come here they will ask their Singaporean friends what to do. So it will have a positive impact if Singaporeans introduce some of our museums to them.”
Uh, when you demolish and rebuild the ‘historical’ side of Singapore, it’s not very likely that people will come to see reproductions. I mean, even the bird park has a replica tree trunk (WTF is up with that). Also, the History Museum sucks ass. The Wax Museum, on the other hand, is super cool. I spent enough time during primary school excursions going to these places to speak with juvenile authority.
It’s probably fitting that I’ve started to read The Road to Serfdom. First, there’s a hue and cry (and riots, let’s not forget) over a Japanese history textbook, and a deafening silence from the Chinese about their education system’s interpretation of history. Now, Russia has pulled a textbook that examines dark chapters in its past (and provides critiques of Stalin and Putin) and replaced it with one that is better for “a feeling of pride for one’s history and one’s country.”
Don’t fucking tell me you can do it and it’s no problem and you’ll strive to make it happen and you want to be given the sole responsibility (and hence, the sole benefit) to do a project and that I can count on you only to tell me on the day of the deadline, a month after you made all these promises that you’ve not achieved anything and you don’t want to be bound by obligation to deliver results and now you don’t mind if I get other people to share the responsibility and I can depend on you to deliver results but only when you feel like it BECAUSE TELLING ME ON THE DAY EVERYTHING IS DUE IS TOO MOTHERFUCKING LATE, isn’t it?
Nobody else had better piss me off today, because I might literally bite their fucking heads off and polish them off with an ice cream chaser.
- had fish (me) and chips (Neil) at The Londoner
- watched The Door in the Floor and three episodes of Monk (season two)
- finished reading The Complete Yes Minister and The System of the World
- started on The Road to Serfdom
- had seafood horfun and deep fried prawn paste chicken wings at the Singapore restaurant (I am officially addicted to those damn chicken wings)
- had a lemon meringue tart and Irish coffee at Javaromas with Neil, Allison, Jeff, Via, Greg, Molly, and Nugget the chihuahua (chihuahuas are really strange looking dogs, and are they meant to shake that much)
- had a few drinks and plenty of conversation at The Londoner
- cycled 34km along Huandao Lu (stopped halfway to chat to the kitesurfer blokes)
- had Thai for dinner
- ate a popsicle
- watched three episodes of Monk
I semi-answered this in Kristen’s comments a while back, but Maria‘s beat me about the head with the baton. And I’ve changed my answers a bit.
Total volume of music files on my computer: er… no idea. I only have a 128MB MP3 player that is currently functioning as a thumbdrive, so I think only a few hundred megabytes. I’m traditional, I like CDs (and I still have tapes).
The last CD I bought was: Heavier Things, John Mayer; Guero, Beck (and two others I forget right now) from my trip to Singapore last week.
Song playing right now: I’m not listening to anything right now. A year of not having a CD player kind of got me used to not listening to music. But the last album I listened to was Heavier Things.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me: not listening to music much precludes the first option, so here are songs that mean something (but not necessarily a lot) to me — Want You Bad, The Offspring (for obviously amusing reasons); Good Enough, Sarah McLachlan (it was so sad); No Such Thing, John Mayer (it makes me want to run around); Friday I’m In Love, The Cure (brings back memories of dancing around like a lunatic on Sentosa when my mum was there for a conference and we stayed at her hotel); No Logic, Area 7 (my introduction to ska).
Five people to whom I’m passing the baton: er, I dunno. Who hasn’t done it? I’d say Neil, but he doesn’t have a bloog (and I’d love to see him list that song as meaning a lot to him). Philippe?
Bacterial printing is the Hypercolor of the 21st century. (Buy your own nostalgic Hypercolor teeshirt.)
I don’t know what it is, a contagion or something, all these people who’re getting married, having children, having a few children… oh yeah, as my mum likes to tell me, I’m at that age where everyone’s doing it. That’s not true. I’m still young. In fact, people keep asking me what school I go to. Even in Xiamen they make that assumption. Neil also looks quite youthful, otherwise people would think he’s a paedophile, which, you know, is generally not a good thing.
When someone tells you they managed to catch a flight just ‘by a baw hair’, do you take that to mean:
- The baw hair, followed by the rest of the body, reached the check-in counter just before it closed
- The inflight personnel have now seen a stranger’s baw hairs
- The first airport crewperson opening the door in Ningbo got hit by a baw hair
It’s esoteric, intellectual, tasteful issues like this that make my bloog a bastion of class and academic discourse.
“The guerrilla war is likely to go on a decade to 15 years. Given the basic facts, of capable, trained and numerous guerrillas, public support for them from Sunnis, access to funding and munitions, increasing civil turmoil, and a relatively small and culturally poorly equipped US military force opposing them, led by a poorly informed and strategically clueless commander-in-chief who has made himself internationally unpopular, there is no near-term solution.” — Juan Cole
Xinhua has this weird photo spread that is supposedly part of a piece summarising Brittany Murphy’s surprise at Madonna appearing at the Sin City British premiere.