Irreverent Ramblings

The Danger of Not Caring

2011-04-29T11:07:00.001+08:00

"The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference." - Elie Wiesel

I am glad that Singaporeans are no longer indifferent about politics or issues or voting.

The Human Condition

2011-03-18T10:46:00.000+08:00

This is taken from John Armstrong's In Search of Civilisation:

"A human being is the only creature which can reflect upon its own existence, conceive of its own death, and fake orgasm"

So much for writing, or speech and language, or the use of our opposable as what separates us from being mere animals.

More on Books and Love

2011-03-03T10:58:00.002+08:00

This quote is from a character in the classic novel Zorba the Greek: "I had fallen so low that if I had had to choose between falling in love with a woman and reading a book about love, I should have chosen the book".

This had a painful sting of truth to it.

Oscar Remarks

2011-02-28T14:22:00.004+08:00

So the Oscars have been given out again, and most of the predicted favourites have won. Of the main contenders, I have seen The Social Network, The King's Speech, Black Swan, The Fighter and Inception.

Of the lot, I believe that the two supporting awards given to Melissa Leo and Christian Bale were enormously deserved in a movie where the acting was just all around superb. Amy Adams was excellent as well but lost out to Leo and Mark Wahlberg was unfortunately overlooked due to him having the most understated of the roles. Bale, in particular, did an excellent job of embodying the accent and mannerisms of a great prize fighter turned junkie.

I was less enthused by the main acting awards. Firth worked suitably hard in the role, putting on a stammer and doing an excellent job mimicking the accent. But it certainly seemed a case of him being rewarded for a string of work rather than a particular stand out piece. I am a huge fan of Natalie Portman and I have had a schoolboy crush on her since I saw her in Leon (The Professional), but I thought the film as a whole (and her performance) rather overcooked. It was a perfect role for her in many ways (sweet, innocence finding a darker side) and one almost paralled by her taking on edgier roles (for her) - Closer, V for Vendetta, No Stings Attached.

The techncal awards largely went to Inception, though a thought must be spared for the great cinematographer Roger Deakins. That he is still Oscar-less is a great travesty that the Academy must rectify at some point.

In terms of the Best Picture winner, the King Speech was a very well made film. A film that used the best of what it had to the maximum in what was essentially just a film about a friendship between two strong individuals (albeit a rather unique friendship). The Social Network might have been edgier, and more consistently captivating throughout, but the King's Speech featured understated direction, an excellent cast (Rush, Bonham-Carter, Firth, Guy Pearce and Michael Gambon among others in cameo roles!). Though making the audience feel a sense of sympathy for a character like Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) was perhaps a harder feat than the unashamedly sentimental patriotism of the King's Speech.

Ideal Partner

2011-02-28T14:06:00.003+08:00

A friend posted this a link to this wonderful blog post on Facebook titled "Date a Girl Who Reads". She also commented that if it had been written by a guy, she and others should date him immediately (it was not). The post struck a chord, because I might have written something like that (though in a wistful what if tone of voice, as opposed to the exhortative it currently is).

I wish I could date a girl who reads, who loves books. I wish I will find a girl who will find the fact that I have a personal library of 2,000 plus books, an enormous turn on rather than a puzzling, impractical extravagance.

I wish to find a girl who reads, and loves good movies, and who loves the theater like me, who likes long rambly conversations over a glass of wine. A girl who is intense and intellectual. Who might possess a somewhat mordant wit.

I would date a girl who reads. Now I just have to find her.

The Accidental Asian

2011-02-10T16:01:00.001+08:00

The Accidental Asian | Eric Liu

Eric Liu epitomizes the typical second generation American: the son of two Taiwanese immigrants (who met in America) he went on to graduate from Yale and serve in the Clinton White House. This is a deeply personal collection of essays, which is equal parts memoir, and equal parts reflection on race, culture, and identity. Liu examines issues ranging from his own 'Asian-ness', the typical ideas associated with Chinatown, the Asian as the 'other', and the viability of the Asian American identity, in the prism of his own experiences and those of his immediate family.

One powerful aspect that ties his essays together is a ceaseless questioning, and a refusal to accept the widely held notion or the commonplace assumption. This is immediately evident in his first piece, a deeply moving reflection on his father rooted in questions about Chineseness and assimilation - both his own and his father's. His father was in many ways typically Chinese, proud of Chinese culture, deeply familiar with the Chinese classics with a grasp of the language equal to that of any Confusian scholar-official. Liu, despite attending Chinese classes, soon lost all facility for the language and with it his cultural roots as he grew increasingly American.

This could be seen as the typical immigrant story as Liu so eloquently writes:

In our archetype of the immigrant experience, it is the first generation that remains wedded to the ways of the Old Country and the second generation that forsakes them. This we learn is the tragedy of assimilation: the inevitable estrangement between the immigrant father who imagines himself in exile and the American son who strains to prove his belonging.

Except that Liu questions this assumption of the first generation immigrant, and the inevitable estrangement with their new adopted culture because:

we let ourselves think of the first generation's life as a mere chrysalis, an interlude between the larval existence of the homeland and the fully formed Americaness of the second generation. But the truth is that the father can become his own form of butterfly.

In fact, his father did transform. A deep love and facility for languages was soon applied to English, and an understanding of culture enabled him to rise to respectable middle management in IBM. It was this very ability to adapt, and this openness to a new culture that gave his son the opportunity to transform himself fully into a typical American.

More than that, assimilation is never the easy transformation for the second generation child as it is made out to be. As the author himself freely admits he often attributed his father's actions to his "Chineseness" but as he admits, with considerable insight this was often in response to his own cultural insecurities : "it was I who boxed against the shame and shadow of racial stigma" as a Chinese boy in an American world; to "cloak any handicap, real or imagined" that might accrue, to his race. Often, it is the second generation that is the one truly caught in between.

This overturning of easy assumptions is again at play in his essay "The Chinatown Idea". The very idea of a 'Chinatown' is often cited as evidence for a Chinese tendency to cling together, to refuse to assimilate. He again examines this through the lens of personal experience, in this case a powerful and touching portrait of a grandmother who lived for more than two decades in the same cinder-block apartment in New York's Chinatown. She seemed a powerful symbol of the typical immigrant Chinese, separated by a linguistic and cultural chasm, comfortable only in a familiar environment. Except Liu always felt that she had a desire to be somewhere else.

As Liu notes, we all have a certain idea of Chinatown, specifically that:

Chinatown chooses to exempt itself from America: that it is purely the product of Chinese clannishness and insularity.

Indeed, this is a particular cliche that I am ashamed to say I have repeated on countless occasions. After all it is only us Chinese who have Chinatowns all over the world (San Francisco, New York, Sydney). It must be a sign of our unique unwillingness to adapt to cultural morays, to assimilate. After all, Americans go abroad all the time and do not create "little Americas" all over the world now do they?

Liu calls this the "cruellest myth" because many of those who are in Chinatown do not wish to stay there, like his grandmother. Far from cloistering themselves they too wish for the American Dream but for them, whether due to their illegal immigrant status, or some vast linguistic chasm, assimilation is distant and unattainable.

It is thus not the insularity of the Chinese that sustains Chinatown, but the determined blindness of the rest of America in creating this myth of a separate entity, where the Chinese often exploit the Chinese, subject to different rules and standards, a "potemkin village" that hides a "nasty brutish shadow world".

After reading the essay, I felt a distinct sense of unease. But as Liu notes there are many Chinatowns: the insular enclave of foreignness, the shadowy world of exploitation, the thriving self sufficient community and the worst mistake one could make is the one that I made: to try simplify and generalize such a diverse portrait.

Ultimately, though, it is Liu's second essay that I could relate the most deeply to. The larger question of the essay (the "accidental Asian") is presented immediately and forcefully in a list of what makes him "white". Among the items he lists are: listening to NPR; marrying a white; speaking flawless, accentless English; subscribing to Foreign Affairs; not being too ethnic; and being mindful of minority militants, among others. As he notes: he never asked to be white, never sought out such a status but he found himself being "white by acclamation". Thus he has become an honorary white to some, a banana to others.

That certainly brought back memories. Of being called Sergaent Kantang (potato) in the army for my english speaking proclivities, as opposed to the Chinese speaking Hokkien swearing rice eaters that were typical of my race. I was a banana (yellow on the outside, white inside), a man with 'atas' (high) tastes - i.e. European cultural tastes. White by proclaimation, then?

I've made my own list: I am functionally monolingual, I speak in grammatically correct, complete sentences, I love the theater and musicals, I enjoy trivia nights, I drink my beer in British pubs or trendy bars (not coffee shops), I listen to jazz, I listen to classical music, I read literary novels, I have many foreign friends.

Of course this status came as much from the things I didn't do, a negation of the typical Chinese Singaporean: I don't speak mandarin (well), I don't speak a dialect, I do not listen to Chinese pop music, I don't watch Korean or Taiwanese TV serials, I hardly karaoke (and only English songs if I do), I don't use singlish. The only mainstream local custom I seem to enjoy doing is eating. That if anything is something that is truly universally Singaporean.

The bizarre fact is that our experiences are parallel, very similar, but like two lines running opposite to one another. As much as we have both become white, or been labeled white, for him it is as a minority Chinese attempting to assimilate into the larger culture. For me it is being born into the racial and cultural majority but have been emplaced into my own cultural (even linguistic) niche, as a result of background and education. As he has become part of the status quo, I have lost my place in it.

Yet in a sense he has become part of the majority, but a minority within the majority. He is not just white, but a certain type and class of white. Upper middle class, confident, socially mobile a far cry from the white trailer trash that used to hurl abuse at him on the bus. I too am a minority within a majority, culturally and linguistically. In that regard, though for different reasons, we are the same. We are both "accidental Asians".

Even though Liu's essays are deeply personal, it is has voice and his aptitude for the stirring image that captures the imagination. This is something unsurprising given that he was a Presidential speechwriter. I wish to end off with a sample from his final essay, Blood Vows about his marraige to his wife:

Let me explain why I married a white woman. It wasn't as if I had a plan. I wasn't trying to prove a point or defy convention. It was simply a matter of who was there and what was possible. Why did Carroll marry a Chinese man? Why do people of different races marry at all? For the same reason today that they go to school together, live together, travel together, work together: because they can

what should immediately strike you is the fact that any explanation is even necessary. As he soon makes clear:

I chose. I chose to enter into a relationship with Carroll. Not with a "white woman", not with some nameless paragon of "white beauty" but with Carroll Haymon, who has always had an uncanny knack for finishing my sentences; who knows when to humour me and when not to; who, as a Southerner schooled in the North, is no stranger to acculturation; whose neck bends just so when she reads; who sings a soulful alto and scorns the designated-hitter rule; who has a way of putting complete strangers at ease. Nobody - and nobody's subconscious tricked me into falling in love with her.

In this powerful memoir, and in his hands, one is impelled to believe that race doesn't really matter that much, and if it does, there are other greater things that can surpass it.

30 Books Before 30

2011-02-07T16:09:00.004+08:00

I've decided to amend my previous list to keep things along the lines of the '30' theme. The 30 selections I have made are a rather eclectic bunch. The only defining criteria was that I do truly want to read all of the books on this list, and more than that I can actually stomach reading them.

It is for that reason that you won't fine Dante's Divine Comedy (too intimidating), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (yawn), Chaucer's A Canterbury Tales (interesting but just too long and difficult), James Joyce's Ulysses (I would probably end up going what the hell?). There is one notable exception. I forced myself to include the Chinese classic Romance of the Three Kingdoms; it is shameful enough that I am reading it in an English translation.

I will try and explain the stranger of my choices at some point, but here is the list for now in random order. Suffice to say this is quite a daunting list, and I had better get cracking!

The Illiad
The Odyssey
The Analects | Confucius
Romance of the Three Kingdoms
Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained | John Milton
The Rights of Man | Thomas Paine
Moll Flanders | Daniel Defoe
Emma | Jane Austen
Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte
Middlemarch | George Eliot
Great Expectations | Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary | Gustav Flaubert
Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain
War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy
The Brothers Karamazov | Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Moonstone | Wilkie Collins
Walden and Civil Disobedience | David Henry Thoreau
Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville
On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin
The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Arthur Conan Doyle
Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man | James Joyce
Lolita | Vladimir Nabakov
Catch-22 | Joseph Heller
100 Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Trial and Metamorphoses | Franz Kafka
Under the Volcano | Malcolm Lowry
Murphy, Malloy, Malone Dies | Samuel Beckett
The Spy Who Came in From the Cold | John Le Carre
The Book of the New Sun | Gene Wolfe

List correct as at 23 March 2011. Subject to change. Suggestions welcome

30 Movies Before 30

2011-02-05T23:05:00.002+08:00

I had earlier created a list of fifty movies to see as part of a thirty before thirty list. After a conversation with my sister who is creating a similar list (albeit with much more time to spare), I have decided to trim the list to thirty, in keeping with the general theme of 'thirty' before 30.

The new list is largely based on the previous one, with some simple rules: obviously only movies which I have not already seen will be added to the list. Additionally, there can only be a single film from a particular director represented on the list (this made for some very difficult choices).

Finally and this turned out to be a very important rule, the list is a mixture of aspiration and personal pleasure. In other words, this list in part represents films that are definitive, critically acclaimed, and otherwise essential works which I feel is vital to my film 'education', but tempered by the simple rule that I have to want to watch them. We often feel compelled to watch or read things which are recommended by critics, on the supposition that they are supposed to be good because some superior authority has decided it to be so. Part of turning 30 is the realization that life is too short to slavishly follow critical opinion and must see lists. Trust informed judgment but in the end, watch what you really want to. It is in this spirit that the following selections were made.

The list (with short explanations where appropriate) can be found below, followed by a section detailing some discarded choices and the rationale behind them:

81/2
400 Blows
Apu Trilogy, The
Apocalypse Now
Bicycle Thief, The
Big Sleep, The
Blade Runner
Blue Velvet
Bonnie and Clyde
Brazil
Breathless
Brief Encounter
Chinatown
Chunking Express
Clockwork Orange, A
Donnie Darko
Fight Club
Great Dictator, The
On the Waterfront
Roman Holiday
Rules of the Game
Seventh Samurai, The
Seventh Seal, The
Shoah
Taxi Driver
Touch of Evil
Tokyo Story
Umbrellas of Cherbourg
Unforgiven
Vertigo

Near misses: A lot near misses were made necessary by the one director rule. How to choose just one movie from the oeuvre of Fellini and Bergman (whose work I have yet to even sample), or Kurosawa (I have only seen Ran, and that on television many years ago), yet alone Chaplin (try choosing between Modern Times, City Lights, Gold Rush). In such circumstances, I often plumped for the most famous film, knowing fully well that it may not necessarily be the best (my friend Yogesh has written an excellent blog post on 30 films by notable directors which are better than their most famous works). So I shall leave it at that.

More interesting are some very well known films that I have chosen not to include because they fail my acid test rule (I just don't feel like watching it):

First, All About Eve. Screwball comedies or even intelligent comedies have just never been my thing, besides which I find I am much more attuned to British as opposed to American humour. Besides, Wilder, despite being famous as a comedic director, also made Double Indemnity, which I consider to be one of the greatest of film noirs, and of course Sunset Blvd. another noir masterpiece whose cynicism I can relate to far more than his later comedic works.

Some Like It Hot is probably considered to be the greatest American comedic film of all time. Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon are supposed to be one of the greatest comedic duos on film. It has Marilyn Monroe in one of her strongest performances, where she transcends her dumb blonde persona. Sadly it just doesn't appeal.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was a huge academy favourite. It did the grand slam of big five Oscars (only It Happened One Night and Silence of the Lambs can match that feat), it has Jack, well being Jack. A good friend, Jake, who knows more about movies than most people I know, loathed it, saying it was completely over the top (then again Jake also disliked Shawshank for being fake, and sentimental). Still, based on what I saw of Amadeus, I could see how this criticism of Milos Forman might be accurate. Also, I already have Jack in Chinatown. If anything, I would be more curious to see another Forman film - the adaptation of the notorious 70s musical Hair featuring hippies, LSD, marijuana and unusual sex practices.

American Graffiti is a cult movie. It shows a different side of George Lucas before he went megabucks. But do you really want to be watching a coming of age in 60s America movie when you're going to be turning 30? Forget the post WWII boomer generation optimism. You're supposed to be far too close to a mid-life crisis to be watching stuff like this. If you feel nostalgic you could at least put on a re-run of Grease. And realise that John Travolta is now fifty. And Olivia Newton John has sagging breasts.

Easy Rider - yet another cult movie movie involving Jack. Two men riding around on motorcycles going against the establishment. You know what they say about mid life crisis - you know you are having one when you buy a Harley, and a motorcycle jacket to go with it. Do I really want to see a movie about two men riding on motorbikes exploring "freedom"? On the one hand it is cliched; on the other, it might just cause me to wonder what the hell I am doing with my life and quit my job and move to Tijuana. Better not push my luck.

E.T: The Extra Terrestrial - I know this is supposed to be brilliant. But I just could not bear a film that was liable to be far too sentimental (an early Spielberg trait). The thought of watching a little alien that looks like a shriveled prune riding in a bicycle basket is vomit inducing enough, worse is me remembering that when I was five and on a visit to Universal Studios, I was chosen to stand in for Elliot in showing how the shot was created (the magic of cinema!). Ergh, no.

The Exorcist: probably the greatest horror movie ever made. Problem is, I have never seen a point to horror movies, period. Except campy Zombie ones. Go George Romero.

Early silent classics: The Battleship Potemkin, Metropolis, Intolerance, Birth of a Nation, early works of Luis Bunuel. Sound is an essential part of the cinematic experience. That is why movies have been shot in sound since The Jazz Singer. I've made one exception - a Charlie Chaplin film, given the man's endlessly acclaimed genius, and out of sheer curiousity. Besides, physical humour I can see transcending the need for speech or sound (there is a reason why one of the most popular comedies of recent times is Mr Bean).

Sexism in Football: No Gray Areas

2011-01-25T11:55:00.006+08:00

Richard Keys and Andy Gray should be asked to leave their jobs as commentators on Sky Football with immediate effect. There is just no two ways about it. This might seem strong words, but given their blatant and inexcusably sexist comments caught off air about an assistant referee, I see no other recourse.

For those of you who haven't heard, Keys and Gray suggested that someone needed to explain the offside rule to female assistant referee Sian Massey after a controversial decision (which ironically she actually got spot on and they got wrong), saying the league had "f**ked up big time" in appointing female officials, and castigated a previous female referee's assistant as "f**king hopeless".

The response? Sky called their comments completely unacceptable and stated that the pair had been suspended from broadcasting the Monday night match between Chelsea and Bolton. I find this woefully inadequate. By way of comparison, let's examine instances where broadcasters have made blatantly racist comments (both on and off the air) and the consequences they suffered.

One famous incident involved Ron Atkinson, who was commenting for ITV on a Champions League semi-final match between Monaco and Chelsea when he stated that Marcel Desailly was "stated in some schools as a f**king lazy thick nigger". He had thought he was off the air, but the remarks were broadcast. He immediately resigned.

In another non-footballing incident, a New Zealand TV anchor Paul Henry deliberately mispronounced Delhi Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit's name as "dick shit" and "dip shit" adding that it was somehow additionally appropiate "because she is Indian, [so] she would be walking down the street dick in shit wouldn't she, you know what I mean?". He resigned shortly afterwards.

The footballing community has sent out a very strong message that racism will not be tolerated in the sport, in any shape or form. This has gone a long way to address the blatant and horrific racism that pervaded the game. In the past, fans found it not merely acceptable but fun to make monkey noises whenever an opposing black player touched the ball. Bananas were even thrown onto the pitch.

Racism has not been completely eradicated. The treatment Marco Balotelli has received from opposing fans in Italy is just one case in point, more so our own intrinsic tendency to still stereotype players based on race (black players are big, physical; white players are smart and cultured footballers). However, a clear message has been sent that any blatant racism will not be tolerated. When Atkinson made those comments, he knew immediately that he had no recourse but to resign.

Keys and Gray are not about to resign. The fact that do not feel the need to is telling. Sexism is as ingrained in football as racism was in the past. Football is a lads game after all, a Saturday afternoon pastime at the pub with your mates. We've all made similarly sexist jokes about the game. How many of us have casually joked about our girlfriends never being able to understand the offside rule? Women also do the same and laugh about the fact that only men would take pleasure and interest in watching 22 other men run around a field for 90 minutes.

What is not tolerable is when gender becomes grounds for baseless facile personal attacks as was the case with Keys and Gray. What is most shocking, as a colleague and friend put it, is their casual banter suggested that they thought every other footballing bloke would feel the same way, though they might not express it as openly (and as unwisely) as the two of them did. The notion of female assistants, let alone referees? Woman having a serious part in top flight football? Ludicrous!

