It’s really, really easy to troll Singaporeans on the issue of race, as can be seen here: ‘Wild Honey’ restaurant slammed for favoring foreigners over Singaporeans. And the grammar in the outraged responses — oh my. How embarrassing. I no longer find it insulting when people say I speak English well for a Singaporean.
Why does everything boil down to race? That smacks of insecurity on the part of the complainers, frankly, which says a lot about how they perceive their own ethnic identity (i.e. if they were comfortable with themselves, they wouldn’t be so fucking sensitive). If you’re nice to the staff in a restaurant, coffee shop, hawker centre — they’ll be nice to you. It’s a simple rule of thumb, and works in establishments everywhere.
Take one middle-aged anatomist and one much-younger widow, put them together in 18th century England, and bang! A crime-fighting team. This period Grissom and Sidle (heh, they’re Crowther and Westerman) have been called in to solve the mystery of an extra body found while excavating an old tomb. The complication is, the land used to belong to Crowther’s family, who sold everything and changed his name after his brother was executed for their father’s murder, three decades prior.
I believe this is the third in a series (the interview at the end of this edition says there will be five in total). While I found the novel sufficiently diverting — I read it in a day — I’m not that bothered about reading the first two, nor am I anticipating the final two. Basically, it was fun, but not brilliant.
(In contrast, I came upon the Matthew Shardlake series by C.J. Sansom by reading book two or three, then immediately went to try and find all the others that were available.)
This book was received free via the Real Readers programme.
Details:Island of Bones by Imogen Robertson, Headline, £7.99
Anders Breivik doesn’t sound criminally insane, but he sure does seem completely delusional and paranoid, which isn’t necessarily the same thing. It’s not as if he didn’t know taking lives was wrong, he simply decided that his actions were justified.
I’ve been talking about these for a little while — I’ve been wanting to make a pair of kimono baby shoes (via Homespun Threads) for a few weeks now. The first shoe had me wailing (inwardly), “This is so hard!!”, but I completed it. When I almost immediately started on the other side, I realised it wasn’t so difficult after all.
(Unfortunately, I made both overlaps face the same way, which was dumb of me. So the first, less successful attempt is now a ‘hat’ for Doug the sock monkey.)
I’d also run out of the white fabric I’d been using (’twas just some scrap stuff), so I had to use some other cloth to make shoe #3. Which, I guess, will be a handy way to tell left from right at a glance.
(I used an older Homespun Threads pattern and the instructions are from the newer, linked PDF file.)
I didn’t follow all the instructions (i.e. there is no interfacing of any sort, these are so soft a baby could probably kick them off in a second) but I’m quite pleased with the result all the same.
So why am I calling this my version of nesting? Well, according to Neil, I’m not big on cleaning (not true — I’m selective about cleaning, plus I grew up with a maid and am spoilt, and every time I say I want to clean something, Neil says, “I’ll do it.”), but I am a fan of tidying, re-arranging, and making stuff. An impending trip to a place that sells organise-y stuff (*cough*IKEA*cough*) makes me happy.
Shit, dude. This is getting pretty tiring. I found myself sprawled on the road the other day after being distracted by a pigeon and tripping over my own feet. I’m grateful there weren’t any buses speeding along at that moment, and that I was on the way to hospital anyway, to get a growth scan.
(Scan results: outstandingly average in every way. Just like its mother.)
Tattooed, Pierced and Plastered — a French study finds that youths who are pierced and tattooed are more likely to leave a pub shitfaced. I’d argue that I would have been fairly inebriated on the weekend when out, regardless of my state of body modification, but we’ll never know now, will we?
Neil and I left Xiamen in July 2006. We’ve talked about going back for a wee holiday for years, but we were only motivated to really do it this year because it was likely to be the last time we’d be able to go for a long time. My cousin and her husband came along too, and we spent a grand total of 2½ days in Xiamen.
It was odd to be back — there is this whole new main road that takes us from the airport to downtown without the arguments whether or not we use the island ring road, and Neil (Mr. Sense of Direction) actually got confused while I was pretty confident we were heading the right way. (That didn’t last. Once we were on foot, his superior memory and directional instincts reared their ugly heads.)
The thing that really gets me about Xiamen is how much it’s changed, along with how much it hasn’t. We didn’t get a chance to see everything I thought we might, but we did get to do some vital things:
Eat xiao long bao (小笼包) — Neil would have pouted for years if we didn’t find one of these vendors. I was also reminded of the seaweed and egg drop soup by another customer ordering their lunch, which is the cheapest soup you can get, but I love it for some reason.
See friends — and catch up on some gossip.
Go on long walks — but this is how I discovered that in my pregnant state, bounding along back lanes has become walking slowly and clutching my back.
I’d never thought about it, although I knew this to be a fact, that having coffees along the main drag was going to cost more than a five / six course meal at our favourite Sichuan restaurant.
Neil has said he’s glad we made the effort to go, and I am too. Maybe next time, if we can afford a longer holiday, we should, er, take the family.
All five captains from the various Star Trek series will be in London this October, at Star Trek London. OH DEITY WHY DO YOU TORTURE ME? Unless I’m so confident that I’ll be fine taking a three-month old infant to a big huge city with lots and lots (and lots) of strangers (oh, what to wear?!).
Book Publishing’s Real Nemesis: it doesn’t really strike me as price fixing when publishers come up with similar prices for their ebooks. Print books generally follow a standard pricing formula, and publishers are usually pretty old-school, so it makes sense to me that they’d end up at very similar RRPs. This is not to say that they don’t need to completely rethink their business, since they will die if they keep going on this way, but it may not be as bad as claimed.
Sounds like lame Apple sheeples are upset that Android users have come to pollute their hallowed Instagram playground. If you’re so desperate for a toy / vintage film camera look on your photos, try using a toy / vintage film camera, for fuck’s sake.
