Today we met someone who had the job (inter alia) of Senior Intermittent Advisor to the US Treasury.
I'd like to officially be an Intermittent Employee or an Occasional Worker or even an Infrequent Thinker.
Monday, October 18, 2004
Charles V could vault onto his horse in a single bound
(I think) but the HK Jockey Club apparently holds a government-granted monopoly on pari-mutuel betting on horse raising [sic].
Monday, October 11, 2004
Saved!
Are teen movies getting better? Saw Mean Girls a while ago and then Saved a few days ago and both have more or less the same plot and cast of characters and both very well done (except that Saved was funnier. I particularly like how the Jesus fish on the Jewish girl's car had "gefilte" written in it. How many people have I offended already?). Funny and sharp and able to laugh at itself for taking with some seriousness the characters and the genre - and rather formulaic. In that characterisation rather like romantic comedies (thinking specifically now of Working Title productions).
The Legend
There is a Bruce Lee coffeeshop (called "Legend Eating House" or something like it) down Circular Road somewhere with posters and photographs of Bruce Lee on the wall and his face superimposed on the shop signs between bowls of noodles (it's a noodle shop) and on every waiter's shirt and a bust of Bruce Lee on the fridge top. We asked if any of the figurines were on sale and the manager/owner/uncle said no, none of them, but if we liked them we too could join the Hong Kong Bruce Lee Club and why not come again and see them another day?
Descartes
My sister's joke -
So Descartes walks into a bar and the barman asks him if he'll have a martini (a barman after your heart, Choon).
Descartes: I think not.
And then he vanishes.
Yeah I know.
So Descartes walks into a bar and the barman asks him if he'll have a martini (a barman after your heart, Choon).
Descartes: I think not.
And then he vanishes.
Yeah I know.
Sunday, October 10, 2004
Not gentlemen
I shuddered from hair-do to shoe-sole. I was even more thankful than before than she had given me the bum's rush. I know what making something of me meant. Ten minutes after the Bishop and colleague had done their stuff she would have been starting to mould me and jack up my soul, and I like my soul the way it is. It may not be the sort of soul that gets crowds cheering in the streets, but it suits me and I don't want people fooling about with it.- Bertie Wooster from Aunts Aren't Gentlemen
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
On grass snakes
Minzhi sends me this from Diana Athill's autobiography, "Instead of a Letter" (which by the way is a great title):
"And to have a whole city which, by custom, the young could treat as their own, to be able to walk down its High Street as confidently as though it were your garden path, to be free to be arrogant and absurd to annoy other people by making loud, precious talk in restaurants, or to carry a grass snake with you when you went to parties that was the kind of thing that you would never be able to do unselfconsciously elsewhere, and which you needed to do."
Sunday, October 03, 2004
Notes
(1) Several weekends ago we went heartlanding in Potong Pasir. Potong Pasir looks like it was stuck in a time warp twenty years ago. They still have the old provision shops and kiddy machines and playgrounds of metal contraptions (rather than plastic and foam) and unpainted HDB facades. Toa Payoh, across the expressway, is all shiny and new and has gardens and benches and residents' corners. The sign says "Welcome to Toa Payoh Vista".
(The only people who will go heartlanding are those who do not, for one reason or another and despite their protests to the contrary, see themselves as part of the heartland.)
(2) I took my driving test - and crashed into every possible thing there was to crash into. I mean kerbs and poles, not people and cars. The funny thing was, I crashed into everything with perfect equanimity, feeling sorry only for the tester - something disastrous always does happen when I do anything which requires any degree of physical coordination and grace - and rather glad that at least I didn't kill anyone. I should give up driving, except that everyone needs one thing in their lives to reach out for and test their faith against.
(3) Yesterday I saw "Imelda". I'm not sure what to make of the documentary, or Imelda Marcos. The director, Ramona Diaz, gave her plenty of rope to hang herself with, and she (Imelda Marcos) availed herself of it. And perhaps it's true that she believes in beauty as a political principle (she says in the film that beauty is love made real, which says more about her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos than her politics). Perhaps she really does believe that she and her husband did good for the country. Perhaps she really didn't know her husband was systematically robbing the country's treasury. It's possible. It's an unobstrusive documentary - Imelda Marcos carries the story - in the way that a Michael Moore documentary (I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 9/11) is as much about Michael Moore as whatever the documentary's about. But I'd like to have seen more of her relationship with her husband. She had some political positions of her own - Minister of National Settlements (I think; can't remember), Governor of Metropolitan Manila - but far more political influence than her positions warranted. Ferdinand Marcos sent his Catholic wife to Libya to persuade Gaddafi not to send arms to the Muslim separatists in the Philippine South. She couldn't have managed that just by being pretty. She campaigned for him - the first time a political wife did so (the others had been content with keeping house). She made herself out to be a poor girl from the countryside made good, but she came from one of the powerful political families. I'd like to have seen more of the political machinations of the time. More of the Marcos dictatorship. What did they do? Besides build convention centres and cultural centres and other buildings (an opposition member said she had an "edifice complex").