Really? There are female referees in many other top flight leagues such as the Bundesliga, which can lead to the occasional awkward moment as Peter Niemeyer of Hertha Berlin found out recently. Women have run the lines in the last two Champions League. Women are refeering at the Rugby World Sevens, even at the Snooker World Championships (arguably a sport which is even more of a male preserve).

Football is lagging behind. What needs to be done is to send out as clear and unequivocal a message condemning sexism as the sport did in taking a zero tolerance policy towards racism. That is the only way we can eradicate it from the game.

Let there be no gray (pardon the pun) area about how football deals with blatant sexism. It is completely and utterly unacceptable. Anyone guilty of it should have no place in the game, in any capacity. Keys and Gray have to go.

Books Bought Recently

2011-01-14T02:22:00.005+08:00

In a vain attempt to reduce my already overflowing bookshelves (or rather to prevent further additions to them), I decided to begin taking note of my book purchases, and the rationale behind them. At year end, I will also do a review of how many of these books actually got read. This is also part of my long term aspiration to try and write about the books that I read, given my utter inability to remember anything I have read more than a few months afterward. Anyhow, this is the latest installment from January:

Beginner's Guide to Epistemology | Robert Martin: I obviously do not need yet another introductory book on epistemology, at least not for my own purposes. Since I am teaching it for Knowledge and Inquiry this year, I am buying this in view of mining it for teaching resources later this year. Or so I tell myself.

Lectures in the History of Political Philosophy | John Rawls: Despite the mind-numbing dullness of much of A Theory of Justice, Rawls was actually a good engaging lecturer, by all accounts. Given my genuine interest in political philosophy, this is a good addition, particularly since I never had a chance to examine historical thinkers (Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau) at University. I also managed to justify this on account of my involvement in the Raffles Renaissance Programme - I will be doing the Social Contract later this term and I need to read up. As a programme covering great books of social and political thought, this book will definitely come in handy.

Justice: Key Concepts Series | Tom Campbell: I have been eyeing this book for some time and I was initially put off by the price before I finally caved. It looks to be an excellent summation of the various theories of justice. I have learned never to underestimate the usefulness of books which effectively summarize complex ideas and debates. This looked to be one of them. Now, I just have to get round to devoting time to examining the issue of justice in greater detail and reading all the stuff I accumulated on political philosophy in the first place.

The Wind-Up Girl | Paolo Bacigalupi: Who would have thought! A book purchase made as a result of reading the Straits Time Sunday life section! It is a sign of how much I have neglected Science Fiction that I had no idea that this novel won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novel. In times past I read Hugo and Nebula winners fairly voraciously. Bacigalupi was interviewed in the paper and my interest was definitely piqued. A novel set in 2030 Bangkok involving genetic manipulation and a mysterious made to order (genetically that is) girl? I just had to get it!

Worlds of Exile and Illusion | Ursula K Leguin: I was speaking to one of my student's last year about Ursula K LeGuin and she was lamenting how Le Guin's earlier "Hainish" novels were largely out of print and very difficult to find unlike The Left Hand of Darkness (which won both the Hugo and Nebula). Then I chanced upon this reprint, a compendium of the first three hanish novels, and I decided that I just had to get it. One of my quirks is that I still try and collect out of print, good science fiction, despite largely neglecting the genre in the past two years (or more). Science Fiction is probably the only field in which my knowledge extends beyond the status quo (what you would find in bookstores) to past works which are no longer well know, or commonly available. As an aside, I used to bump into that student many mornings coming out of the MRT station on the way to school. Inevitably, we both would have a different book in our hand each time. As two of the few people who were truly voracious readers, we would have a short chat about books, and authors. I certainly will miss those conversations.

The Secret Speech | Tom Rob Smith: I first chanced upon Tom Rob Smith when I borrowed his debut novel Child 44 from a university library. It was one of those impulse borrows ( book looks interesting, let's just grab it) which are less damaging that the impulse buys that might result from one being at a book warehouse sale or a bookstore. I was looking for an easy read on the train ride home, instead I got that rare thing - a taunt well written thriller which was an intelligent exploration of Stalinist Russia. The premise itself was mind-bogglingly simple, yet compelling. A young child is found murdered, a detective sets out on the trail and discovers more deaths. What seems a simple run of the mill idea takes on huge significance in the context of an utopian communist system, where serial killing is simply deemed to be impossible. I was delighted when the book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008 given its obvious quality, but still surprised (how often do thrillers get such recognition?). On the strength of Child 44 alone, I bought this follow up novel. While it has been out for some time, I haven't seen a copy in a bookstore until now, so once I chanced upon it, I naturally bought it rather unthinkingly. Let's just hope Tom Rob Smith doesn't suffer from the curse of the second novel.

In Other Rooms, Other Wonders | Daniyal Mueenuddin: The subcontinent is known for producing brilliant writers, and a seemingly never-ending conveyor belt of new talent - Arundhati Roy winning the Booker prize with her debut novel, Kiran Desai with her sophomore effort, Aravind Adiga rising suddenly to prominence with his first book. Mueenuddin seems to be the latest subcontinent writer to rise to garner such attention. He certainly fits the mould - ivy league educated, worked in white collar job (banking) before returning to his home country to manage a farm. Mueenuddin is Pakistani and is already being touted as an authentic voice of his country. I bought it, as one often does, purely due to the lavish praise heaped on it, and the fact that it was nominated for a slew of awards. I also thought of a colleague who loves fiction from the subcontinent when I bought it - the fact that I could lend it to her, and introduce her to yet another exciting young writer somehow added justification to the purchase.

A History of Christianity | Diarmaid McCulloch: Why oh why do I keep doing this? If there is one area where I have collected massive (both in quantity in number and the size of the books themselves) unread volumes it is history. I find a new history of say The Nazi Regime, or a new volume in a multi-volume history of Europe, or a new book chronicling Krushchev in the Cold War. It is highly acclaimed (by fellow historians). I, of course, would love to find out more about that particular historical period. I buy the book. I put it on a shelf - all 600-700 pages of it. At best, I skim a couple of chapters. The book is never read. When it comes to volumes of authoritative history, I suffer the ultimate manifestation of the book buyer's curse - the myth of best intentions. That myth goes along the lines of - I have always wanted to learn more about this subject; this book is well written and critically acclaimed; I might not read it immediately and it does look a bit daunting, but of course it will be worth the effort and I will get round to reading it eventually. Eventually never happens. So why did I buy a 900 page history of Christianity? Because I am interested in the subject. Because Diarmaid McCulloch is the foremost historian of Christianity writing today, because the book was lavished with great praise, and book of the year awards from individuals ranging from the Archbishop of Canterbury to Melvyn Bragg. Because I will read it someday. Perhaps after I finish McCulloch's own history of the Reformation (purchased at Oxford in 2005, not yet started), or perhaps after I have read equally noted historian Paul Johnson's own History of Christianity (purchased Sunny bookstore Singapore, read first 60 pages out of 700). Perhaps never.

The Haunted Hotel

2011-01-07T17:47:00.003+08:00

The Haunted Hotel | Wilkie Collins

It has been my practice over the past few years to start the year with a flight of fancy, usually a fantasy novel of some kind. I had purchased The Haunted Hotel while browsing at Kinokuniya Bookstore at Bugis Junction, killing time before dinner with a friend. Having read the first forty pages in the bookstore itself, I was intrigued enough to purchase it and find out whether Countess Narona's marriage to Lord Monbarry would result in the dire premonitions she so feared.

Wilkie Collins was familiar to me on the stength of his two most famous works - A Woman in White, a staple of Gothic literature; and The Moonstone, considered by many to be the forerunner to the detective novel. I had never gotten round to reading either of those two works despite studying Gothic literature in school, and being a fan of detective and crime fiction, with The Moonstone being an influence on many fine writers in the genre.

It is tempting to see The Haunted Hotel as an interesting mixture of these two genres - the gothic novel and the detective novel. Elements of the supernatural do seem to be at play in the novel - dark premonitions, disturbing visions (or possibly hallucinations), a clearly overwrought and thus unreliable narrator, but these are tempered with rational explanation based on systematic enquiry (such as a report from an insurance office). This delicate balance is seen most clearly in the denoument of the novel's final act with a clever little plot device that offers the readers the chance to believe the conclusion as either the fantasy of a deranged mind, or the confessions of a dark and deadly crime.

Wilkie Collin's writing style is engaging, and captivating. You won't find here the long, conjuncted sentences of his peers such as Charles Dickens (who acted in two of Collin's melodramas). The novel is very readable (as much as that is an overused term), and it builds up the story and the tension gradually. It takes reading the great Victorian mystery and crime novels to appreciate how dire modern thrillers are (I insist on making a distinction between thrillers which I view as pulp novels, and crime novels which is a genre with more artfulness). This novel, slight at 200 pages, made me want to read Collin's two most famous works mentioned above.

All in all, this was a much darker flight of fancy than I am used to starting the year with. It was certainly no sword and sorcery fantasy novel, but it was perhaps a richer experience for that. Besides which, it is also in keeping with 2011 being a more serious, focused year for me.

Other Media

2010-12-28T05:03:00.003+08:00

Computer Games

Battlefield Bad Company 2
Call of Duty: Black Ops
Mafia II
Starcraft II
Halo II
Mass Effect II
Medal of Honour

Theater and Concerts

A Little Night Music (Play)
Blackbird (Play)
Descendants of the Eunuch Admiral (Play)
The Masrayana (Play)
Ignite (Live Music)
Those Who Can't Teach (Play)
Verdi's Requiem Mass (Concert)
The Tempest [Bridge Project] (Play)
Chico Valdez (Concert)
Vashti Bunyan (Concert)
Kings of Convenience (Concert)
Pink Martini (Concert)
St Vincent (Concert)
Melanie Gardot (Concert)
Daisy Pulls It Off [Stage Club] (Play)
Can Change (Play)

Movies Seen in 2010

2010-12-28T04:14:00.001+08:00

Movies seen in 2010. Bolded titles recommended.

Tron Legacy
Tangled
The Battle for Terra [DVD]
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt 1
G.I Joe [DVD]
The Red Shoes
Megamind
Dial M for Murder
The Chess Players
Apur Sansar
Aparajito
Sandcastles
Inception
Toy Story 3
The A-Team
Shoah
Mary Poppins [Outdoors Sing-A-Long]
Star Trek [2009] [DVD]
Iron Man 2
The Limits of Control
Shake Hands With the Devil
How To Train A Dragon
The Man Who Stared At Goats
A Single Man
Whip It
Green Zone
Summer Wars
Nine
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Invictus
Sherlock Holmes

Books Read in 2010

2010-12-28T04:07:00.005+08:00

Here's a list of books I read in 2010: 91 titles in total. Bolded titles are recommended.

Very Short Introduction to English Literature | Jonathan Bate
How Did You Get This Number? | Sloane Crosley
Bangkok Haunts | John Burdett
The Baker Street Phantom | Fabrice Bourland
Glasgow Kiss | Alex Gray
Nemesis | Philip Roth
Bring on the Apocalypse | George Monbiot
Another Point of View | Lisa Jardine
A Good Talk | Daniel Menaker
Why We Love Dogs and Eat Pigs And Wear Cows | Melanie Joy
Manchester United: The Biography | Jim White
The Fry Chronicles | Stephen Fry
Conned Again Watson! Cautionary Tales of Logic Mathematics, Probability| Colin Bruce
The Harmony Silk Factory | Tash Aw
Cigars in Camelot | William Styron
I Was Told There'd be Cake | Sloane Crosley
Nothing to Envy | Barbara Demnick
Soccernomics | Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski
The Sleepyhead's Companion | Sean Coughlin
This Book is Overdue | Marilyn Johnson
C | Tom McCarthy
Parrot and Olivier in America | Peter Carey
The Finkler Question | Howard Jacobsen
In A Strange Room | Damon Galgut
Bottlemania | Elizabeth Boyte
Howard's End Is On The Landing | Susan Hill
I Feel Bad About My Neck | Nora Ephron
Long for This World | Jonathan Weiner
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest | Steig Larsson
The Girl Who Played with Fire | Steig Larsson
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo | Steig Larsson
Truth and Beauty | Ann Patchett
The Battery: How Portable Power Sparked A Technological Revolution | Henry Schlesinger
The Life You Can Save: Acting Now To End World Poverty | Peter Singer
The Housekeeper and the Professor | Yoko Ogawa
The Dawkins' Delusion | Alister McGrath
Sunshine | Ian McEwan
High Noon in the Cold War | Max Frankel
Globish | Robert McCrum
Ani-Mattar | Frank Close
The Conscience of a Liberal | Paul Krugman
The Case of the Missing Books | Ian Sansom
Sway | Ori and Rom Brafman
Conversations on Ethics | Alex Voorhoeve
Friends in High Places | Donna Leon
A Brief History of Liberty | David Schmidtz and Jason Brennan
A Million Words and Counting | Paul Payack
The Varities of Scientific Experience | Carl Sagan
Fatal Remedies | Donna Leon
Poe | Peter Ackroyd
In Search of Orwell In Burma | Emma Larkin
The Singapore School of Villainy | Shamini Flint
Justice: The Right Thing To Do | Michael Sandel
The Kings of New York | Michael Weinreb
The Race of A Lifetime | John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
The Man Who Was Thursday | G.K Chesterton
The Hero and the Crown | Robin McKinley*
The Millstone | Margaret Drabble
Lustrum | Robert Harris
Brilliant Orange | David Winner
The Evening of the Holiday | Shirley Hazzard
Bangkok Tattoo | John Burdett
Indignation | Philip Roth
Porterhouse Blue | Tom Sharpe
The Pianist | Wladislaw Spzilman
The Yiddish Policeman's Union | Michael Chabon
Austerlitz | W.G Sebald*
Let the Great World Spin | Colum McCann
The Cult of the Amateur | Andrew Keen
Oedipus Rex | Sophocles
SuperFreakonomics | Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner
Trick or Treatment | Simon Singh
Alex and Me | Irene Pepperberg
A Noble Radiance | Donna Leon
Neverwhere | Neil Gaiman*
The Lion and the Unicorn | George Orwell
The Communist Manifesto | Marx and Engels
Decline and Fall | Evelyn Waugh
Ender in Exile | Orson Scott Card
The Falling Woman | Pat Murphy
Demolition Angels | Robert Crais
700 Sundays | Billy Crystal
The Cutting Room | Louise Welsh
Take Me To The Source | Rupert Wright
Pitching My Tent | Anita Diamat
The Confessor | Daniel Silva
Shopgirl | Steven Martin
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas | John Boyne
The Children's Book | A.S Byatt
Fatal Remedies | Donna Leon
Poe | Peter Ackroyd

The Year in Review (So Far)

2010-11-26T00:01:00.003+08:00

2010 is hardly completely over, but I thought I would do a brief year in review.

Best Book Read (Fiction): Let the Great World Spin was beautiful and much of the writing was lyrical (as much as it is a cliche to refer to writing as that). Involving the interlocking stories of several individuals set around the famous tightrope walk across the twin towers, it's brand of fluent storytelling and compelling characters made for a great read. More than the eventual winner of the Booker Prize, Parrot and Olivier in America was filled with Peter Carey's trademark wit and humour. It was fun, hilarious, and filled with immensely well drawn characters. C, by Tom McCarthy was considered by many to be the front runner for the Booker and it is easy to see why. It has the edgy experimentalism that is a trademark of past Booker winners. Set in the decades from the turn of the century, it is in many ways a technological fable, each section hinging on the emerging science of telegraphy or signals.

Best Book Read (Non-Fiction): Nothing to Envy presents a harrowing portrait of North Korea through the oral testimony of a small number of individuals who defected. A book that is wonderfully woven together, it is a painful, shocking and flabbergasting read. In Search of Orwell in Burma follows a British journalist who traces Orwell's time as a colonial administrator in the country, and how it affected his life and writings. There are definitely chilling and Machiavellian parallels that can be drawn between the two (think 1984) and this book is effective for not over-reaching with the metaphors.

Best Film Seen (Current Release): Inception is a superior movie: thought provoking, multi-layered, filled with brilliant ideas. Oh, it also contained some excellent action sequences. A movie only Christoper Nolan could have pulled off.

Best Film Seen (Other Release): The National Museum's cinema has been a virtual gold mine since it opened, offering the opportunity to see great cinema classics in full restored cinematic glory. I am still kicking myself for missing the Fellini retrospective they staged, but the chance to see the great holocaust documentary, Shoah, was one that I thankfully grabbed. It is a film unlike anything ever made - nine hours that never feels overlong. A documentary in its most traditional form - just interviews, no recreations, no gimmicks, no set pieces. But what testimony, what horrifying details. We all owe Claude Lanzamann a great debt. Of equal worth in upholding a basic sense of the innate worth of every human being was the Apu trilogy. Satyajit Ray manages to create beauty and poetry out of the life of a young Bengali boy. A movie captivating in its simplicity. Surely the bildungsroman to make all others irrelevant.

Best Performance: Pink Martini were a real treat - an enormous multipiece band led by two wonderfully charismatic individuals. China Forbes did not disappoint with her superb vocals and presence. Tom Lauderdale was kooky, random, and very funny. And boy can he play the piano.

Other Media: I never played the original Starcraft. But there was enormous hype over the sequel. Ten years in the making. Talks of extensive delays. Was it worth the wait? No doubt about it. Starcraft II must rank as one of the greatest computer games ever created. Superb cinematic quality cut scenes, very well developed characters and voice acting. Well crafted individual missions with varied maps, and objectives. My only beef - you play for the most part as the Humans only. Still, an immense game. Simply superb.

To Boldly Go

2010-09-12T02:14:00.003+08:00

Star Trek fans are well known for being extremely obsessive creatures, going to extremes because of their love for the TV series. They imitate characters, dress in Star Trek uniforms, and are privy to the most obscure references from their TV series of choice. I consider myself a Star Trek fan, though not a Trekkie. The difference is more than a mere linguistic one. A Trekkie is a mark of status, and must be earned or bestowed by other fellow Trekkies. It means attending conventions, learning how to speak Klingon, and doing the Vulcan split finger salute.

I am hardly that obsessive, yet in many ways I have an enormous soft spot for Star Trek, particularly the Next Generation series, which I grew up watching. It must be one of the great incongruities, and such a tremendously fortunate one, that Patrick Stewart, great thespian and Shakespearean actor, plays a science fiction starship captain. It was thus tremendously heartening for me to meet S. recently, someone who shared my interest in Star Trek, and the Next Generation in particular, even admitting to watching TNG episodes when she was depressed.

While randomly surfing the net, I have found two examples of how extreme Trekkies can be in their obsession. The first is this man who turned his entire flat into something straight out of a Star Trek set complete with galley, transporter area, ship schematics, original computer display panels (LCARS to the Trekkies) after his wife left him. The attention to detail is truly stupendous, and has to be seen to be believed. The second is the group of individuals in the Hague who have decided to stage an opera - completely in Klingon.

All of this is certainly a nostalgia trip back to my own days watching Star Trek The Next Generation on late night re-runs (it was usually shown at midnighton terrestrial), reading Star Trek novelizations, particularly the hugely funny ones by Peter David, and generally believing as teenagers are wont to do, that we can "boldly go where no man has gone before".

A New Hair Day

2010-09-07T18:24:00.003+08:00

I have a strange relationship with my hair. As I tell people, I tend to cut it when I get bored with it. Often, the best that can be said of my relationship with my hair is that I pay it no attention. I ignore it, willfully or otherwise.

The phase of willful ignorance was a legacy of my time in Junior College, where there were two main fashion statements pertaining to males. One was to wear incredibly baggy trousers that threatened to fall off at any moment and which reduced the wearer to walking in a strange sort of shuffling gait in order to ensure that said trousers did not actually fall off. The second was to style one's hair such that there was a peak or pointed end sticking out at the front, or for the more adventurous, to ensure that there was a kind of ridge or crown running from back to front. If one stops to think about it, both fashion trends resulted in behaviour or appearances not dissimilar from the mating rituals and exhibition displays of some birds of paradise, but I digress.

Everyone is young and idealistic during Junior College. I chose, in my own inimitable way, to take my own chosen stand against such vacuous exhibitionism, such blatant plasticity, such facile displays of irrelevant fashion. So I refused to gel, or style, or even comb my hair. It saved me a few minutes every morning, and it certainly saved me a significant amount of youthful angst regarding my appearance (or so I thought). I went to school on some days with tufts of hair sticking out on one side, making me look rather unbalanced (both literally and metaphorically). On good days, my hair would be a shapeless mass, on bad days it would be an unmanageable mess.

Two kind classmates, hoping to save me from myself, once attempted to do me the favour of trying to make order of all that chaos. Given that we were part of a humanities class, they clearly had not heard of the second law of thermodynamics, or they hadn't figured that my hair would follow that law so closely, or else they might not have even bothered. After a PE lesson, they whipped out a comb they had specially brought (a key tool of young adolesence, to be found sticking out of the back trouser pocket, which I of course lacked), and after an attempt to solicit my permission, dragged me in front of row of mirror lined sinks in the boys bathroom and attempted to gel my hair into a semblance of what was then considered fashionable. They ended up aghast at its state, appalled at my indifference. And for all their well-meaning intentions, they decided that it would be all but impossible to convince me to abandon my folly regarding my follicles.

Now, my attitude towards my hair is not one of willful ignorance, but more one of benign neglect.

30 Before 30

2010-08-02T23:00:00.000+08:00

There is something about turning thirty. One remembers the number of great rock musicians who have died before they are thirty: Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Jimmi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Buddy Holly. Einstein came up with his major theoretical breakthroughs a few years before his thirtieth birthday. Newton revolutionized physics before that age. By thirty, most great sportsmen are seen to be on the decline, be they footballers, basketball players or tennis players.

When you approach thirty, there is palpable sense that you should have achieved something, come close to establishing yourself. If not securing some little nest egg, then at least deciding what you are going to do with the remaining fifty years you have on this planet. This makes this particular turning point ripe in significance (and for a existential crisis). This has led to an online trend for creating a mini bucket list of things to do, loosely, thirty before thirty.

I am probably being premature about this, but I thought I would start early. All too often people begin this existential soul searching after they cross their 29th birthday, and the tasks they set themselves are a little on the frivolous side (e.g. go sky diving, visit the Pyramids, bake a pumpkin pie!). This is certainly important, but I also wanted concrete (and even occasionally difficult) goals which might take longer than a few months to achieve. Doing 30 things in a short space of time is difficult, giving myself the better part of two years to do so enables me to set harder tasks.

There weren't many ground rules for coming up with the 30 things. The first is, unlike normal new year resolutions they should not be merely aspirational. There should be a degree of achievability. So no vague resolutions of wanting to exercise more. Stating something like, I want to learn how to be proficient in rock climbing, on the other hand, is more specific, and something that can clearly be attained.

Many of the items on the list were things that I have been meaning to do for awhile. The hope is that setting them down in a concrete way will give me the added motivation to actively pursue them.

In no particular order, the thirty things are:

Obtain a place in a Phd program and choose a specific field of study at an overseas university
Learn the basics of English grammar and linguistics
Complete a short collection of essays or similar literary endeavour (and attempt to publish it)
Master a third language to at least basic conversational level (or improve mandarin to such a level)
Develop an understanding of film theory, film criticism and practical film making
Create a wardrobe that is comprehensive, fairly stylish, and most importantly one that I am comfortable with
Create and maintain a website
Blog regularly (4-5 posts a month)
Host a formal dinner party in which the dishes are all prepared by me
Learn how to cook basic dishes and to be comfortable in a kitchen
Keep a monthly budget and manage finances closely
Learn about investing, stocks and shares and create a portfolio (however meager)
Climb another mountain (at least Kinabalu, preferably Kilimanjaro)
Master the basics of rock climbing
Open a really expensive bottle of wine and share it with some close friends
Obtain a driver's license
Finish watching a list of 50 classic films (see list in another blog post)
Read twenty classic works of literature (see list in another blog post)
Finish in the Top 100 of the World Quizzing Championships
Make a return trip to the UK, catch up with old friends, watch Wimbledon, visit Hay-on-Wye (for the literary festival)
Write regular film/theater/book reviews and attempt to parlay this into a freelance position

As you can tell this list is still a work in progress. Suggestions for the remaining things to accomplish are more than welcome.

A Million Words and Counting

2010-06-22T16:34:00.004+08:00

A Million Word and Counting
by Paul Payack
Citadel Press, 2008

There have been innumerable books and articles on the notion that English has become the global language, the international language of business and the chosen medium of cross-cultural communication. Much has been made of how globalizing forces has cemented English's status as the lingua franca (perhaps lingua anglia?) - the majority of web pages and blogs are published in English, hundreds of millions of people around the globe want to learn it and it is the only feasible medium of exchange either in the corridors of power in Brussels or when a Chinese investor attempts to seal a deal in Africa (and vice versa).

Paul Payack, a self-styled word maven has shown a penchant for self-promotion when his site, the Global Language Monitor claimed to have found the millionth word in English. As many linguistic scholars have already pointed out, such as David Crystal, the doyen of word popularizers, the very exercise was a "load of rubbish". It became more so when the millionth word turned out to be the completely insipid choice of "Web 2.0", a selection made more out of self-interest and one that hardly fulfills the goals of highlighting the "diversity and dynamic growth of English" that was the supposed aim of the whole exercise.

This book turns out to be a prelude to all the needless hoopla. Payack claims himself not merely to be a word maven but a trivia fiend, and these qualities are on display here. He gives us numerous lists and groups of facts, no doubt culled from the archives of the Global Language Monitor. What he is forgotten is the basic principle that lists (and reams of trivia) are never interesting in themselves, but only hold value if they are relevant, and are fascinating only when they are out of the ordinary and not completely mundane.

What this book primarily consists of is groups and lists of English words organized according to various topics such as 'the silver screen', television' and 'celebrities' (including a random list of weird celebrity children names), most of which are pointless and mundane. A list of Top 25 'Bushisms' is hardly original though at least randomly funny. I hardly need a book like his to tell me that the top phrases associated with Hurricane Katrina were "disaster, catastrophe, apocalypse and end of the world" among others; nor was his Katrina word explainer really illuminating: explaining what cajun is was interesting, but do I really need a defintion of 'search and rescue', or 'superdome' or 'recovery' or 'sandbag'? Similarly, I nearly fell out of my chair in surprise and shock when he listed the frequently used tech words of 2007 as 'iPod, nano, cookie, megahertz, plasma, and blu-ray', among others.

The biggest disappointment is that when Payack veers away from the mundane, which is rare enough, he fails to go beyond listing various words and phrases to explaining how they might come about. So as an example, it was interesting to me that in Finnish English a "noobie" is a slang word for a rookie, or in Polish English "thanks for the mountain" roughly means thank you in advance. The problem is, Payack never does explain in any kind of detail how these terms might have come about, something that was supremely unsatisfying.

Worse is when Payack inundates us with completey pointless lists of facts, often without ever revealing their significance. So he gives us a list of the Top 25 Fashion Cities based on his company's predictive quantities indicator, saying that it is "surprising" but failing to reveal how he came by this list at all. More pointless are lists of every country and its capital city, or the names of powers of ten up to a googolplex and other reams of random information that anyone could probably find in an almanac. Within the random lists there are some nuggets that I found of genuine interest, such as a list of countries without a national language (now that is certainly something that never crossed my mind), but it was rather tiring sorting through all the chaff.

In sum, Payack's book is a disappointment in a field already chock full of books celebrating the rise of English as a global language. With such a broad and fascinating subject area, what is truly is amazing is that Payack has produced a book that contains so much that is insipid. Rather like Web 2.0 if you ask me. Global English, in all its varied diversity certainly deserves better.

World Quizzing Championships 2010

2010-06-15T11:05:00.002+08:00

As my friends will know, I am a huge fan of all things trivia and quiz related, so one of the highlights of my year is the World Quizzing Championships. This year marked the second time that I officially took part in the competition - I had previously been a competitor in 2006 while studying in England, deciding to make the trip to Cardiff (where it was held) despite the fact that my final PPE exam was just two days later. That experience, as well as trying out the 2008 and 2009 sets of questions underlined that the World Quizzing Championships provides high quality but extremely challenging questions.

I had planned to take part in the quiz in Manila, and the Philippines itself has the strongest quizzing culture in Southeast Asia (though a distant second in Asia to the quiz mad Indians) but I ended up organizing a small leg of the competition in Singapore instead (Malaysia also has a tiny leg with around 2-3 competitors). In the end, we held the Singapore leg at The Yard, a small quiet British pub on River Valley Road (with claims to be the oldest British pub in Singapore). Joining me in this trivia madness was Jake, an American friend of mine who has partnered me in many quizzes in the past, and Kenneth, whom I met at the weekly quiz at Brewerkz and who hopes to take part in College Bowl quizzes in America, where he is headed to study.

A bit on the rules of the competition. Basically, there are eight categories - Culture, Lifestyle, Media, Entertainment, Sport and Games, World, History, and Science. They are divided at random into two parts of four categories each. There are 30 questions in each category for a total of 240 overall. The quiz is done individually, with no conferring, and competitors get an hour for each part. Their total score is tabulated by dropping their worst category and adding together the scores for the remaining seven, for a maximum total of 210 points. If scores are tied the person with the higher score in their worst category is ranked first.

What makes the quiz very tough is the quality and difficulty of the questions and the question of speed. Having 1 hour for 4 categories works out to 60 minutes for 120 questions or 30 seconds per question including reading the question itself, trying to recall the answer (or in some cases trying to work it out) and of course trying not to second guess yourself. The questions are often much tougher than your average pub quiz. All in all it makes for quite a challenge.

I set myself a number of goals for this year's quiz. First, I hoped to crack 100 points. Seemingly modest considering that the highest possible score was 210 (eight categories of 30 questions each, with the lowest scoring category disregarded), so surely scoring 50% or 105 should be a easy right? I knew from past experience that attaining even 15 in any category was a major challenge though I did hope to break 100 and if possible score 50%.

Besides that, I hoped to be the top scoring competitor in Southeast Asia. For that reason, I had hoped to fly over to the Philippines, where the best competitors are to take part there. It would also be a good opportunity to meet other quizzers which would have been nice.

In the end, I accomplished neither. I ended up with a respectable 98 points, good enough for a 127th in the world. A Filipino quizzer by the name of Leonard Gapol scored an even 100 to beat me by a mere 2 points. To break the top 100, a score of 105 was needed (which was coincidentally exactly half the marks). To put the result in perspective, there were over 1200 competitors taking part in this year's WQC, so my placing puts me just fractionally outside the top 10%. Not bad, even if I failed to accomplish my two other targets.

As for the questions, I was particularly proud because I didn't drop that many questions and managed to work out those that I knew I knew but took some time remembering. In my case it was the British fashion designer that committed suicide (Alexander McQueen), the French city where there was an alternative papacy (Avignon), the standard measurement of distance in Ancient China (the li) or the very young British diver who one of the youngest competitors at the Beijing Olypics (Tom Daley). In a quiz of this difficulty there is nothing more irksome that to have an answer at the tip of a brain which you can't quite pull out.

Of the ones that got away I should have gotten the clue to the Tuileries Gardens in Paris (mixed it up with the Luxembourg Gardens), and a music clip clue from the musical Hairspray, but there weren't that many dropped points for me in this particular quiz.

This turned out to be especially important this year as it was a fairly tough quiz compared to the ones in 2008 and 2009. I struggled on Sciences (which includes the Social Sciences), which was expected, but I didn't even manage a score of 10 in History, which is surprising, given it is a subject I am normally quite decent at. In the end I managed 19 in Media, 16 in Sport and Culture, 14 in Entertainment, 13 in Lifestyle, 11 in World, 9 in History and 8 in Science. Here's to more quizzing and a better score next year!

30 Things A Man Should Own Before 30

2010-05-21T13:16:00.003+08:00

A skin care regimen. C’mon guys, healthy complexions aren’t just for metrosexuals!: Not going to happen, and so far, not needed.
A tasty signature dish he can whip up for a date: Cooking is useful but I'll learn it for myself. A signature dish would be cool.
Respect for women as equals and not just as heads attached to boobs. Absolutely, as long as they don't behave like heads attached to boobs
At least four good pairs of shoes: dressy, business casual, casual, exercise: There's a difference between exercise and casual? Just kidding. I'll have to work on this one comfortable shoes that fit me are tough.
At least one friend who gives honest fashion advice I think I've found someone, but fashion advice is something you never get in too short a supply if you are me.
A tailored suit Done. Just need more occasions to wear it! And with a bow tie too!
A toolbox that includes: a hammer, screwdriver, wrench, nails, work gloves. I definitely need to improve on the handyman bit. No point having tools if you are clueless about how to use them. I CAN change a light bulb. I think.
Enough clean underwear (no holes!) to get him through a week between laundry sessions. Yes, an absolute essential.
Independence from his mama. Absolutely. Independence is good. From women. Period.
The ability to ask for directions. You don't need to ask if you don't get lost!
A great road map when there’s no one to ask. I don't drive, and you don't need road maps in Singapore. It's too small.
A favorite cookbook. I'll have to work on understanding them first.
A decent set of pots and pans. And knives. Never forget the knives.
An emergency kit in the trunk of his car. Again, no car, so no worries.
A hobby that does not include a television set or a 6-pack of beer. I will take this to be an active hobby that requires you to sweat. I'm thinking rock climbing.
A trusted barber or hair stylist. This is a perennial problem. I need one that speaks in English, and will just give me a trendy easy maintain look that doesn't require me to put in much effort. Recommendations welcome.
A pair of jeans that makes his butt look good. I think I do own a pair. Girls, feedback welcome on the latter bit.
Jumper cables. Don't own a car, so not bothered.
A driver’s license. I was close to getting one. Will go ahead and finish it.
Always enough toilet paper. Obviously. Just don't expect me to put the toilet seat back up.... why can't you put it down if you need it?
Sheets that don’t scratch.
A nightstand that doesn’t say “Handle with care” on the side. Huh?
A smile he uses generously. Use it too much and it loses its luster. I say reserve it for special occasions and special someones.
At least one lamp that didn’t once belong in a dorm room.
Enough confidence to approach someone he finds attractive. Always difficult, this.
Enough sense not to use a cheesy pick-up line. (When in doubt, say “hello!”) I never do cheesy pick up lines. I only come up with sardonically witty retorts that nobody ever understands.
A great razor. Being Chinese I have no regular need of one. That said, having tried to grow a mustache in my university days, I know how ridiculous I look with one.
The beginning of a nest egg. Sigh. I wish.
A place where everyone knows his name. I've got that. I am a firm believer in the local pub where everybody is friendly with everyone. That, and most of the second hand bookstores in Singapore.
At least one sex move he’s received lots of positive feedback on. Errr, well. I couldn't possibly comment, could I?

This internet meme is courtesy of The Frisky.

A Host of Benefits

2010-05-16T09:48:00.003+08:00

I was quite tickled by this. What helps to burn calories and increase your overall fitness, reduces the risk of heart disease, increases your immunity against influenza and the common cold, helps to reduce depression, and even gives you a better sense of smell? Of course benefits only accrue with sustained regular doses.

I'm sure that by now you have an inkling about what the answer to the above just might be. Appropriate warnings must be issued as with any form of drug or treatment: this particular one should only be administered with an individual in whom you have due care and trust. Thankfully there is low risk of an overdose. Might induce euphoria and temporary feelings of happiness and emotional dependence.

British General Election

2010-05-08T09:42:00.004+08:00

So it has come to be. Most of the media commentators had predicted a hung parliament, and I did as well. David Cameron needed a very big swing in his favour - almost all 80 odd marginals (with a 8 point swing to the Conservatives needed to gain the seat) and then somehow conjuring up another 30 odd seats from somewhere. While the Conservatives did well enough in winning back seats in their own heartlands of the South-West (and to a lesser extent the South-East) they failed singularly in making any significant dent in Scotland, much of a dent in Wales (though they did pick up 5 seats), and in any major urban area in the UK. While David Cameroon has made significant strides in a Conservative Party revival, the fact that his party still remains toxic to many voters and his failure to penetrate much into Labour strongholds is a significant cause of concern for his party.

If there was one advantage that Gordon Brown brought to this election, it was strangely enough his Scottishness, and it clearly showed. The Conservatives managed to retain their only seat in Scotland but made absolutely no inroads anywhere else, and all of the marginal Labour (and Lib Dem) seats there returned their MPs with larger majorities on the whole. It will be interesting to see how much of the poor showing in Scotland is down to genuine antipathy towards the Conservatives (as opposed to nationalistic support for Brown and former Lib Dem leader Charles Kennedy). The Scottish vote, with only 1 in 59 seats going Conservative, renews questions about devolution and the West Lochlian problem. The Conservatives would have a clear majority in Commons excluding Scotland and with a number of key bills in the Commons that do not pertain significantly to Scotland (Blair's raising of University tuition fees comes to mind) passed only due to Scottish MPs, this is an interesting constitutional question that has reared it head more significantly in the context of this election.

The Conservatives have always relied predominantly on the rural vote, but their inability to make almost any inroads in the cities and industrial areas in this election is still noteworthy. Apart from winning back the marginals in their Southern base such as Hove, Portsmouth North, Watford and Bristol, they were fairly unsuccessful in making much inroads into any of the Northern or North-Central cities. They did win Cardiff North, and took back Southampton, and succeeded in wresting Oxford West and Abingdon in a big swing away from the Lib Dems but even in the Southern heartlands the Conservatives embarrassingly lost Brighton Pavilion to the Greens and Eastbourne to the Lib Dems. In an election when they needed to win literally everything in the South West and South East, the fact that even Southern cities like Brighton, Portsmouth, Southampton, Colchester and Bristol are fairly ambivalent in what should have been big Conservative wins, does not bode well for Cameroon and his party.

For the Lib Dems this election revealed that much of the hype surrounding them and their leader was merely just that - hype. Given the economic uncertainties and a deeply unpopular standing Government, the electorate was hardly likely to favour a third party, which despite Nick Clegg's rhethoric, was never remotely considered a credible party for Government. While in certain cases, anger against Labour translated into Lib Dem gains, the scalping of Charles Clarke a notable case, more often the Lib Dems also suffered from the anti-Labour backlash, particularly in the South-West and also in losing two significant MPs in Lembit Opik and Dr Evan Harris. Opik, certainly one of the most colourful characters in Parliament, found himself decapitated by the masterful conservative strategy of finding a plain spoken local Welshman to run against him in Montgomeryshire. A more stark contrast to the celebrity dating, chat show regular Opik would be hard to imagine.

My personal sympathies go out to Dr Harris. I voted for him in the last general election when I was a student living in Central Oxford. He was the victim of redistricting (which reduced the student vote he so relied on) in part, but his loss was still quite a shock. I certainly hope he runs for parliament again, and given the marginal loss he suffered (it went to a recount), one should not bet against him winning back his seat the next time around.

As for Labour, this is almost certainly the end of the road for Gordon Brown. In taking the most seats, and the popular vote, the Conservatives clearly have the mandate to govern, hung parliament or no. Given that the electorate had clearly turned against Labour, the best they could have hoped for was that the Conservatives would be prevented from attaining a clear victory, which is what transpired. Brown must almost certainly make way for someone else to be Leader of the Opposition, most likely David Milliband. Labour still maintain a big stranglehold on Scotland, Wales, the North West and most of the big cities (including large swathes of London) and with most of their power base intact, they will continue to be the other major player in UK politics. In many ways, the bigger threat to Labour might have been a major Lib Dem breakthrough, with the Lib Dems gaining 20 or even 30 seats and approaching the 100 seat mark. This would be similar to the situation with the rise of Labour and the decline of the Liberal Party at the turn of the last century. As it stands, Labour can regroup and bide its time as Her Majesty's loyal opposition.

The fascinating question will be how the hung parliament will pan out. It is almost certain that the Conservatives will have to make common cause with the Lib Dems. They could just about form a majority with the SNP, Plaid Cymru, and assorted Northern Irish parties, but it would not be a stable base for governing. Ruling with the Lib Dems could mean giving them cabinet positions and more vitally, giving ground on Lib Dem demands for more proportional representation in Parliament and some modification to the first past the post system. Once again, it has been shown that the first past the post system is not at all friendly to the third biggest party except in the case of hung parliaments where they tip the balance. As such, while this election has been a disaster for Nick Clegg in every other respect, in this one regard the Lib Dems have made their most significant stride in their party's history. How they use this opportunity will likely determine the next cabinet, and the future of the party itself.

Theological Questioning and Evil

2010-04-20T12:56:00.004+08:00

At the prompting of a good friend, I am starting to revisit theological questions. Or more accurately, I am again look at religion and particularly theology from a philosophical perspective. My closer friends will know that I accept, to a fundamental degree, that the firm foundations of religious faith can never come from reason alone. I accept the need for Kierkegaard's "leap of faith". That said, any faith that is blind, that is reached without deep questioning and searching to me is fundamentally hollow, and perhaps even rotten, a soft center without any weight.

For me, one of the most difficult philosophical (let alone religious) problems that exist is the problem of evil. Not merely that there is evil in the world, but that it is often the completely innocent that suffer unjustly. Christianity though in particular has a much greater burden in relation to the problem of evil because they posit a God who is personal, whom you can seek comfort in, pray and talk to, who watches over each and every person just as he watches over the sparrow.

While a humanist can bite the bullet and say that injustice is often a brutal fact of a cold, uncaring world a religious person cannot. A volcano doesn't have intentions, nor an earthquake. It cares not for the fact that a town or a city or a school or tens of million people living nearby. But Christians cannot escape the question of how an all knowing, all powerful God could allow for those many thousands of innocents to die. Indeed, some psychologists have suggested that it is precisely in the fact of the inexplicable brutality of existence, in our need to find some kind of meaning in the very first place, that many turn to God as an answer.