(4) Have been reading bits of the New Yorker these last few days - Thurber letters/short stories, a compilation of "Talk of the Town" pieces I found in the library, Dorothy Parker book reviews from the 1920s/30s, the most recent copy - not the most impressive or up-to-date specimens of the New Yorker - but all this is to say, do you think we could do something like this in Singapore? Not to reproduce the New Yorker, exactly, but to come up with something irreverent and humorous and open to experiment while at the same time with impeccable writing and solid research? Something that reads like a conversation with a good friend. Could be about anything at all - a magazine with an inordinate curiosity about the world - and what would hold the magazine together would be consistently good writing and a sense of humour. Not that everything needs to be funny - a magazine that took its writing seriously but where the writers didn't take themselves too seriously and could laugh at themselves. Oh and we could have decent book/movie/music reviews too. By writers that enjoy good and trashy music (books etc.) both but can tell the difference. What do you think? Would you want to write for something like this?
(The only people who will go heartlanding are those who do not, for one reason or another and despite their protests to the contrary, see themselves as part of the heartland.)
(2) I took my driving test - and crashed into every possible thing there was to crash into. I mean kerbs and poles, not people and cars. The funny thing was, I crashed into everything with perfect equanimity, feeling sorry only for the tester - something disastrous always does happen when I do anything which requires any degree of physical coordination and grace - and rather glad that at least I didn't kill anyone. I should give up driving, except that everyone needs one thing in their lives to reach out for and test their faith against.
(3) Yesterday I saw "Imelda". I'm not sure what to make of the documentary, or Imelda Marcos. The director, Ramona Diaz, gave her plenty of rope to hang herself with, and she (Imelda Marcos) availed herself of it. And perhaps it's true that she believes in beauty as a political principle (she says in the film that beauty is love made real, which says more about her marriage to Ferdinand Marcos than her politics). Perhaps she really does believe that she and her husband did good for the country. Perhaps she really didn't know her husband was systematically robbing the country's treasury. It's possible. It's an unobstrusive documentary - Imelda Marcos carries the story - in the way that a Michael Moore documentary (I'm thinking of Fahrenheit 9/11) is as much about Michael Moore as whatever the documentary's about. But I'd like to have seen more of her relationship with her husband. She had some political positions of her own - Minister of National Settlements (I think; can't remember), Governor of Metropolitan Manila - but far more political influence than her positions warranted. Ferdinand Marcos sent his Catholic wife to Libya to persuade Gaddafi not to send arms to the Muslim separatists in the Philippine South. She couldn't have managed that just by being pretty. She campaigned for him - the first time a political wife did so (the others had been content with keeping house). She made herself out to be a poor girl from the countryside made good, but she came from one of the powerful political families. I'd like to have seen more of the political machinations of the time. More of the Marcos dictatorship. What did they do? Besides build convention centres and cultural centres and other buildings (an opposition member said she had an "edifice complex").
(4) Have been reading bits of the New Yorker these last few days - Thurber letters/short stories, a compilation of "Talk of the Town" pieces I found in the library, Dorothy Parker book reviews from the 1920s/30s, the most recent copy - not the most impressive or up-to-date specimens of the New Yorker - but all this is to say, do you think we could do something like this in Singapore? Not to reproduce the New Yorker, exactly, but to come up with something irreverent and humorous and open to experiment while at the same time with impeccable writing and solid research? Something that reads like a conversation with a good friend. Could be about anything at all - a magazine with an inordinate curiosity about the world - and what would hold the magazine together would be consistently good writing and a sense of humour. Not that everything needs to be funny - a magazine that took its writing seriously but where the writers didn't take themselves too seriously and could laugh at themselves. Oh and we could have decent book/movie/music reviews too. By writers that enjoy good and trashy music (books etc.) both but can tell the difference. What do you think? Would you want to write for something like this?