As Peter Singer argues, I have never been able to find a satisfactory answer to this question short of saying that God's ways are unknowable, and any attempt by feeble human minds to understand God's intentions is akin to a monkey trying to grasp the depth and power of Shakespeare. I find this reply unsatisfactory. To begin with, the argument is circular. It attempts to argue that we are incapable of knowing God precisely by presupposing that God is omnipotent and omniscient as well as good, the very three things that seem incompatible together when we deal with unjust evil in the world. More damning for me is the denigration of reason. As I said earlier, any faith that I shall ever come to will be through constant thought, struggle and reflection. It is far far too easy, and correspondingly also too dangerous to just say God's reason is unknowable. Let us not seek to grapple or understand. Let us just accept.

Perhaps that is the crux of religion. Acceptance. Submission (which is the major tenant of Islam). Thy kingdom come they will be done, now and forever. Amen.

Catholic Church, Abuse and Homosexuality

2010-04-15T14:55:00.003+08:00

The degree to which the Catholic Church engaged in a systematic cover-up of the sex abuse cases which are now being revealed is certainly still contentious. What is not is the series of ill-advised, and in some cases downright insulting remarks that have issued from the Vatican revealing a Church very much on the defensive.

First, the Pope's very own personal pastor made an allusion to the current series of scandals being akin to the persecution of the Jews. That this comparison is inaccurate is self-evident, that it is thoughtless, and an insult to the 6 million Jews who lost their lives in the holocaust is even more so. Many of the victims of the holocaust lost their freedom, their livelihoods and ultimately their lives as a result of blind hatred and pure prejudice. To equate their plight with a Church that is under attack due to the abuse of trust and criminal behavior of admittedly a minority of its members is not just bad taste but horrendously wrong. It is insulting not only to the Jews, but to the actual victims of abuse, and a pathetic attempt to paint the Church as a victim, instead of having it as a body give a fully accounting and reckoning for what has happened.

This especially is the case as more and more victims of abuse come forward with testimony, and with more circumstantial evidence showing the culpability of senior members of the church, who if they did not actively attempt to cover-up or circumvent the truth, at least chose to do nothing, which is a form of culpability in and of itself. The fact that church has repeatedly insisted that this is a private matter that will be dealt with internally, like many other instances of Vatican bureaucratic secrecy, has increased speculation that the church has something to hide. In any other circumstance, individuals facing such allegations would have to come before the open court to face their charges. Some opaque form of internal censure surely is not sufficient given the age of many of the victims when the abuse occurred, the abuse of positions of trust and power of the perpetrators, and the heinous nature of many of the acts. Those suspected of pedophilia should be investigated, and if found guilty, jailed.

Worse still, a senior Bishop, effectively the second most powerful man in the Vatican, has come out with the accusation that pedophilia is inextricably linked to homosexuality. The irony is, in the context of the Church, this might very well be the case. That it is not so for the wider homosexual and transgender community may be testament to the lasting damage of the Church's outmoded stance on sex and sexuality.

That there is a link between pedophilia and homsexuality in the Catholic Church context, is ironically, very much due to the fact that taking up the robe is seen as a last resort to many individuals unable to reconcile their religious beliefs which condemns homosexual acts in any form, and their own innate tendencies. Facing the notion that their inclinations and desires are inherently wrong, they choose instead to renounce desire altogether, taking vows of chastity, hoping that purity can be found in abject self-denial.

I am not saying that all the pedophiles and sex abusers were homosexual, in fact, far from it, something that already shows the inaccuracy and plain idiocy of Cardinal Bertone's remarks. What is does serve to underline is that abject self-denial, which is in line with the Church's notion of the sexual act as a kind of impurity can be signficantly damaging if the repression results in systematic abuse. This leaving aside the psychological trauma faced by some of the clergy, particularly the homosexual ones in this form of repressive self-denial.

How ironic then that the current Pope was the author of the last major Catholic statement on homosexuality, which trots out the usual cliches on the matter. Violence against them is no doubt wrong, but we should never detract from its inherent wrongness. Homosexual inclinations itself is not a sin - presumably engaging in homosexual acts itself would constitue such, but it "is a strong tendency ordered towards an intrinsic moral evil". Love the sinner, hate the sin.

Indeed, because it is a moral disorder, it prevents achieving personal fulfilment and happiness. As such "The Church, in rejecting erroneous opinions regarding homosexuality, does not limit but rather defends personal freedom". So, telling individuals that what many of them perceive (or feel) to be a fundamental part of their identity is an intrinsic evil they are extending the sphere of personal freedom. By condemning a whole group of individuals as intrinsically morally evil (and then stating that of course, they should still have our love), they are promoting their best interest. I struggle to see how.

Attempting to accept or condone homosexual beliefs is seen as seeking to undermine the Church. Those who represent the view of acceptance are ignoring the teaching of the Church. Supporting gay rights on grounds of equality is mistaken and an attempt at manipulation given that homosexuality "may threaten the lives and well-being of a great number of people". How exactly? By undermining the church?

In contrast, we have the Catholic church's stance on homosexuality, and indeed their views on sex in general including contraception. What harm has that done? Just ask the numerous victims who have been sexually abused by Catholic clergy in whom they had the utmost trust, and were often allowed to continually abuse young children systematically over an extended period of time. Just ask the young, confused homosexual men and women who are not able to reconcile their sexual identities with a faith that tells them they are inherently sinful. Tell that to an African woman who is infected with HIV because the Church tells her husband that using condoms is a moral wrong, and he uses that as an excuse to have unprotected sex with her. There is real harm, here. Harm that the Catholic Church must answer for. Harm that it can no longer deny and hide away. Harm that will not dissipate from feeble attempts to paint the church as a victim, or indeed as a bastion under siege.

Interesting Puzzle

2010-04-14T13:28:00.003+08:00

I am glad that I rushed down to take part in the Brewerkz pub quiz after ringing Jake up mainly because we managed to win, with a team of just four people. That worked out to a cool 80 over dollars per person on the night, which was quite wonderful. I also won a free beer to boot after betting with Jake that Yokohama was the second largest city in terms of population in Japan after Tokyo, though Jake rightly pointed out that much of that depended on things like how you defined city and metropolitan limits.

I ended up having a long chat with the quiz masters afterwards, and it turned out that one of them was a banker, dealing with derivitives and thus analytical by nature. His background in gambling actually helped a great deal, at least in terms of securing him his job, because some of the interview questions were actually based on logic and probability. He challenged us with two specific puzzles which I only fully worked out afterwards, and it makes enormous intuitive sense, I thought I would share them.

The first puzzle involved a game of chance with a die. Let us say that you will pay in cash the amount equivalent to the die roll (e.g. if it lands on a six, the person wins six dollars). What price should you make a person pay in order to compete in the game? The answer is derived by using simple math. First, there is an equal probability of each outcome (the die landing on any number from one to six). So the average payout can be calculated by taking the total payout in each individual outcome (i.e. $1 in the case of die roll 1, $2, in the case of die roll 2) and dividing it by 6. So what you get is $1+$2+$3+$4+$5+$6= $21 in total, dividing by 6 gives you $3.50. So you should charge at a very minimum $3.50 for a roll.

He then added a more challenging twist. Say you give the gambler a chance at a second roll of the die. The number that then comes up on the second roll is the payout will be given (i.e. if you roll 3 on the first go and 2 on the second, the payout is $2). What price would you set for a person to compete in this 2 roll game? Would it be the same as in the first case, more expensive, or less expensive?

The answer of course is that you have to set it more expensive. Calculating the exact amount is a matter of logically predicting the behaviour of the gambler. To begin with, the gambler will not re-roll unless he has a even or better chance of improving his payout. Because there is always a risk that he will throw lower the second time around. So the gambler will probably hold if he rolls 4,5 or 6 the first time, and re-roll if he rolls 1,2,3. If he re-rolls the scenario exactly mirrors the first one above. However, given that the gambler has the option of holding on a high number and improving his payout on a low one, it logically means that the price has to be set higher.

How to calculate this? Very simple, first deal with the first roll which has a payout of 4+5+6 divided by 3 which is 5 - the gambler will re-roll otherwise. As calculated above, the average payout on a second roll (should the gambler roll 1,2 or 3) is 3.5. So the price set for a gambler to take part in this second game is the average of these two which is 8.5 divided by 2 which is 4.25. So you should make someone pay $4.25 in order to take part in the double roll game.

Singapore Live Music

2010-04-11T23:20:00.000+08:00

I was invited by a friend to attend a free live gig at the Esplanade outdoor open stage this evening. It was a metal gig, and though it is not one of my favourite popular music genres - I prefer alternative and rock - I thought I might give it a go. She was going because her cousin was a guest musician playing back-up guitar.

There are often complaints in Singapore about the lack of any kind of independent music scene here, complaints that I increasingly find are thoroughly unjustified. It is an undeniable fact that the live music you get in most commercial bars and pubs consists of nothing more than cover bands, but I am increasingly learning of what a vibrant original music scene Singapore actually possess. Beyond our ability to manufacture Taiwanese pop divas, we have interesting bands that play stuff on the edges (metal, grunge, rap) many of whom are more than decent.

I love the feel of live music, the evident passion of many of the fans. The concert was fairly dead though until to the amusement, surprise and general gawking disbelief of everyone, an old uncle, dressed in classic striped short sleeve shirt got up and started head bobbing, doing air guitar and generally just prancing around. Singapore never ceases to surprise. Seeing him along with some of his old uncle friends attending a metal gig was already cause for much surprise - seeing him mimic a riff on an imaginary guitar, that was just thrilling and completely out of the blue.

Burns Night

2010-01-26T11:40:00.004+08:00

Robbie Burn's legacy certainly lives on, from renditions of Auld Lang Syne (which incidentally means Old Long Way) every New Year's Eve, and more quixotically, in the celebration of Scottishness that accompanies the anniversary of his birth every year. I had never celebrated a Burns night before, despite being a part of innumerable other random British and Oxford traditions, from singing in the spring on May day morning, to wearing suits to exams. This was something I was keen to rectify so I jumped at the chance of attending a Burns night celebration at the Shoe.

And what good fun it was. The place was bedecked in tartan and of course with Scottish saltires, courtesy of the St Andrew's society of Singapore. The bar staff wore kilts, and there was the obligatory piper. The most fascinating part of the Burns night tradition is a ceremonial procession honouring the haggis, where it is marched in to the sound of pipes. There is then a traditional address to the haggis, usually in the form of Burns' famous poem, read out preferably in full Scottish brogue.

Everyone was given free haggis with neaps and tatties (which I found to my disappointment was no more exciting than potato and turnip). A bottle of Macallan whisky was raffled out and the winner generously decided to share it around. I am told that the best way to accompany a haggis is with a single malt - it probably helps to mask the taste!

In the spirit of Burn's night I thought I would mention some bits of Scottish trivia. Apparently, it is a tradition that real Scottish men don't wear anything under their kilt. Perhaps the idea though is to keep everyone guessing. As a member of the Scottish parliament said: "The mystery of what a true Scotsman wears under his kilt is as big a part of our culture as the Loch Ness Monster". Perhaps the best way to find out? Find a kilt wearing Scotsman and ask him to show you!

New Year's Greetings

2010-01-12T20:26:00.001+08:00

This is rather rather late, but better late than never. So to all my friends, and to the (seemingly non-existent) readers of this blog, I offer my New Year's greetings:

May you live in adventure and mystery, in the warm glow of enchantment, and the thrill and fright of shadowy things. Read books that are good, and wise, that make you laugh and cry. May you kiss someone you love, and perhaps more importantly, be kissed by someone who loves you. Catch a snowflake or moonbeam, delight in the inconsequential. Most of all, find something not quite happiness somewhere in between rapture and joy.

[As inspired by Neil Gaiman]

700 Sundays

2010-01-10T16:38:00.001+08:00

700 Sundays| Billy Crystal

Those used to the name dropping and revelations that are a staple of celebrity biographies will be pleasantly surprised by this book, a quietly humourous portrait of Billy Crystal's family which ends just as he begins his ascent to Hollywood fame. The book covers Crystal's childhood as part of an extended Jewish family growing up on Long Island, centering on his relationship with his father, and delving into his three abiding passions in life - baseball, dixieland big band jazz, and what would eventually bring him fame and riches, stand up comedy.

The book had its impetus in a Broadway show, which won a Tony award, and it is easy to see its roots. The advantage is the powerfully authentic and often personal voice that comes out of many of the pages. You can almost audibly hear in your head Crystal's famous voice doing his shtick. The drawback stems from the same source: for however good it translates to prose, many parts of the book begs to be performed. You want to see him work the crowd and do the physical expressions that are fundamental to some of the portraits in the book. A number of jokes in the early part of the book fall particularly foul of the translation from theater hall to the page, in particular a re-enactment of his very own circumcision, which might have worked with Billy charm and sense of comic timing but doesn't seem that funny inked out.

What a family Billy had though. The stories abound, from his Uncle Milt founding the famous Commodore Records which meant that the young Billy had personal interactions with a whole slew of jazz musicians, both famous and forgotten. Indeed, it was Billie Holiday who took a young Crystal to watch his first movie, and Billy's grandmother decided to give Louis Armstrong a hilarious piece of advice when Louis visited the family, which Armstrong thankfully didn't take. Billy's father eventually came to work for Milt and helped in the running of the record business as well as staging jazz performances and dances, and the result is a wonderful portrait of the grandeur and sophisticated charm of big band dixieland jazz in its heyday.

A particularly powerful portrait from the book, one that is easily overlooked, comes in the third chapter which takes the form of an extended one way phone conversation between a favourite aunt and her friend in which she reveals, complete with numerous asides and digressions, her coming to terms with her daughter being lesbian, and the brave decision she made to attend her daughter's wedding. It was an utterly authentic, real and moving portrait of everyday domestic bravery which deserves to be celebrated.

One of Billy's big passions is baseball and this is well represented in the short book, from his first visit to Yankee stadium, which began a life long love affair, to numerous household games with his two older brothers where they played out entire imaginary games, including their very own backyard World Series. One of Billy's abiding memories of the 700 Sundays he spent with his father is his dad patiently teaching him the fundamentals of baseball, and Billy finally mastering a way to hit his father's wicked curveball, all of which served him well when he managed to win a baseball scholarship to College.

It was also Billy's father, along with an utterly hilarious Uncle called Berns who had a special talent for accents and mimicry which an inspired Billy soon adopted, who initiated Billy's love of comedy. Billy used to perform jokes (often boardering on the inappropriate and sometimes scandalous) copied from stand up acts he had seen, at large Crystal family gatherings. Thankfully, the extended family not only has the grace not to take offence at the gall of the young budding comedian, but actually laughed uproariously.

Tragedy was to strike when Crystal was 15, when his father died of a heart-attack during a weekly bowling game, following some angry words with Billy, leaving his son both heartbroken and guilty. The rest of the book is probably the weakest section, tapering off with largely narrative sections depicting Crystal dealing with his grief, meeting and falling in love with his future wife (which strangely seems a bit dead and lacking much sparkle), and eventually ending with the death of his mother.

700 Sundays is a short volume, but is an enormous surprise as celebrity autobiographies go. This is a funny, moving portrait of an All-American family that is equal parts laugh out loud hilarious and poignant. It certainly deserves to be read, and if you are so lucky, perhaps even seen.

Grade: B+

Book Sale

2010-01-09T23:11:00.000+08:00

Having spent a fair amount of time spring cleaning during the December holidays, I decided to organize a garage sale of sorts to get rid of old books and CDs which were no longer wanted. It was a kind of open house excuse to catch up with old friends as well. All in all, it was fairly successful. As expected, the interesting items were mainly the ones to go - double copies of good books like Ian Kershaw's Fateful Choices, and a volume of Frank Miller's Sin City.

Karin took several black leatherbound volumes of Agatha Christie as I expected she would; I also convinced her to take Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons - given her love of British comedy, I was sure she would love the book. I also managed to sell several other classic books among them a copy of E.M Forster's Howard's End, Greg Bear's Blood Music and several others.

Of course that left me with an enormous pile of hardbacks, which had mainly been purchased on offer from Borders, in the first place, which nobody wanted to touch. It's a classic rule which I have now learnt - nobody, and I mean nobody will touch hardback fiction, even secondhand. Blackwell's bookstore in Oxford knew that fairly well - one of their few rules governing the secondhand department was that they would not take any hardback fiction.

And of course old thrillers, Stephen King novels, and other such rather banal brainless reads were also left languishing, not that I was surprised. I mean, it was rather evident that my close friends were hardly the types who would pick up this stuff which was expressly dumped by me because I hadn't read them, or felt I would never read them, or found them to be horrible.

I also failed rather spectacularly to get rid of any CDs barring three Jars of Clay albums and Savage Garden's Affirmation. Admittedly, what was on offer was rather dire - Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Richard Marx, Bob Carlilse, Rick Price smacked of overwrought sentimental ballads and were precisely being sold being they were relics of embarrassing teenage years. And no, I deny any responsibility for the two Spice Girls CDs on sale. Still, there was some half decent rock stuff which nobody picked up.

It was good seeing some old friends again, and I was quite pleased that I managed to raise over $100 for charity - in this case Habitat for Humanity. I should really try and prune even more of the mountain of books that I own and sell them, but human beings are acquisitive creatures but nature, and it is always hard to part with what you own. Still, a enjoyable enough evening, and for a good cause.

Old Brown Shoe Pub Quiz Record for 2009

2010-01-03T20:51:00.005+08:00

I've been keeping a record of my participation in the Old Brown Shoe pub quiz over the years. So here's how it stand for 2009. Overall, I took part in 39 of the 52 quizzes for the year, a better than three quarter participation rate. The record reads at 22 wins, 8 second places, and 9 times taking the mantle of the quizmaster.

To go an entire year finishing in the top two is no mean feat, particularly given the evenings when some of the usual team mates hadn't been around for some reason or another. It has only served to underline how effective the team is - a potent mix of Britishness, youth (well, if I show up that is!) and a completely random range of interests.

I've especially enjoyed taking the helm as the quizmaster 9 times and I sincerely hope I will get the chance to be the quizmaster on regular occasions this year as well. It's not easy to set a good quiz, particularly a balanced one, but there is a real thrill to having created a good set of questions which everyone will enjoy.

Try and Try Again

2010-01-02T16:55:00.001+08:00

The title of this post is taken from the old dictum that if you fail, you should, well you know. Unfortunately, I'm making these new resolutions not with the enthusiasm and go getting spirit encompassed within that saying, or indeed exhibited by the little engine that could (I think I Can! I Know I Can!), but rather with a resignation bordered with hope (not the other way round).

So I hope that I can do the following this year: exercise at least once a week; set clear targets and meet them (this post is hopefully a sign of that); be more punctual; walk the dog more often, keep in closer touch with friends; blog more regularly (twice a week); pick up a nice hobby/interest/passion; decide what I really want to do with my life.

They say as you grow older you become more set in your ways. You ossify. You grow comfortable, or complacent, or resigned. Which makes it perhaps even more imperative, year on year, to make urgent changes. Because next year, it won't be try and try again, but oh f**k it all.

Best Movies of the Decade (Top 25)

2009-12-18T03:15:00.006+08:00

Here I have attempted to distill a list of my favourite 25 movies released this decade. They aren't necessarily the movies I think will be the most influential in the years to come, nor are they necessarily the most critically acclaimed. What they do represent is quite simply movies I would definitely want to watch again, movies that I found hugely enjoyable or thought provoking. Movies that somehow lingered with me, and will continue to linger still:

The Lord of the Ring trilogy
Pan's Labyrinth
The Lives of Others
City of God
Dogville
Y Tu Mama Tambien
Kill Bill (Vol. 1 and 2)
There Will Be Blood
The Dark Knight
Wall-E
Before Sunset
Atonement
Milk
Brokeback Mountain
The Dreamers
Michael Clayton
Sin City
Sideways
Good Night and Good Luck
Avatar
Downfall
Memento
The Incredibles
Spirited Away
The Pianist

Near Misses: Star Trek, Amelie, Gosford Park, The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Minority Report, The Constant Gardener, The Queen, Borat, Finding Nemo, Million Dollar Baby, Once, Closer, Lost in Translation, The Wrestler, Spring Summer Autumn Winter Spring, Revolutionary Road, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Casino Royale, No Country for Old Men, Man on Wire, Bowling for Colombine, Match Point,

Acclaimed Films I Haven't Seen: The Royal Tenenbaums, Four Months Three Years and Two Days, Hurt Locker, United 93, Mulholland Dr., Knocked Up, A History of Violence, Mystic River

Computer Gaming Madness

2009-12-06T16:29:00.004+08:00

Much of the first week of the holidays has been taken up by two computer games that I recently purchased. The first, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is an excellent first person shooter, and a sequel to the previous Modern Warfare game. The second, Dragon Age Origins is a classic fantasy role playing game.

Before Modern Warfare 2 was released, I decided to play through the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, at a slightly higher difficulty level for a greater challenge. It underlined yet again how the Call of Duty franchise had really raised the bar for first person shooters. You take on the role of both Soap MacTavish, a new recruit to the elite Special Air Service (SAS), and as Sgt. Jackson of the US Marine Corp. In the Call of Duty games you truly get a strong sense of what it feels like to be 'under fire'. The system of not having a health meter, but having the screen darken as you taken repeated hits (thus limiting your ability to fight back) makes you instinctively try and duck for cover, or for those foolish enough not to, die. This innovation is carried over to Modern Warfare 2, as is the lack of your ability to save the game at any desired point, meaning that you have to survive till specific checkpoints or replay that section.

Call of Duty 2 extends the sheer turmoil and exhilaration of combat that was present in the original, and adds multiple new and fascinating settings and perspectives. In this game you are another young recruit this time mentored by Soap who is now a captain in the SAS. It would be hard to top the original which included the detonation of a nuclear device, a stage where you are a sniper in a ghillie suit stalking through an abandoned city near the former Chernobyl nuclear reactor, and you even get to take the perspective of an aerial bomber providing air support to ground troops. Call of Duty 2 does manage to top this though- you get to try your hand at driving a snow mobile, you have to negotiate a cliff face with ice axes, and in one exhilarating sequence you are a gunner on an armoured vehicle racing through the streets of a Middle Eastern city while taking fire from all directions. The settings are diverse and novel - from a slum in Rio, to an oil derrick used to host SAM sites, to a prison near Vladivostock, even to several levels in suburban America. There is also a stage which is bound to attract enormous controversy where you play an American soldier that infiltrates a Russian terrorist cell, and which involves you taking the role of terrorists shooting up an entire airport full of innocent civilians.

There are several drawbacks to the game despite the intense combat experience, the excellent gameplay, the creative settings, and the generally effective AI. First of all, it is expensive. At $75 it is a good $20 more expensive than a normal computer game. I would have less of an issue with it, given its quality, were it not for the fact that it was also disappointingly short. I finished the game in around 10 hours on the advanced difficulty setting. An average gamer could complete it in 6-7 hours on normal difficulty. After you complete the main campaign there is an additional section that you can tackle called "Special Ops" which takes specific elements from the game (evading capture in a forest, snowmobile races, breaching and clearing rooms, surviving a wave of enemy attacks) and you earn between one and three stars by completing these set tasks at higher difficulty levels. That can't disguise the fact that the single player campaign is a bit skimpy.

Another surprising drawback was that the Call of Duty 2 plot ended up far less coherent and structured than the original's which basically involved you hunting down the Russian ultra nationalist Imran Zakhaev. The storyline got downright messy towards the end of Modern Warfare 2, and the motivation behind a crucial plot twist was never really sufficiently explained beyond some bombastic and overly cliched voice-over dialogue between missions. As someone who hardly utilizes the multiplayer component of these games paying such a hefty price for a short campaign was definitely poor value for money. But Call of Duty does provide fantastic thrills and a powerful gaming experience.

Far, far more time was spent playing Dragon Age: Origins. The developers behind the excellent Mass Effect has created a more traditional fantasy role playing game this time around, creating an enormous world to explore complete with its own back story, mythology, political dynamics and much else besides. Incredibly enough, the game even provides multiple back stories to start with, depending on the background and race of your character, with five separate 'origin' quests as a result, all culminating with your recruitment into the Grey Wardens, a group of reknown fighters committed to battling the evil threat of the Dark Spawn. The game is immensely complex, and it is easy to be completely lost in the rich tapestry of this fully realized world. From recruiting and interacting with a multitude of non-playing characters to multiple dialogue options, alternate paths and endings, the game is huge in every sense of the word.

It is also fairly difficult unless you've played through a number of role playing games, particularly the combat elements. For much of the game you will be involved in combat with three other members of your party, and it is essential to have a balance between warrior type melee combatants and ranged characters such as rogues mastering the bow and arrow skill or mages. What I disliked was the necessity to micromanage combat - you had to set out clear instructions in the tactics screen and even then you still had to pause combat repeatedly to control individual characters. The tactics menu also had drawbacks. For example I found it hard to program a mage to cast an area effect spell on a group of enemies far away - or at least to do so effectively. Often, the only way was to pause the game and take control of the character yourself.

The advantage of combat switching was that even if your main character is of a particular class - such as a mage - you can taste combat in all the various roles by playing as an accompanying character for the duration of any particular combat. In the end, I left the game at the easy difficulty setting, minimizing the amount of micro-managing I had to do, and also because I wanted to explore dialogue and character options to a greater degree. I would have preferred a more fluid combat system needing less pausing and tactical development, though.

On the whole, Dragon Age was a hugely addictive and immensely entertaining game. I spent the better part of 25 hours of direct gameplay and I still failed to finish all the various side quests and sub plots, let alone read through the immense codex outlining the history, mythology, and back story that you accumulate as you proceed in your quest. It is a superb buy but only if you are willing to jeopardize your social life for a number of weekends, not to mention risk having your significant other severely annoyed at you for neglecting them! I can't wait for the inevitable sequel that surely must follow, and indeed, for Mass Effect 2, slated for release in April 2010.

My Film Highlights of 2009

2009-11-26T14:40:00.005+08:00

The year is not quite done, but I've decided to do a short run through of the best (and worst) movies I've seen in 2009.

Best Movie seen in the Cinema: To date, I have seen 40 movies in the cinema this year. If I go a December movie binge I might just bring the total to around one a week. There were many quite wonderful films - the brutal rawness of The Wrestler, the emotionally heart wrenching (some would say manipulative) yet also quietly funny Departures, the wonderfully adapted 1960s take on suburban unhappiness that is Revolutionary Road, the delightful Up! and the thought provoking and just generally provocative Waltz with Bashir, and the list goes on.

Two movies stood out for me, though. For sheer pure enjoyment, nothing quite beat J.J Abrams Star Trek. It managed to both pay homage to and reinvent and revitalize an old franchise, but more importantly it was just a tremendous blend of wonderfully good humour and great action. Sean Penn rightfully won the Best Actor Oscar for a chameleon like portrayal of Harvey Milk - Milk, in my opinion deserved the Best Picture Award as well. I was supposed to choose between them, but I honestly can't, so I'll fudge and pick both.

Best Movie Seen (Other Media): This was truly impossible to decide. How could I possibly choose, when I saw A Man For All Seasons, The Lion in Winter, The Third Man and The Hustler on DVD? All of them are classic films that are deservedly great. How to choose between Paul Schofield's tremendous portrayal of Thomas More as a man of conscience (A Man for All Seasons) or Paul Newman's immensely charismatic yet complex pool shark (The Hustler), not to mention a classic film Noir in The Third Man complete with a Orson Welles cameo. That's to discount Bernado Bertolluci's tremendously influential Last Tango in Paris with an unforgettable performance by Brando which I also saw for the first time this year. All brilliant movies which I would definitely watch again.

Worst Movie Seen (Any Media): Hollywood continues to churn out fairly bad, testosterone fueled action movies which ensures that Michael Bay will always have a job. While the first Transformers movie was fairly successful (mainly by not taking itself too seriously), the second one was bloated, overcooked and excessively long that took itself far too seriously. It was also not helped but some fairly bad acting (Sam's dad going "I don't wanna lose you" in such a terribly fake way in the middle of a war zone being the icing on the cake). New Moon was turgid and often excruciating. I found it impossible to overlook the often terrible lines such as "all you have to do is breath" [to make me happy], or "Bella, you're everything to me" (okay, I'll be honest and admit those aren't the exact lines, but rough paraphrases, but you get the idea!).

Occasionally I also feel the odd compulsion to watch a bad, generally brainless action movie without any plot. Thus, the abysmal Elecktra and the rather dull Fantastic Four. Oh, and I also did pay to watch Street Fighter: Legend of Chun Li in the cinemas, but that had Kristin Kreuk in it, and a local Singapore actor!

Addendum: Avatar did indeed turn out to be a spectacular movie which made my Top 25 list of the decade (as did Milk) while Star Trek missed out in that regard. So I guess Avatar and Milk are my best of 2009.

Coloured (Paper) Memories

2009-11-25T13:15:00.001+08:00

I was attending a Knowledge and Inquiry workshop organized by the Ministry and one of the sessions involved a hands on activity where we had to try and show a proof of Pythagoras' theorem using coloured paper.

Beyond the fact that the proof was really interesting, what struck me was that coloured paper was fundamentally the same from my school days. Even more impressively, the price tag showed that it cost only 60 cents for one packet of coloured paper, compared to 50 cents when I was in primary school. The price tag also showed that it had been purchased from one of those random neighbourhood stationary shops that are slowly disappearing.

All in all, a bit of a nostalgia trip as I hadn't seen coloured paper for years. It also struck me as fairly impressive that the price had remained relatively the same even after two decades. Other stationary items (fullscap paper, pens) are now far more costly, let alone food, cars and much else beside.

I remember a budding young entrepreneur type in my primary school who used to pay five cents to fellow classmates to make ninja stars which he would then sell for ten cents to other students. Even taking into account the cost of the coloured paper, he would turn a small profit. Ninja stars made of the prized gold and silver sheets cost more of course. It was also an early introduction to colour matching since a ninja star was made from two pieces of coloured paper folded together. There were many random combinations to be had - I particularly enjoyed black/pink and green/red ones.

Given my lack of ability in folding/wrapping/creating anything, I was often the student who bought the ninja stars for ten cents, rather than ending up part of the stable of individuals earning some small change making them. To put things into context, 10 cents was not inconsiderable in those days when your daily pocket money often amounted to a dollar. A glass of soya bean milk would cost that, from the old grumpy uncle (ten cents, ten cents, all also ten cents, big one twenty cents) who also sold Walls ice cream from a large cooler which he regularly slammed (never closed or shut, always slammed). A plate of small chicken rice cost only 30 cents.

For old times sake, I tried my hand at making a ninja star (while also attempting to prove Pythagoras right of course). I took a pink sheet and a black one and tried to combine them, but of course it came out all wrong. A person who apparently took weeks to learn how to tie my shoelaces (when I was little), who gets presents to family members wrapped by other family members to whom that present is not meant for (sis wraps dad, dad wraps mom, mom wraps sis), and who often struggles to tie a half windsor knot, that was always going to prove a challenge.

More Quizzing Mayhem

2009-11-12T13:19:00.002+08:00

I was asked to stand in for Peter again this week as quizmaster, and the choice of "black-eyed Pete's" [a riff off Black Eyed Peas] as a team name was a not too subtle allusion as to why. I was short of inspiration for that week's quiz so it took a fairly long time to set. In the end, I set rounds on Remembering '89 (in honour of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall); A Test of Character (teams had to name the film after I listed out some characters from it); and The Natural World (Animals, Plants, Physical Geography).

It was a full house - nine teams in total - and it made for a fairly good night. There was a bunch of first timers that definitely caught the eye no less because one of the members was a television personality who was a presenter on ESPN Sport Center. Attractive young ladies are a rarity at Old Brown Shoe quiz nights, so it was refreshing to see two of them that night, teammates of said television personality.

It turned out to be a fantastic quiz, perfectly pitched. By the end of the night, as many as 5 or 6 teams had a shot at winning it, and the top 5 were separated by a mere four points. The team with the attractive young ladies won, but sadly they had to forfeit their winnings for violating the long standing rule that each team could only have a maximum of six members. I still gave them a bottle of wine though, along with the third placed team. To give some idea of the balanced scoring, none of the nine teams scored a perfect 10 in any of the rounds; almost all teams scored at least a five in every round except for a team, self-styled as the "wooden spoons", which predictably struggled.

All in all, it was a very fascinating night, made even lovelier when I ended up speaking to Colette afterwards and was introduced to one of the girls - Emilie - who proved to be slightly tipsy. She proceeded to show her immense flexibility by placing both feet at either ends of the table top, and her considerable singing prowess by belting out some tunes from Annie. No doubt the alcohol had something to do with it, but I suspect she is generally random and slightly crazy, which is quite wonderful. A great pity then that I didn't get her number, one can only hopes she comes down to quiz again.

A Book A Day for 365 Days

2009-10-13T13:24:00.003+08:00

Of all the new year resolutions that I have made, one of the few that I have successfully kept is a pledge made back in 2000 to try and read at least one book a week for the entire year. I've since gone from that initial target of 52 books to setting myself a more ambitious one of 100 books for the year (just under 2 a week). All this pales in comparison though to the goal that Nina Sankovitch set herself - she wanted to finish a book a day for one entire year, and write a reflection on each and every one of them. She started on October 29, 2008 and she's almost done - having read through Christmas, New Year's and Easter. She started her one year of reading as a means of helping her come to terms with her sister's death and of course to appreciate more about herself and the world. Her reviews and thoughts on reading are real gems, which I encourage everyone to read.

I can't help but be moved and impressed by Nina's journey, and perhaps, one day I will find the courage and the time to do something similar. The depth and breadth of her reading was very impressive - she would not read anything she had already read before; she would read an individual author's work only once, and she would read widely - essays, short stories, science fiction and fantasy, crime, literary novels, the occasional classic. Of course, the fact that she had only a day to complete it meant that each book was usually limited to under 300 pages (with novellas for busy days).

It was flattering to see a number of books I've already read that she encountered for the first time during her one year journey. These included The Watchmen (she found it far too violent and didn't enjoy it), Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman (we both loved it but as book lovers that was only to be expected), Ali Smith's The First Person and Other Stories (she found Smith's style irritating and distracting, I found it intriguing and fun), The 39 Steps (we both thought it farcical and not very exciting), and many others such as Ender's Game, Paul Auster's Man in the Dark, Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach (she found the ending too staged, I thought he had earned it), Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, The White Tiger, Never Let Me Go and Stardust by Neil Gaiman (we both wanted more of faerie).

Anyhow here's a salute to Nina once again, and I'll go back to her list and I'll sure be glad to find some interesting new reads that might help me fulfil my goal of reading 100 books next year.

Courting Controversy

2009-09-23T08:40:00.000+08:00

I was asked by Pete to be the quizmaster this week as he had a load of marking to catch up on. I naturally agreed - I do love being the quizmaster and I pride myself on setting a fair quiz. For me, there have to be at least a couple of teams with a shout of winning the quiz for it to count as successful.

The last time I set the quiz there were complaints that it was slightly too intellectual with a round on first lines from novels, and one on famous last words (from both real and fictional people), so this time I decided to dumb it down considerably. So, I besides a more typical round on the 1920s, I dumbed things down considerably with a round on celebrity baby names. As if more proof were needed of the horrendous names that people give celebrities. I also set a random and interesting round on tricksters and scams, which was a bit of fun.

All in all it was a fairly well received quiz bar one moment. I asked a question about the recent Manchester derby football match, where there was a huge bone of contention over the amount of added time played, mainly because Michael Owen rifled in the winner with the clock showing 95:25. I of course, asked what minute in extra time the goal was scored and there was significant semantic controversy as to whether that constituted the 95th or 96th minute of added time. Obviously less than 6 minutes of added time had elapsed, but it was still IN the 96th minute itself. Confused? Well some of the teams were outraged. The problem was 2 teams had put 95th and three teams had put 96th, so in the end I accepted both answers.

Other than that, I was rather pleased that my usual team missed out on a question on the 'Lost Generation' (in the 1920s round) despite having 2 literature teachers in their ranks. And I was pleased, in keeping with my own ethos about exciting quizzes that the top three teams were only separated by 2 points at the end of the night.

Defending the Caveman

2009-09-20T23:44:00.001+08:00

Defending the Caveman came relatively hyped up. After a sold out first run last year, the SRT brought it back for another run due to 'popular demand'. It is easy to see why so many people loved it, dealing as it does with gender stereotypes and the battle of the sexes it was impossible not to resonate. It was definitely popular with the audience, as there were laughs throughout, though the true measure of its success could probably be measured in the number of knowing glances between couples that were exchanged throughout the show.

However, to sum it all up it was not theater. Not to be too pedantic about it, but the 'play' was effectively a one man scripted stand up comic routine masquerading as a play, much to the detriment of both its attempts to be theater and more damagingly, to its attempts at comedy. Apart from a few props (TV set, a couple of wall mounted paintings, chair, pillow) which the best stand up routines now incorporate anyhow, and some largely irrelevant lighting effects, there wasn't anything terribly theatrical about it. Not that it largely mattered if the play (or should I say routine) succeeded on its own terms. I had some serious doubts in that regard, however.

I'm quite a big fan of improvised comedy, particularly the British variety. I admit to not having had the chance to see much improv live, but I have a couple of friends who are diehard fans, and we occasionally get together to watch the latest DVDs of QI (with the indelible Stephen Fry), as well as other one night only performances. Of course the very point of improv is that it is not scripted, and the performer is able to feed off the audience. Of course the best improv performers prepare and reherse quite thoroughly, but there is an element of spontaneity which characterizes the best routines. That of course was very much missing in Defending the Caveman, stolidly scripted as it was.

Daniel Jenkins does a fine enough job, nicely building up an easy rapport with the audience, without which the entire production would have fallen quite flat. He strutted and exaggerated and milked the laughs, and was more than competent especially when role-playing the inevitable disagreements and entanglements that formed the complex web of male-female relations that was at the heart of the show.

Ultimately, though, I just didn't find the jokes all that creative or original, and in fact not even all that funny. There were the usual cliches trotted out about men being hunters and women gatherers and how that accounts for our differences. So women always gather information about each other, while men of course when interacting are satisfied with a couple of grunts following which they watch footie on the telly. Of course that is why men can't multitask either (they're evolved to concentrate on one thing for a long time) while women are quite the opposite. The jokes went on in a similar vein and soon started to wear thin.

The problem is, you soon got the sense that you've heard all of this before, probably when meeting up with you guy or girl pals for a bitch about the opposite sex (ah one thing that men and women have in common!). When the play went on to espouse such nuggets as poking fun of the fact that men absolutely refuse to ask for directions (which was mocked far more succintly and charmingly in Pixar's Cars among other places), I quietly felt the inclination to want to leave the theater, head straight to my local pub and start moaning to my mates. Of course, that could just be down to the fact that I wasn't one of the lucky six people to get a free Tiger beer (in what was probably the only original act in the entire play). More likely, it is due to the urgings of my inner caveman that I felt hard pressed to resist.

England and 'Destiny'

2009-09-12T00:35:00.001+08:00

Much has been made on England's brilliant progress in their recent World Cup qualifying campaign and their eight consecutive wins. The praise and enthusiasm has reached a new high following their 5-1 victory over Croatia, a win that sealed their place in next year's World Cup. Coach Fabio Capello has now officially gone on record in saying that anything less than making the finals next year in South Africa will be a disappointment. The British press has typically gone all agog, with the Times stating that there was a 'sense of destiny' about England. However, as any England fan will know, England never fails to provide a sense of drama and heartbreak. If anyone can break this streak it is the iron-willed, disciplined and methodical Italian manager they now have, but I'm not altogether ruling it out.

The first thing that inevitably seems to happen, of course, is injuries. It seems inevitable that England enters a World Cup with their best player facing some kind of major injury crisis. Captain Fantastic Bryan Robson had a hamstring injury and struggled for full fitness for much of Italy '90 - that was well before the sudden metatursal jink that affected both David Beckham in 2002 and then Wayne Rooney in 2006. Capello himself noted that one key factor in England's success will be their physical conditioning during the World Cup itself. He'll have one full week to make sure they're in shape before the competition starts, but there is not much he can do if they're crocked.

In a related point, for all of Capello's tactical nous, England's squad still remains thin in several areas. The Goalkeeping problem is unlikely to go away, Paul Robinson has World Cup experience, but was in a slump; David James remains error prone; Rob Green whom Capello seems now to prefer is hardly deemed world class. England also lack an out and out striker. Wayne Rooney is wonderful gifted but he's not a true goal poacher (and his best talents lie elsewhere, anyhow), for all the physical presence that Emile Heskey has provided, he has a poor goalscoring record, and missed two one on ones against Croatia. France in 1998 proved decisively that you don't need a proven goalscorer to win the World Cup - they had Stephane Guivarch and Cristophe Dugarry leading the line when they won, but it does make life easier. An injury to Rooney would still be fairly fatal to England, and there might be a lack of goals should opponents find a way to effectively stifle England's midfield.

Lastly, there is the dreaded notion of penalties. Of the horrors of Italia '90, the '96 Euro Championships (both to Germany), the '98 World Cup, and of course the last World Cup finals against Portugal. On some occasions there was a clear lack of self-belief and some bizarre decisions - what was David Batty doing taking a penalty in 1998? As much as I admire Gareth Southgate's courage in 1996 he made it sound like a complete spur of the moment decision to step up and take the sudden death penalty. Shouldn't such things be planned? They will be under Capello. England players certainly don't lack self-belief and it is not that they can't take them. Gerrard, Lampard and Barry (at Villa) regularly took spot kicks for their clubs and now Rooney seems to have taken over the job at Man Utd. Yet Gerrard and Lampard both missed in 2006. One final interesting point - given his trauma in the 2008 Champion's League final playing for Chelsea, will England captain John Terry step up to the plate again if England are faced with a shootout?

It's fun being an England fan. You learn to live with drama and a little bit of heartbreak. It would be nice for a change if they actually do go on and win the tournament, and they get lucky in the lottery of freak injuries and penalty shootouts, but it would be just a little less exciting. Destiny, maybe, but I'm not ruling anything out just yet.

Counterknowledge

2009-07-01T11:56:00.000+08:00

Random crackpot conspiracy theories have been around for ages. We all have our favourites such as insisting that JFK was assassinated by more than the lone gunman but instead fatally shot by a mysterious shooter on the grassy knoll (either way, there is no disputing that he ended up quite dead) . Indeed, if one were to be completely spurious about it, I wouldn't be surprised to find that more Americans believe in the existence of UFOs than the theory of evolution.

Damian Thompson takes direct aim at some of the more nonsensical recent crackpot theories in his book on Counterknowledge subtitled "how we have surrendered ourselves to conspiracy theories, quack medicine, bogus science and fake history". These might make rather easy targets, but Thompson argues that their influence has grown rather perniciously. Indeed, counterknowledge which he defines as "misinformation packaged to look like fact" has gone from being at the fringe of society to having spread to the mainstream. UFOs are a classic example of this, but the list now encompasses such unfounded scares and unabashed rubbish as a 9/11 being an American-Israeli conspiracy, MMR immunization causing autism, quack nutritionism, alternative treatments in general, particularly for HIV/AIDS, creationism, and such meta-historical nonsense as Jesus fathering a child, China 'discovering' America and the holocaust never occuring.

As he notes, one of the paradoxes of our age is that while "our techniques for evaluating evidence are subtler than before..... counterknowledge is corrupting intellectual standards". It must be said that he does skirt around the more intellectually interesting question of why this might be the case. Mention is made, obviously, of the internet, and the information revolution which has increased the "privatization of knowledge" and has made everyone an expert. He also delves into Sociology arguing that modernity leads to the "dismantling of authority structures" and our dedication to what Anthony Giddens calls the "reflexive project of the self". Still, more interesting analysis on this paradox of more easily available knowledge leading to the growth of so-called counterknowledge would have been welcome.

Where Thompson does succeed well is gleefully deflating some of these crackpot theories. He does this with gleeful abandon and not inconsiderable wit. He delights in showing the intellectual bankruptness of such quack cures as homeopathy, craniosacral therapy and other so called 'alternative' medicines. More scarily, he shows how some of those remedies are now marketed officially in high street stores such as Boots, or worse how homeopathy is available as a treatment from the NHS and as a degree course at the University of Westminster. Nutritionism, or rather those who abuse the label also comes under fire from him, and his cynicism is amply justified when we consider that (Dr.) Gillian McKeith actually earned her Phd from a non-accredited American University on the basis of a correspondence course. Worse still is the case of Patrick Holford, a 'nutritionist' whose degree in psychology better explains his blatant attempts to market quack products like a 'crystal' which will protect one from allegedly harmful electromagnetic radiation emanating from mobile phone towers.

Ours has been labelled the information age with good reason: advances in technology has allowed us almost instant access to unlimited information. But as Damian Thompson has pointed out, this has also led to the pernicious spread of misinformation. We might shrug off mass mails about HIV infected needles being left on train seats in order to infect people (the virus can't survive any length of time openly exposed), but it is more scary for society at large when this extends to autism scares over MMR jabs, cancer scares over cellphone antennaes and the belief that China discovered America in 1421 (and Europe in 1431 too apparently).

Spelling As a Competitive Sport

2009-06-16T19:06:00.002+08:00

People who know me well will know that I am a bit of a sports junkie. As in, I am the kind of person who will be happy to put ESPN on in the background, and I am someone who follows a wide variety of sports - football, tennis, basketball, golf, and even more random ones like table tennis and badminton. ESPN has been extending their coverage to such non-traditional sports as pool, snooker, bowling and darts (all of which I must admit I do rather enjoy watching as a kind of guilty pleasure), but even I was taken aback when I turned on the TV the other evening to be confronted with the ultimate clash of the titans, 48 individuals battling it out for the ultimate grand prize: the US National Spelling Bee trophy.

Traditionalists ("It ain't a sport unless you sweat while doing it") will laugh, but there was something rather captivating about seeing 13 and 14 year olds (some as young as 9) puzzling out words which were, quite honestly baffling, even to those who believe they have a considerable grasp of the English language. That spelling is a competitive sport, as unlikely as that might sound, was soon evident from the contestants.

Many of them were familiar with Latin and Greek root and derivatives, better to ensure not being caught out by tricky words; a number of them were making their second, third or even fourth appearance at the National Spelling Bee, with previous experience seen as a bonus (is experience a key factor, well just ask any golfer or tennis player yet to win a major). Nerves were evident, unsurprising given the one mistake and you're out see you next year format of the competition. It was often tension filled and pressure packed - there was even a psychologist on hand to counsel the distressed, some visibly distraught after they were literally "rung out" by the dreaded bell, signifying they had made a misstep puzzling out some fiendish word or another.

Just how difficult was it? I am not a great speller, laziness and Microsoft Word spellcheck has seen to that, but I do think I have a fair vocabulary. By the third and fourth elimination rounds (when the difficulty was increased) I would have probably gotten between a third to a half of the words wrong. This put me just about par for the competition as a whole. No doubt, these were 13 and 14 year olds, so I should feel ashamed at my ignorance, but in my defense, some of the contestants admitted to more or less sleeping with a Miriam-Webster by their bedsides, and spending arduous amounts of preparation in advance of the competition.

That said, I have kept a little notebook which I have filled with puzzling and interesting words that I had not previously come across. I have always meant to check out their meanings and etymologies, if only to expand my vocabulary. I have also meant to get to the roots of language, literally and metaphorically, to actually learn the building blocks (what is an adverb, what on earth is a past participle?) of grammar. Perhaps watching the US National Spelling Bee will inspire me to renew my efforts in this.

15 Books

2009-06-12T11:20:00.001+08:00

I've succumbed to yet another Facebook meme that has gone rabid. This one can be basically called 15 Books. You are supposed to choose 15 books that you love, or that had a major influence on your life. It was a very difficult task for me, given how much I enjoy reading, but here is the list I've come up with:

The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R Tolkien
Dune | Frank Herbert
The Sandman Graphic Novels | Neil Gaiman
The Passion | Jeanette Winterson
Housekeeping | Marilynne Robinson
Atonement | Ian McEwan
Disgrace | J.M Coetzee
The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro
The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Things They Carried | Tim O'Brien
In Cold Blood | Truman Capote
King Lear | William Shakespeare
Ex Libris | Anne Fadiman
A Wrinkle in Time | Madeleine L'Engle
True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle | Avi

Two books that probably influenced me greatly but which are too embarrassing to list: The Firm by John Grisham (it was the very first "adult" novel I ever read after I picked it up off my mother's shelf) and Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer (I read through the night trying to finish it, fell asleep, woke up around lunch and carried on where I had left off).

Near Misses: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes, Practical Ethics by Peter Singer, Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, Bartholomew and the 500 Hats by Dr Seuss, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisevitch by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Love Condensed?

2009-06-10T15:08:00.004+08:00

On certain occasions, fiction mirrors reality to a rather uncanny extent. We quote music lyrics because sometimes they express what we feel in a more direct and pithy way that we otherwise manage. So I found this passage in Julian Barnes's England England, which I am now reading:

Martha knew exactly what she wanted: truth, simplicity, love, kindness, companionship, fun, and good sex was how the list might start. She also knew that such list making was daft; normally human but still daft. So while her heart opened, her mind had remained anxious. Paul behaved as if their relationship were already a given: its parameters decided, its purpose certain, all problems strictly for the future. She recognized this trait all too well, the blithe urgency to get on with being a couple before the constituent parts and workings of coupledom had been established. She had been here before. Part of her wished she hadn't; she felt burdened by her own history

Couldn't have put my current feelings more accurately and concisely that what Barnes has written. Fiction mirroring reality.

Soft Landing

2009-06-09T12:32:00.004+08:00

My mother told me about the death of Elisha Chng the other day, and I was quite shocked. It was a surreal sensation reading about him in the afternoon papers - about how he played rugby and was a male model, though I was annoyed at the tone of idle speculation, the he seemed to have it all, so why? I used to play with Elisha when we were young children - our families were close. I remember giving him a bucket of G.I. Joes when he left for Africa with his family - his father was a missionary sent there to proselytize. I've written this poem as a form of remembrance and tribute. Note it is still a work in progress. Comments and suggestions on the poem (and how to improve it!) are welcome.

Soft Landing

for Elisha Chng

I knew you but briefly
more a presence, a memory,
than something solid,
until the thump of your landing
in the afternoon papers -
dry words of baffled condolence
leavened with concrete.

It was surreal to discover
the grown up you, secondhand -
rugger, model, all action hero,
rather like the G.I Joes
we played with as kids –
a bucketful my parting gift
as you left for Africa.

You weren’t a close friend or confidant –
nothing to warrant
this extravagance of verse;
still, I offer this wreath -
wraith like memories
thinly plucked
an antidote to idle speculation:
of why, what, waste
seeking some absolution
better found
in quiet remembrance.

Mexican Banditry

2009-06-07T23:40:00.000+08:00

The sister, CL, and myself met at Holland Village for lunch, and given the usual ding dong backwards and forwards discussion of where to eat, I plumped for Mexican. Holland Village itself has two Mexican restaurants sitting plumb right beside one another. Family tradition has dictated that we always dine at El Patio, which has a slightly more homely feel compared to Cha Cha Cha which was reputed to serve food that was less than authentic.

That age old tradition was to be broken today. We arrived at El Patio and stood outside briefly perusing the menu. The restaurant was completely empty, rather dire for a Sunday afternoon. We could blatantly see the one staff member on duty inside the restaurant, sitting at one of the tables, doing her damnedest to blithely ignore us. Even when we stood there for five minutes and began staring straight are her. I finally made irritated waving motions and she slowly and very reluctantly began to rise from her slouch, by which time me and the sister were so irritated, we walked away.

It was thus that we came to dine at Cha Cha Cha. The service was admittedly much more prompt. We were soon shown to a table. That, if anything, could explain why they had 6 or 7 tables occupied to El Patio's none. All was going rather well. Until the food came. I had ordered the mixed combo - one hard taco with beef, one chicken burrito. By the time I was half way through the hard taco, I was confronted with stringy bits of meat at the bottom, which was so tasteless, I couldn't remember whether I had ordered the beef or the chicken with the taco, and quite honestly, on taste alone I couldn't tell. I guessed it was beef based on the coloration, and nothing else. My sister was similar unenthused about her meal - her rice wasn't quite to her liking, and the refried beans tasted like they had probably been refried one too many times. The result was poor CL being subjected to a litany of complaints about the food from the two of us.

So, the puzzling question for us remained: how did these two establishments survive for longer than a decade at Holland Village, given the poor food in one, and the poor service in the latter (though the poor service at El Patio was probably due to a change in management). More importantly, where can Caleb and the sister go if they want some good mexican food? There is of course the Cafe Iguana, near Clarke Quay and with a newly opened outlet on Greenwood, which is decent. But we're looking for really authentic Mexican, stuff which can vaguely measure up to what we had when we spent a few months in Texas. Can anyone help us with our conondum, please do send recommendations. We need to eat proper Mexican after the debacle that was Cha Cha Cha.

My Simple Pleasures

2009-06-06T18:59:00.004+08:00

It all started when CL sent an SMS commenting about the simple joys of gelato, and watching happy dogs and exuberant children frolic about, with a subsequent query about what my simple pleasures were. Conventional wisdom tells us to count our blessings, a simple old as apple pie piece of advice that has been echoed by countless self-help and positive psychology books centering on how we can achieve happiness. Admittedly though, having the question posed so starkly gave me pause, though it hardly took me all that long to reply. What I can up with was:

reading a good book, watching an enjoyable movie in the cinema, browsing in a bookstore or a library, watching a play or a concert, holding someone you care about deeply, my dog wagging her tail and bringing me her toy ball whenever I step through the door, a beer in the pub with some friends, dinner at a nice restaurant with good company, meeting new and interesting people, catching up with old friends, randomly bumping into someone on a street corner, the thrill of pulling out a random piece of trivia or information, sleeping in, sharing a bottle of wine with company, staying up late doing absolutely nothing, spur of the moment decisions, suppers, lazy Sundays, reading the news, heartfelt kisses, the fresh smell of a brand new book and the musty smell of an old one, pretty notebooks, dry humour, long rambling discussions, sitting and watching the stars, hiking and walking, visiting new places, lovely little cafes and eateries

Of course the list doesn't end there. But the rather long list shows that as cynical as you care to be, there are lots of little things in life that inherently make it worth living.

When Harry Dumped Sally

2009-06-03T00:18:00.002+08:00

I was having a random chat with M. when we both mentioned that we really enjoyed When Harry Met Sally. Which is unsurprising given that it is a cult romantic comedy classic but surprising given that we are both a little bit cynical and jaded, and don't ordinarily watch rom coms.

The cynical side of us did come through of course. Like in any romantic comedy, the two protagonists end up together at the end. That wasn't a spoiler. If you are watching a rom com you know it is going to happen. Anyhow, I mentioned that I always thought that Harry and Sally would divorce after say 5 years of marriage because they would start to drive each other nuts. M said that she always thought that it would happen that way too. Of course given that the American divorce rate is hovering at about 50%, we have a odds on chance of being right.

So we started imagining what would happen after the credits rolled. So they divorce after 5 years but what do they do then? Perhaps Sally buys a dog to help her get over the break-up and she meets a lovely guy while walking the dog in the park one day. M was like no no maybe Sally turns lesbian (being so put out by men after Harry) and meets this really hot chick and ends up with her! Maybe they meet while Sally is walking her dog.

As for Harry. Well, he probably leaves New York and goes out of state in order to try to find himself. M wanted him to turn fat, and lose his job and be miserable. But, he needs some kind of redeeming quality too. What if he turns gay as well? I tell M. that we can't have both of them turn gay as that will go beyond the bounds of all credibility. Maybe he joins a hippie commune or loses himself in Zen Buddhism.

Where we can agree is that Harry and Sally don't end up back together. We are too realistic and cynical for us to believe or even want that to happen. Life doesn't always imitate the movies. I proposed the title When Harry Dumped Sally as suitably nice. M did say that even she found the idea and the title depressing. It would make her lose all hope in love. Which probably means that it won't sell.

I've always harboured secret dreams of writing a screenplay. Why not write a cheap sequel to a cult classic. Goodness knows it has been done often enough before! I'll just go check on the availability of Rob Reiner to direct, and of course Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal to star......

Eating: Some Commense Rules

2009-05-29T17:56:00.003+08:00

Eating, previously one of life's simplest and most pleasurable activities, has become increasingly complicated. I have always adopted a simple philosophy towards eating which has served me well thus far: "eat first, worry about it later". When pressed, I would joke that the stress of worrying about what you eat will probably kill you faster than anything present in the food.

Joking aside, we have been given an incredible amount of dissenting advice regarding our diets. Previously, we were told about the dangers of fat and cholesterol only to find that the 'trans-fats' that replaced them in our diet (in products such as margarine), were even more deadly. Now we are told that carbohydrates are the bogeymen, the overconsumption of which is cause for much of the obesity that plagues Western society (Atkins diet anyone?). We should eat more fish because they contain Omega-3s which is the new holy grail for everything from reduced cancer risk to better brain cells. But fish may also contain harmful substances like mercury.

Michael Pollan, in his book In Defence of Food, nicely deflates the prevailing trend towards 'nutritionism' where food is not seen as food but as an item made up of calories and nutrients. He brutally de-bunks nutritionism, showing how it is unreliable at best, and bad science with links to the food and medical industries at its worst. Nutritionism, to a degree, has become a blanket excuse to create processed foods, with studies commissioned by the food industry showing nutritional benefits of whatever food they are asked to assess. Pollan states rather cynically that a qualified FDA health claim for any product amounts to a euphemism for "all but meaningless". By the end of the book, you are rather inclined to agree, especially when you read about a chair in "Chocolate Science" being endowed by the Mars Corporation at the University of California Davis.

One of the worst failings that Pollan documents involves the so-called 'lipid hypothesis' linking the rise in heart disease (and other illnesses) to consumption of fats and cholesterol. That led to a drastic change in diets - not necessarily for the better as it turns out. Pollan rightly points out the manichean nature of dietary advice - previously protein was bad and carbs were good, now carbs are bad and protiens are good. The only thing that is universally acclaimed to be generally pretty harmless and actually quite beneficial is leaves and fruit and that goes to the heart of Pollan's advice for what we should eat.

Pollan also rightly points out that the reductionist nature of nutritionism just doesn't work. Scientists enjoy isolating an individual vitamin, mineral or nutrient within a particular foodstuff and praising or blaming it for having beneficial or deleterious effects on your health, but ultimately foods themselves are highly complex agglomerations that defy analysis. So is it really the Omega 3 fatty acids alone that makes fish such a nutritional food? Or is it the Omega 3s working in conjunction with other individual proteins in fish that has some effect during the digestion process? The most basic but crucial thing that Pollan does is to emphasize that we have to once again think about food, as well food.

Ultimately, I have distilled from Pollan's book a small number of simple maxims with the aim of eating more healthily but also being able to enjoy food a lot more. He presents about two dozen or so simple and sensible general rules which you will be well advised to check out. After finishing the book I have resolved to:

Set aside specific time for eating as a sole activity and spend more time eating - no eating in front of the TV, or computer, or at a desk while finishing work.
Have more meals with other people - good company and excellent conversation makes a meal that much more enjoyable, and actually reduces the amount you eat.
No snacking - eat three square meals and avoid having little snacks in between. So no nuts, crisps, chicken wings etc.
Stop eating junk food or fast food - there are far far better ways to spend $7 than on a upsized Big Mac Meal; there are also much better ways to spend $4 than on a pack of Lays potato chips.
Eat more green, leafy vegetables - try having 2 servings of vegetables and 1 serving of meat for dinner instead of the other way round.
Eat fruit more regularly - try to have freshly squeezed fruit juice at hawker centers/foodcourts. One serving of fruit after dinner.
Cut down on the amount of meat you eat - fish and seafood might be better options. Perhaps choose a day where you can forgo meat entirely (a la Catholics on friday).
Avoid any kind of food that looks like it is processed. If it didn't once look alive, don't buy it.
Cut down on alcohol consumption - you don't have to go teetotal but binge drinking is generally a very bad idea. Also if you are going to drink, try a glass of red wine every evening rather than beer or spirits.
Learn to cook - what better way of really understanding what on earth you are eating? Plus it will make you appreciate and enjoy food all the more.

Other things that I should explore:

Taking supplements - the jury is still out whether supplements are really all that effective. However, it is also true that modern factory farming has resulted in foods that give much higher yields but lower nutrient values. It may be worth taking a multivitamin.
Portions - Is it better to have five small meals a day rather than the traditional three solid meals? It is worth finding out the evidence on either side. Will it be too much of a hassle to change?

All Roads Lead to Rome

2009-05-28T04:35:00.005+08:00

It was the final that every neutral football fan wished for. Arguably the two top teams in the world going head to head for the right to be crowned European Champions. More than that, two teams who play open attacking football, with two of the best and most exciting players in the world in Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi competing to settle the issue of who is better once and for all in a personal duel on the pitch. The names of those on show dripped off the tongue: Henry, Eto'o, Messi, Iniesta, Ronaldo, Giggs, Rooney.

On paper, a truly Olympian struggle was promised at the Olympic stadium in Rome. What ensued was a compelling match, but unfortunately not one for the ages. It is not often that Sir Alex Ferguson can be accused of being tactically outmaneuvered, especially in a major final, but after Pep Guardiola's side took the lead, very much against the run of play, they played masterful possession football and strangled the life out of an erratic and disappointing Man United side that were almost thoroughly outplayed.

The pundits had given the advantage to United, particularly given the frailties of a Barcelona defence deprived of its two starting full backs and defensive rock Marquez. Sir Alex's side has shown they could contain Barcelona in the previous year's semi-finals, when a nil-nil stalemate was followed by a Paul Scholes stunner that put United through. It was expected that Barcelona would have more possession, but United's defensive solidity and ability to counter attack at pace would enable them to pierce the makeshift Barca defence.

United started the match with the confidence that comes from being the current champions of Europe, dominating possession in the opening exchanges, and wasting a few half chances, especially from Cristiano Ronaldo. As amazing as it sounds, the Barcelona front three barely had a touch on the ball between them for the first 10 minutes. United were then hit with the proverbial sucker punch. Iniesta was allowed to run through a gap in midfield far too easily, and played a weighted ball through to Eto'o who turned Vidic and squeezed a shot past Van Der Sar's near post. It was Barcelona's first meaningful attack of the match. It was disappointing defending by United and by Vidic in particular.

The goal clearly lifted Barcelona, who began to dominate possession, settling into their usual mercurial passing game that left the United players chasing shadows for a large part of the remainder of the half. The confidence only grew during the second half, as United was forced to throw caution to the wind. Tevez was brought on for an ineffectual Anderson in the hope that his attacking qualities might manufacture a breakthrough, but more importantly that his terrier like hounding and running might actually unsettle a Barcelona midfield that was stroking the ball about with supreme confidence.

Iniesta was particularly peerless in this regard, playing lovely little passes and neat one-twos that left his markers flummoxed. He was involved once again in the build up to an excellent Barca chance at the start of the second half, Man Utd's old tormentor Thierry Henry bursting through only for Van Der Sar to save smartly with his feet. At one point, his pinpoint passing, and general awareness led the commentator to ask rhetorically if he was even capable of misplaying a pass. The answer was yes, but not often.

Lionel Messi was also living up to his billing as a world class player, terrorizing the United with his direct slalom like running. Often the only way United could stop him was resorting to cutting him down. One such challenge led to a free kick at the edge of the area, and Xavi curled a lovely shot round the wall, only to see it carom off the upright. It was no surprise that it was Messi that supplied the coup de grace, from a pinpoint Xavi cross after United had given away possession cheaply and Evra only half cleared the ball. It was a superb ball into the box, but Messi still had to lean backwards while hanging in the air to guide the ball past a flailing Van Der Sar into the bottom corner of the net.

Credit must be given to Barcelona for their superb passing, and for the incessant pressure they put on United. Their makeshift backline was never much of a factor given their ability to close United down from up the field, and to starve them of space and possession. Gerard Pique, who only re-signed for Barca after failing to secure a first team place at United, had an excellent night, blocking a Park attempt on 2 minutes, and denying Ronaldo a clear shot that would have given United hope moments after Barca had taken a two goal lead. Beyond that, Vidic and Berbatov had headers off target, but United never really threatened the Barcelona goal in the closing stages.

Ultimately though, it was a surprisingly toothless performance from a United side that was lacking leadership, self-belief, and real quality on the day. What they would have given for a midfield enforcer in the Roy Keane mold, who could stamp his authority in the middle of the park, and harry Iniesta and Xavi. For all their other talents, Carrick can't tackle and man-marking are not the best attributes that Giggs or Anderson possess. The closest United have to that kind of a player in their current side is Darren Fletcher, who was suspended for the final and was sorely missed.

The entire United midfield was disappointing on the day, Carrick spraying passes all over the place, Anderson running aimlessly. Rooney was deployed first on the left, briefly led the line and ended the game on the right flank and cut a frustrated figure throughout. Ryan Giggs looked his age for probably the first time this season, looking tired and ragged by the early stages of the second half, as the Barcelona team continued to run circles around him. Paul Scholes should certainly have been brought on earlier - his intelligent runs and long range passing were sorely needed on a day when the United midfield was largely misfiring.

Tactically, United chopped and changed frequently, to little effect. Players often looking strangely clueless on the field. They started ostensibly with a 4-3-2-1 formation similar to Barca's that occasionally evolved into a 4-4-2 with Giggs tucking just behind Ronaldo up front. The 4-4-2 was singularly ineffectual, with the Barca midfield dominating United, so Ferguson brought Tevez on in a straight 4-4-2 with Giggs taking the place of Anderson in central midfield, Ronaldo moving to the flank and Rooney and Tevez pressing the Barca backline. That proved even worse, as Barca threatened to tear United to ribbons with their intelligent link up play, exploiting the gaps that United left as they pushed forward. Barca never tinkered with their tried and tested formation, looking comfortable playing their usual attacking and pressing game.

By the end of the game, Ferguson had his entire fab four of Rooney, Tevez, Berbatov, and Ronaldo on the field in what was effectively a 4-2-4 formation. It didn't make one jot of difference. United were a team lacking real leadership (Paul Scholes as the captain for the last twenty minutes?), any self-belief or even any fluency. There was to be no repeat of 1999 when United stole the trophy from under Bayern's nose due to a dogged refusal to give in. In 2009, it wasn't an exaggeration to say that they capitulated.

It was certainly not third time lucky for Ferguson, who despite his vast experience and supreme talent, has arguably been outplayed in all three Champions League finals he has been involved in. He was undoubtedly lucky in Barcelona in 1999 (brilliant substitutions aside) when Bayern bossed the game only to be hit by a double whammy in the last 3 minutes. Last year, Chelsea probably edged the game overall, despite United's domination of the first half - Drogba will be cursing the crossbar, and Terry will probably never be able to forget the nightmare of seeing what would be the winning penalty smack off the upright. Fergie ran out of luck this time round, flummoxed and well beaten by a truly marvelous Barcelona side.

Telegraph 100 Essential Novels

2009-05-26T09:54:00.003+08:00

It is in the vogue for newspapers to come up with lists of novels that everyone should read now, and the latest list I have found is on the Telegraph website. I probably only discovered it so late because I don't read the Telegraph as a general rule but was directed there when a friend sent me a link about a new Jane Austen biography, claiming, you guessed it, to have found that mysterious man that broke her heart and eventually led her becoming the ultimate literary chick lit novelist.

The Telegraph's selections are:

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights by Anonymous
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38 The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

I've personally managed almost a quarter of them. 24 out of 100. Mostly classic choices on the list but some odd ones - Waiting for the Mahatma by R.K Narayan? The Savage Detective by Robert Bolano? Strangely, it is those odd ones that I want to seek out first, if only to slake my curiousity as to why they were included!

Much Ado About Nothing

2009-05-12T09:13:00.005+08:00

There is something that makes outdoor performances of Shakespeare highly agreeable. It is of course worth bearing in mind that the Globe Theater itself was open to the elements. The thought of spending an evening amidst the greenery of Fort Canning sipping wine was a highly enticing one, so I jumped at the chance of catching the Singapore Repertory Theater's outdoor performance of Much Ado About Nothing with Karin.

Of course, I had first fallen in love with outdoor Shakespeare performances while at Oxford, where summer lawn productions - especially of Shakespeare - were a common feature of Trinity term. There is something quite magical about watching a play in the small intimate surroundings of an Oxford garden, in the time just between dusk and twilight that I will never forget. Of course, this production was on a much bigger scale, with lighting and sound equipment to match, so I had to struggle not to compare the two.

Probably the most hilarious moment I have ever come across in an open air production of Shakespeare was when I watched a amateur production of Romeo and Juliet whilst visiting my aptly named friend Juliet in Devon. It was a beautiful setting near Devon Castle and all would have been well if not for a steady drizzle which began towards the end of Act II and began getting heavier as Act III wore on. It was thus with a significantly ironic glance up to the already opened up heavens that the actor playing Lord Capulet uttered the lines near the end of Act III:

When the sun sets, the air doth drizzle dew; But for the sunset of my brother's son It rains downright.

with an appropriately heavy emphasis, given the circumstances, on 'rains downright'. The play was moved indoors shortly afterwards.

But I digress. Singapore doesn't quite face the problem of persistent rain that the UK does, but an unseasonably hot May evening did temper my enjoyment of the play somewhat. It was downright muggy and left everyone sweating through the entirety of the play, futile efforts at fanning oneself with the program being largely ineffectual. One could only pity the cast members, especially the male characters, who were dressed up in stifling long sleeved navy whites.

The staging and costuming was rather interestingly and elegantly done. A 1920s Singapore colonial era setting and feel was chosen for the play and fitted quite well, on the whole. The set was rather beautiful and was designed in the form of the exterior of colonial style bungalow complete with large slatted swinging doors leading to the 'inside' of the house, a small swimming pool which is put to good use in the play itself, and the natural greenery of Fort Canning surrounding the stage being the garden of the bungalow itself.

The costumes were similarly sumptuous, with the men in navy dress white uniforms, complete with peak caps and epaulettes, and the ladies in lovely full length cocktail dresses. The highlight for me must surely be a 1920s style uber-retro full body swimming costume that Benedick is made to wear in Act III.

Overall, one minor gripe was the whole attempt at the colonial period thing was overdone at times, especially attempts to include chinese/nonya elements into the mix. Having traditional erhu music played during the funeral scenes in a misguided attempt to enhance the mood led to a sense of melodrama, as was having everyone wear traditional chinese/nonya garb at the wedding, complete with fancy headress for Hero. You would not expect a uppity British colonial to dress in any such way, so it was not keeping in character with the setting, and led to a bit of a unnecessary hodge podge feel.

It is no surprise that when an operatic adaptation of Much Ado About Nothing was made, it was titled Beatrice and Benedick. For better or for worse although not the main love story of the play, they stand as the main comic pillars. Claudio and Hero's love story might be the main narrative centerpiece, but their somewhat soppy wooing of each other followed by the enormously melodramatic renunciation (followed by Hero's faked death) hardly make them compelling characters.

Adrian Pang again shows wonderful stage presence as an ever playful Benedick. His experience in performing Shakespeare clearly comes through in his wonderfully witty deliveries, particularly his observance of the pauses and comic timing that is essential to Shakespearean humour. He was also helped by begin given some of the funniest comic set pieces in the play, notably one where he sneaks around the swimming pool and tries to hide behind a plant to overhear his friends conversing about Beatrice and another when he has to grab whatever headgear is at hand in order to cover up his crown jewels after a strategically placed towel is whipped away (Adrian Pang was wearing skin coloured briefs just in case a wardrobe malfunction happened).

Wendy Kweh's Beatrice to Pang's Benedict was very much his catty and teasing equal in the scenes that they were playing off each other, but she was less effective on her own. Beatrice is in many ways one of Shakespeare's strongest female characters (Katherine from The Taming of the Shrew and perhaps the sisters Goneril and Regan from King Lear are the only ones that can even remotely rival her). Kweh nicely brought out Beatrice's independent streak but her reading of the script sometimes lacked the subtlety and dramatic pauses necessary to really bring out the full unbridled wit. That is just a small gripe, all things consider, in a largely effective and really quite fiery performance.

Given the complexity, fun and flair of Beatrice and Benedick, the actors playing Claudio and Hero always risk being upstaged. Julie Wee does her best in what is largely a cardboard character role, playing the lovely chaste besotten bride adequately. I was more disappointed with Jason Chan, who overplayed Claudio, descending into melodrama when denouncing his bride on their wedding day, and similarly lacking subtlety and range in expressing remorse (at his inadvertant betrayal) and joy (at discovering her to be alive). Prancing around and declaiming loudly a good Shakespearean hero doth not make.

The play was bolstered by an excellent supporting cast. Particular praise must go to a suitably villanious Don John (in a small, largely cliched role), and an effective Don Pedro, who served as an important foil to Claudio and Benedick. I was far more ambivalent about Leonato - especially in the more dramatic scenes involving Hero's denouncement. The play as a whole certainly handled the comedic elements far more effectively that the dramatic ones. The Watch also seemed to garner some laughs and more half-hearted ones when they could have threatened to steal the show.

Overall, it was certainly a pretty entertaining evening. For me the witty banter between Adrian Pang's Benedick and Wendy Kueh's Beatrice was fun enough to just about warrant the price of admission (a relatively cheap $25 student ticket in my case). The beautifully designed sets and costumes were a real bonus. Still, I never thought of Much Ado About Nothing as one of Shakespeare's stronger comedies and me and Karin agreed that the play as a whole lacked any high note (apart from seeing Adrian Pang almost totally naked, complete with six pack for the ladies). Still, a enjoyable, if humid evening out.

Acts and Omissions

2009-05-10T21:45:00.000+08:00

It is currently far more acceptable to allow instances of passive euthanasia (allowing someone to die by withholding treatment), as compared to active euthanasia (injecting them with a lethal drug that would prematurely end their lives). This is partly linked to our strong inclinations towards the sanctity of life. While many would be squeamish at actively taking a role in causing a death (even if acting on a person's wishes), they are less likely to feel the same way about causing a death in an indirect way (e.g. withholding potential treatment).

This can be clearly seen in the responses to the classic runaway cart scenario. In the scenario, there is a runaway cart hurtling down some tracks. It is currently headed for a group of four workers in the distance, who are too far away to warn and too preoccupied to notice in time to get out of the way. However, you can throw a switch diverting the cart onto a separate set of tracks which would spare the four workers, however, in doing so a single individual would be killed. Most people would find it acceptable to throw the switch.

However, in a separate scenario, the same cart is hurtling towards the same four people, but the only way to stop it is to push a bystander next to you onto the tracks. He happens to be quite a large individual with the bulk necessary to stop the cart. If you throw yourself on the tracks, it would be insufficient to stop the cart entirely and the four workers would still die. In this latter case, most people would not push the person onto the tracks to save the four people. The only fundamental difference is whether you would be directly on indirectly causing the death of one person in saving the four.

So this difference over the direct vs. indirect causation of death is deeply held and can seem to translate to a doctrine of acts and omissions. So I play an active role if I administer an injection or prescribe a cocktail of drugs which the patient then takes (note in this case I am merely giving the patient the means to end their life). A passive role would be to 'let nature take its course' for example by withholding drugs so a patient would die 'naturally' from an illness. Studies have shown that many doctors (and nurses) often carry out the latter for infants with severely deformities, for example, or in prescribing large doses of painkillers that will hasten death but provide some comfort in the case of terminal illnesses. Some nurses even allow very elderly patients in nursing homes to succumb to treatable illnesses such as pneumonia, rather that subject them to intrusive medical care, particularly if that patient has been ill a number of times.

Two classic contrasting examples illustrate our strange understanding of acts and omissions. The first is that of 'Baby Doe', a baby born with severe Down's syndrome, but also an oesophagus that was not fully formed. The baby was thus not able to digest food. An operation could be performed to fully connect the oesophagus which would allow for the normal intake of food but Baby Doe's parents requested that the operation not be performed. The baby died five days later after two courts upheld the parent's request. That the baby could have survived if the operation had been performed is not in doubt, though he would have faced severe mental deficiencies.

Compare this to the case of Samuel Linares, a young toddler that swallowed an object that became lodged in his throat. He was rushed to hospital but suffered severe brain damage due to the lack of oxygen intake to his brain. He was only kept alive by a respirator, and was comatose for over nine months, after which the hospital recommended that he be placed in a long term care unit, as it was unlikely that he would ever regain consciousness. His parents' request that he be taken off the respirator were ignored. Eventually, his father, armed with a pistol, forced his way into the ward and disconnected the respirator personally, cradling Samuel in his arms until the baby died. He then surrendered himself, weeping uncontrollably, to the police.

The two cases are especially illustrative because if both babies had lived, there is little doubt that Baby Doe would have a significantly better quality of life. Given Samuel Linares was in what was effectively a persistent vegetative state, and doctors were unsure if he would ever regain consciousness, it is doubtful if you can say he even had a quality of life at all. (A British High Court Judge made a similar remark when ruling about Anthony Bland, a football fan in a persistent comatose state as a result of the Hillsborough Stadium disaster).

Does it make sense that we allow Baby Doe's parents to effectively consign him to death (by not giving permission for the operation) while refusing to allow Samuel Linares' parents to make a decision allowing for their son to die peacefully by removing the respirator that was sustaining him? If one viewed the respirator as an artificial form of intervention that is sustaining Samuel's life, then one can argue that the parents should have a decision in stating that he should not be put on a respirator in the first place (a rejection of intervention to save life), just as Baby Doe's parents refused the operation (which was a rejection of a life saving intervention). If we agree that both should have the decision, why should we not allow Linares' parents to pull the plug on the respirator, assuming that doctors had done all they could, and it was unknowable and even doubtful if Samuel would ever wake up?

Science as Magic (or Religion)

2009-04-17T13:47:00.004+08:00

It was Arthur C. Clarke who proposed, as one of his three 'laws', that a civilisation, coming into contact with science and technology far in advance of them, would view such technology as magic. This idea is hardly a novel one, and anyone who has read the tragic tale of Cortez and his small band of conquistadors overcoming the mighty Aztec empire will clearly see its antecedents. The Aztecs, unable to comprehend Spanish technology such as guns, came to view the conquistadors as reincarnated Gods with predictably disastrous consequences for themselves.

The supposedly opposing poles of Science and Magic has long provided a powerful theme for Science Fiction and Fantasy writers. A pioneer in this, aided by the fact that she was working in both the Science Fiction and Fantasy fields, was Andre Norton, most notably in her Witch World series of novels.

In those novels, a technologically advanced civilisation, fleeing some kind of self-generated catastrophe that has made their homeworld uninhabitable, enters a much more primitive world through a portal, seeking to use their more advanced technology to subjugate the native inhabitants and claim it for their own. However, they are opposed by a matriarchal society whose leaders are witches and able to harness magic (actual magic, not the science in disguise variety).

A new and novel treatment of this ongoing theme is Sharon Shinn's Samaria series of novels, particularly her second novel, Jovah's Angels. In a marvelous twist of irony, she takes the two typically opposing poles of science and mysticism and welds them together in one sure stroke. Our modern scientific way of thinking is perceived to have been borne out of the enlightenment, which involved a total rejection of mysticism and religious dogma. But what if science were the source of mysticism and religion?

In Samaria all beings worship the god Jovah (the parallel with Jehovah is not coincidental). A special group of beings with wings - Angels - are given the task of ensuring society in Samaria is harmonious. These angels can intercede with Jovah by 'praying', for example to change weather patterns, ask for seeds to be sent down and even medical supplies in times of plague or illiness.

However, Jovah also demands obedience from its subjects as any good god would. To prove that the peoples of Samaria still live in harmony, a Gloria must be sung every year led by the Archangel and his Angelica or spouse, with representatives from each of the many races that live on the planet. Three specially appointed prophets 'speak' to Jovah and intercede with him in some long forgotten tongue using some special device.

Shinn's genius is that Jovah is no god but is the computer of the interstellar ship that brought the original colonists to Samaria. The prophets use a simple keyboard to correspond with the God, and the Angels' - beings created through genetic engineering at the dawn of Samarian colonization - prayers are picked up by Jovah's long range sensors where the computer triggers the necessary responses. Control of the weather is enabled through influencing the planet's upper atmosphere, seeds and medicines can be released and dropped from the ship's massive storage hangers, and if the Samarians choose to disobey, the ship's lasers can smite a mighty hole in the planet below.

This is Clarke's third law brought to spectacular life, and Shinn's strong characterization, and utilization of biblical terminology lends the first two books in the series a really strong feel. The implications are strongly felt but neatly sidestepped. Alleluia, despite the realization that everything she believed and worshiped if not quite a lie then is undoubtedly drastically wrong, decides to hide the truth. Samaria cannot know because the implications would be immense - and catastrophic.

Still, given the slow rise of technology (which the original settlers had renounced as being the root of evil), there will eventually come a time when the peoples of Samaria will begin to question the mythology and religion they held so blindly. More fundamentally, it would only take the first telescope pointed up at the Samarian night sky to reveal the orbiting spaceship and raise fundamental questions that will not be left unanswered.

A long running jibe at the irrationality of religion is to posit that there is a giant teacup orbiting the outer edge of the solar system, and that it will eventually bring out the annihilation of the earth. For the people of Samaria, it is a spaceship not a teacup. Perhaps, mankind should not be so quick to laugh, and as we continue to peer out into the darker reaches of our universe, we might just find some hint as to the beginnings of our creation. Now that is a kind of faith in itself.

Profiling Yourself

2009-04-15T23:36:00.000+08:00

The internet abounds with profiles of yourself. Taking myself as an example, I have profiles on Facebook and MySpace. I keep a blog. I have a short write-up (and some reviews posted) on Amazon. I am sure my internet footprint goes even wider than that. This can be rather more scary than one would necessarily realize.

Other netizens have already written about the pressure that this kind of blatant self-describing can bring. What books or movies should I list among my favourites on Facebook on other sites? Harry Potter is just about acceptable, but stating that you love Dan Brown sends a clear message of a low brow, follow the herd mentality that doesn't speak well. List Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Satre and Derrida and you risk looking like a pretentious twat. It's worse on internet dating sites where the entire point of the exercise is to present and market yourself.

Like in most things, honesty is usually the best bet. You don't want to portray a great love of Ayn Rand only to struggle to remember who the protagonist of Atlas Shrugged is. Don't ever list anything that you can't talk about in more than vague terms (The main guy was Howard Roark, oh wait that was the Fountainhead wasn't it doesn't count, to use the Rand example).

Needless to say, everything has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Two economists (I forget where I read this exactly, I think it was in Freakonomics) showed that the better part of 75% of women list themselves as "above average" or better in looks on internet dating websites. There is a similar discrepancy in the income range figures that men claim to make and the median national income. Both are clearly not possible. It does seem to solidify the social stereotypes that physical attractiveness and wealth respectively are the two main trump cards that men and women are perceived to be looking for in prospective partners.

We all come into contact with various profiles of acquaintances of acquaintances, or random strangers on Facebook. I even heard of couples getting together after viewing each other on Facebook and then deciding to meet. I must admit to having browsed some of these many profiles randomly (on Facebook and other sites), particularly when pursuing one of my most natural and innate talents - namely procrastination.

I have come to realize that looking at what some people write about creates powerful and immediate gut reactions. I need not be told that it is probably fundamentally unsound to decide whether you like or dislike a girl based on the fact that you listed similar favourite books or films, or you share certain interests, or if you liked the particularly witty or rambling way in which she writes.

More powerful than shared affinities though, is what I call the ick factor. Situations where you cannot help but recoil in mild disgust. They need not necessarily be deal breakers, but there has to be considerable affinity in other aspects of personality or interests to overcome them. I think it is useful guide - in a sense we are better at understanding what we dislike rather than what we really like.

I've come up with a short list that will almost immediately cause a shiver of revulsion:

An inability to write in complete sentences; gross ineptitude in the use of grammar or punctuation
Using txt speak or excessive CAPS
Stating a love for Korean and/or Chinese TV dramas
Saying that God is their best friend, and/or listing the Bible as their favourite book
Listing romance novels or worse fashion magazines as favourite reads
Music tastes that include mainly J-pop and Jay Chou, Hip/Hop, R&B and Rap
Smokers
Listing main interests as shopping and karaoke

Definite Turn Ons:

A penchant for intelligent conversation
A person who loves to read, and read widely (and who enjoys some of the same authors that I do)
A love of theater and musicals
A love of independent, art house and classic movies
Thinking about philosophy, values, and other such deep, impractical issues
Enjoying traveling
Saying that they like nerds
Someone who is quirky and a little random, out of the ordinary.

The sum total of this exercise? The laws of human attraction are inherently inexplicable (unlike the more scientific laws of electromagnetism that govern our world). Perhaps out of all this procrastination I do have a clearer idea of what I want after all.

My Dog and the Universal Appeal of Ikea

2009-04-14T14:42:00.000+08:00

Ikea is traditionally known for making products that are well-designed and that have universal appeal. It seems that this appeal crosses the species barrier as well.

My golden retreiver, Sadie is more of a spoiled child than a family pet. Besides having a free run of the house, she will only sleep in a room with air-conditioning (or lie upside down outside the closed door of any air-conditioned room to catch whatever underdrafts come her way). On more than one occasion, my domestic helper switched on the air-conditioning in my room, just for the dog, as I was returning home late. But I digress.

Sadie, being the spoiled dog that she is, has two boxes of toys. My parents (more specifically my mother) never fail to buy her a new toy or bone when they travel overseas. Come to think of it, I hardly get anything from them when they travel abroad, meaning the dog is more spoilt than me!

So of all the accumulated squeaky toys, pull toys, round balls and other assorted paraphernalia, what does my dog love the most? Chewing up a stuffed round 'football' plush toy bought for $5 from Ikea. She has already gone through two of them to the extent that she regularly leaves a trail of stuffing around the house (especially when she is feeling neglected).

Those stuffed footballs have been repeatedly sewn up, only to be pulled apart again, and the second reincarnation is so bereft of stuffing now that it is barely able to sustain a round shape. In desperation, I asked my sister, who lives near Ikea, to stop by there and buy the dog yet another one. The dog was overjoyed when she got it.

So what of all those more expensive chew toys bought from speciality pet shops? They lie forlorn, undisturbed and pretty much forgotten in a basket downstairs, defeated by the universal appeal of yet another Ikea product.

Word of the Day - Defenestration

2009-04-08T19:49:00.004+08:00

Defenestration - the act of throwing someone out of a window. Though it need not necessarily result in death, famous examples in popular culture and history often result in the death of the defenestrated.

Examples in popular culture include the Comedian's death by defenestration that kicks off the events of Alan Moore's classic graphic novel The Watchmen, and also the death of Jedi Master Mace Windu, who is defenestrated by Anakin Skywalker after having his arm cut off.

In history, Jacopo Pazzi was defenestrated, after the ruler of Florence, Lorenzo de Medici (The Magnificent) discovered a conspiracy led by Pazzi to assassinate him. This was mirrored in the events of Thomas Harris' novel Hannibal, when Hannibal Lecter defenestrates a Florentine policeman, coincidentally a distant decendant of Pazzi, who sought to betray Lecter and claim a bounty for Lecter's capture.

The Czechs seem to be the most strongly associated with the act of defenestration, with two notable incidents taking place from the windows of Prague Castle itself, in 1419 and 1618. In the latter case though, those thrown from the windows landed on a pile of manure in a dry moat and survived, an incident which was seen as a miracle. Czech Foreign Minister Jan Masaryk also died in 1948 after falling from a bathroom window at the Ministry, and although it was claimed to have been a suicide, it was likely to have been a defenestration carried out by the Communist party.

Defenestration does have a certain ring to it. Must be the echoes with castration.

100 Things

2009-03-25T20:39:00.003+08:00

Yet another of those dastardly memes. It's random but fun though. Those I have managed are highlighted in Bold.

1. Started your own blog: Fairly obvious this one, though I have more trouble keeping to repeated new year resolutions to keep updating it regularly.
2. Slept under the stars
3. Played in a band
4. Visited Hawaii: I even walked on dried lava after a recent eruption
5. Watched a meteor shower
6. Given more than you can afford to charity (you can always afford to give more)
7. Been to Disneyland: All of them except the ones in Tokyo and Hong Kong
8. Climbed a mountain: Several, including a 6,000m one in the Andes mountain range.
9. Held a praying mantis
10. Sang a solo
11. Bungee jumped (I would love to, though!)
12. Visited Paris:
13. Watched a lightning storm
14. Taught yourself an art form from scratch: folding paper airplanes doesn't count does it, not that I was even any good at that?
15. Adopted a child: surely having a child is the more common.
16. Had food poisoning: once after having ten oysters at a buffet that had clearly gone off, and for half of a holiday in Indonesia when I was 9.
17. Walked to the top of the Statue of Liberty (went there, but it's still closed post 9/11)
18. Grown your own vegetables
19. Seen the Mona Lisa (American tourist in front of me: "My Gawd, it's so small!")
20. Slept on an overnight train
21. Had a pillow fight
22. Hitchhiked
23. Taken a sick day when you’re not ill
24. Built a snow fort (and a snow man, who promptly melted the next day)
25. Held a lamb
26. Gone skinny dipping
27. Run a marathon (I did manage a half marathon)
28. Ridden in a gondola in Venice
29. Seen a total eclipse
30. Watched a sunrise or sunset (on Mount Sinai, Manchu Picchu.....)
31. Hit a home run
32. Been on a cruise
33. Seen Niagara Falls in person (at least half a dozen times)
34. Visited the birthplace of your ancestors (I guess China counts right?)
35. Seen an Amish community
36. Taught yourself a new language
37. Had enough money to be truly satisfied
38. Seen the Leaning Tower of Pisa in person
39. Gone rock climbing
40. Seen Michelangelo’s David
41. Sung karaoke
42. Seen Old Faithful geyser erupt
43. Bought a stranger a meal at a restaurant
44. Visited Africa (but only Egypt)
45. Walked on a beach by moonlight
46. Been transported in an ambulance
47. Had your portrait painted
48. Gone deep sea fishing
49. Seen the Sistine Chapel in person
50. Been to the top of the Eiffel Tower
51. Gone scuba diving or snorkeling
52. Kissed in the rain
53. Played in the mud
54. Gone to a drive-in theater
55. Been in a movie (I have been interviewed on TV and been on televised gameshows)
56. Visited the Great Wall of China
57. Started a business (given my lack of entrepreneurial inclinations, this is not likely to happen)
58. Taken a martial arts class (Army unarmed combat - hated it)
59. Visited Russia (I really want to do this)
60. Served at a soup kitchen
61. Sold Girl Scout Cookies (I sold cookies for the Canadian equivalent - The Beavers)
62. Gone whale watching
63. Got flowers for no reason (Hah! Fat chance!)
64. Donated blood, platelets, or plasma
65. Gone skydiving (Again, I would love to!)
66. Visited a Nazi Concentration Camp (I want to visit Auschwitz, if I have a chance)
67. Bounced a check
68. Flown in a helicopter (though I have flown in a military transport plane, and a small four-seater)
69. Saved a favorite childhood toy
70. Visited the Lincoln Memorial
71. Eaten caviar
72. Pieced a quilt
73. Stood in Times Square
74. Toured the Everglades
75. Been fired from a job
76. Seen the Changing of the Guards in London
77. Broken a bone (Surprisingly, this hasn't happened yet, touch wood)
78. Been on a speeding motorcycle (riding pillion in Vietnam and Cambodia)
79. Seen the Grand Canyon in person
80. Published a book (One day, perhaps)
81. Visited the Vatican
82. Bought a brand new car
83. Walked in Jerusalem
84. Had your picture in the newspaper
85. Read the entire Bible
86. Visited the White House
87. Killed and prepared an animal for eating
88. Had chickenpox (I'm now vaccinated, so no chance of this now!)
89. Saved someone’s life
90. Sat on a jury (Again, not likely to happen, given Singapore doesn't have juries)
91. Met someone famous (depends on how loosely you define famous)
92. Joined a book club
93. Lost a loved one (grandparents)
94. Had a baby
95. Seen the Alamo in person
96. Swam in the Great Salt Lake
97. Been involved in a law suit
98. Owned a mobile phone
99. Been stung by a bee (a wasp actually, during army training)
100. Read an entire book in one day

A clean 50 out of 100, which is not bad at all.

The Beginning of the End

2009-03-17T06:17:00.002+08:00

According to a recent BBC article, it may already be the beginning of the end for me. The article suggests that "mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age". Apparently, Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University has discovered that reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in our late 20s.

I am turning 27 this year. At the peak of my mental ability, and yet to accomplish anything of note. What a truly depressing thought.

Fallout 3

2009-03-14T07:55:00.001+08:00

Fallout 3 has been sitting there on my shelf for the better part of half a year now. Given it was my one week break, I decided to install and play it. My only regret is that I never got round to doing it earlier. It is a marvelous game, superbly detailed, full of a vast number of different characters, quests and locations, in a very original and powerfully realized world.

For those of you unfamiliar with the Fallout series, it is set in a post nuclear apocalyptic America and involves the struggles of the remnants of humanity to survive in the resulting nuclear wasteland. Some humans survived by seeking shelter in specially created underground Vaults, thus escaping the nuclear Armageddon. Your character grew up in a Vault, but the disappearance of your father under mysterious circumstances forces you to leave the Vault and enter the wastelands to search for him.

Fallout 3 itself is set in the ruins of Washington D.C and its surrounding environs. It provides an enormous environment in which to explore. If you were to focus just on completing the main elements of the central storyline, you would only be skimming the surface of what Fallout 3 has to offer. Part of the strength of the game is its almost endless multitude of random quests and locations. You do get a fantastic thrill fighting an enormous supermutant behemoth in the rotunda of the Capitol building, or clearing the Lincoln memorial of slavers, or even visiting the White House (though you won't be able to get in the front gate).

The game was so good that after I finished it the first time, I immediately began the game again, so as to have the chance to explore some of the other side quests and locations that I missed out on the first time round. The narrative depth of the Fallout 3 universe is truly amazing, with wonderful bits of background and threads of individual stories left behind for the intrepid explorer in the form of notes, or holo-recordings. These provide many little windows to the past and what transpired after the nuclear bombs fell.

Gameplay wise, Fallout 3 is a very interesting amalgamation between a First Person Shooter (FPS), and a Role Playing Game (RPG). Combat wise, it has completed the transition initiated by Fallout: The Brotherhood of Steel from the turn-based combat system of the first two Fallout games, to a more conventional shooter. However, it ingeniously incorporates a form of turn based combat by including a VAT system, allowing the playing to slow down combat and target specific body parts subject to them using up 'action points' that have to then be replenished.

Admittedly, slow motion combat is hardly new to computer games, but Fallout 3's system enables players to target specific body parts. Shoot out the legs and your enemies will end up limping. Shoot at their arms and they might drop that rocket launcher that is causing your so much grief. The overall combat system is simple and effective.

At its heart though, Fallout 3 is an RPG. Typical of the genre, your character advances based on experience points that he earns, thus gaining skills and additional perks. Skills are affected by basic stats (Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck respectively) chosen at start. Unlike previous Fallout games where perks were chosen at the start of the game (with a maximum of two selections possible), and provided both advantages and disadvantages, in Fallout 3 the player got to choose a new perk each time he leveled up and perks were always advantageous.

There were a wide assortment of perks to choose from, ranging from those that were combat based, or those that were speech, or skill related. The more random and interesting ones included Bloody Mess - causing enemies to die in the most spectacularly messy way possible and Mysterious Stranger, in which a random trench coat wearing person mysteriously comes to assist you on occasion in the midst of VAT combat.

So, overall, Fallout 3 was a truly fantastic game. My only regret was not being able to spend sufficient time fully exploring every nook and cranny of the gaming universe, and the fact that leveling up maxed out at Level 20. It is definitely a game that is worth revisiting again, just to discover more of its richly detailed universe.

Euthanasia and Causing Distress

2009-03-08T23:12:00.001+08:00

One common argument against euthanasia is the emotional unhappiness to doctors, relatives and friends that such an act would cause. This is of course asserted, and there have been numerous instances of friends and family actually feeling a great deal of relief that their loved ones could die peacefully and without agony at the time of their own choosing. But admittedly, there are also instances (so artfully illustrated in the movie The Sea Inside), where the family members would strongly oppose such a move, and would be greatly distressed by it.

The case is more difficult with regards to doctors. Some doctors in places where euthanasia is legal (or in some cases such as Oregon, assisted suicide) do report emotional distress after their participation in an assisted death, or in prescribing the necessary medication to enable a patient to take their own lives. Others have found it an intrinsic part of what they view as their duty of care to a patient. However, it is reasonable to point out that if it offends a doctor's conscience (or religious beliefs) to assist in such an act, he can pass on the patient's case to another qualified medical practitioner who will be willing to carry out such a patient's wishes.

Let us assume, at the very least, that a patient's decision to take their own lives, at a time of their own choosing (which I deem the basic definition of euthanasia) will cause significant emotional distress to third parties (doctors, nurses, family, friends). Is this justifiable grounds for rejecting a person's request for euthanasia?

Say that a person, who is of sound mind, has decided that by their own assessment, their lives no longer have any value and they wish to die. One classic example would be a quadriplegic who is completely paralyzed from the neck down due to an accident. That person might feel that the loss of the independence and autonomy of his current condition that necessitates him being cared for by others even involving the most basic of needs, means that his life, to him is inherently valueless (or even of negative value) and he thus desires to die. I shall put aside, for now, questions over the person's capacity to make such a decision, and assume that it is a rational decision, not made under the duress of emotional distress or physical pain (though arguably these components make up a vital part of any decision is whether life is worthwhile or even tolerable). There is a demeaning tendency to associate anyone who is considering taking their own lives as being psychologically unsound, which I argue is not necessarily the case.

If we were to deny his request on the grounds of his action causing emotional distress to other people, we would effectively be saying that he should merely be living, not for himself but in due consideration to others. This is something most of us will find inherently odd. Think about a scenario when a somewhat angsty teenager who reads too much philosophy declared to his parents that he had come to the conclusion that his life was fundamentally meaningless and that the only reason why he continues to live was the psychological and emotional anguish that his suicide would cause his parents. If you were his parents you would probably be very disturbed and send him for counseling.

We thus seem to have a deep seated belief that we should have some individual purpose for our lives that is independent of merely living our life for other individuals (I leave aside the question of living for God, which is not anyhow, inherently a person). It thus seems strange that if that same teenager above were completely paralyzed from the neck down, and he told his parents that he found his life completely meaningless and he wished to die, we would tell him that he cannot do so because of the emotional anguish it would cause them and others.

This question of emotional anguish and causing distress relates to one of the fundamental problems facing strict utilitarians (and hedonists) with regards to murder. A strict utilitarian will argue that an action is right so far as it maximizes some ordinal value, usually taken as pleasure. So we should act in such a way as to maximize pleasure and to minimize pain. So according to such a view why is murder inherently wrong? A strict utilitarian could argue that it would cut short any possible future pleasure or happiness that the murdered person could experience.

This view is problematic - first of all it is not at all certain that, on balance, that person would necessarily experience a pleasurable life in the future had he not been murdered. Second of all, there is an inherent problem in committing to maximizing future pleasure. If it is a duty not to kill someone because of the inherent loss of possible future pleasure accrued to that person, will that not imply that we have a corresponding duty to maximize future happiness by creating other individuals that could possibly lead pleasurable lives? So, a couple, if indifferent to having a child (say the pros and cons balance out) on this view must have the baby if the baby will then have a resulting life that is pleasurable.

Strict utilitarians can then appeal to the indirect harmful effects of murder. Murder can lead to other individuals being fearful for their safety, which increases their unhappiness. It causes significant emotional anguish to the murdered individual's friends and family. It can even be argued to disrupt the basic functioning of society. On this view, a strict utilitarian can be said to take the view that the only thing that matters is present pleasure and suffering (of which the potential future pleasure of the murder victim would not count), and still argue against murder. On this view, the only wrong that is committed against the victim by his murderer is the possible pain involved in the ending of his life. Thus seems strange - would killing someone in his sleep through the use of a painless form of poison be any less wrong than stabbing him violently and repeatedly? And worse still, it seems to suggest that murder is wrong only because of the effects it has on society, and the victim's relations, not on the victim itself.

Drawing a parallel with the example at hand. Euthanasia is in effect a decision by an individual to take their own lives - 'self-murder' or bluntly a form of suicide. (The exact differences and similarities between euthanasia and suicide is outside the scope of the current discussion). If, as above we find it hard to accept the notion that murder is inherently wrong due to the indirect harm that it will cause, then it seems inconsistent to apply this same criteria of indirect harm to euthanasia. That is why suicide is no longer illegal in most countries (Singapore being an exception).

Of it can be argued that there is a difference between suicide and assisted suicide. In one case an individual unilaterally (often in distress), takes his or her own life, while in the latter case it usually involves the participation and consent of others, including a qualified medical practitioner. I will not delve into the complex arguments regarding legalizing assisted suicide and/or euthanasia here, but it does seem strange that in a country like Great Britain, you are legally allowed to end your own life by jumping off a building, but you are not allowed to do so by asking a doctor to prescribe you pills that will end you life if you are in a state of severe illness or pain in which otherwise ending your life would be impossible.

Academic Blues and (Un)Motivation

2009-03-02T23:08:00.000+08:00

I'm glad that it is the beginning of a one week break. I just completed a set of exams, and finally managed to submit an overdue term paper that involved two excruciating weeks of painfully trying to write something that was coherent. I think I have reached the stage where I have rather lost motivation with the course - one of those existential moments where you attempt to ask yourself exactly what is the point of writing a paper on the end of the Cold War or on U.S. grand strategy. For me, academia was also supposed to provide an end in itself. I am not doing this to earn a piece of paper, or to gain a Master's per se. I am doing this because I want to learn more about U.S. Foreign Policy, about the Cold War, about International Relations. So losing my intellectual interest (did I even have it to begin with?) is akin to losing the raison d'etre for doing the entire Master's program itself.

I told myself that the Master's would provide a perfect opportunity to think and to read. Not necessarily just on International Relations but on a whole host of other things. Certainly, it has been a delight browsing around the Humanities and Social Science library borrowing books on such random topics as film studies, ethics, euthanasia, random fiction, equality, and much else besides. But if you seem happier watching and critiquing movies and researching classic film criticism, and if you are more engaged in a book like Why Read Marx Today? as compared to a homework assignment, then something has certainly gone off tangent.

It is quite galling to me, how the whole of January and February has now passed without my having made any substantial headway on my thesis, not to mention my struggling with a smaller workload than the other students (because I am taking less classes due to the thesis). I feel like I've sunk into some kind of mild disinterested torpor which is very disturbing indeed.

I was more and more convinced recently that I should pursue the path of the Academy. To go and get a Phd and find a job as a professor. There were always nagging issues in my mind, though. Could I, the arch generalist, the gadfly, possessing not so much a short attention span as one that is simultaneously occupied by a dozen different things, find and work on one single topic that would occupy and satisfy me for the better part of 4 years? What then afterwards? More papers, read by learned colleagues, a merry-go-round of point counter point. Given my current frame of mind, a Phd is out of the question - it would be a tremendously foolish undertaking.

Perhaps, it comes down more narrowly to determination, setting goals, being motivated. But it is not as if I came into this term unmotivated. I did like the classes I had chosen and I was rather enthusiastic over my thesis topic. So what happened? As for setting goals and being determined, that flies out the window once you lose your motivation. But perhaps the whole point of being detemined is to not allow yourself to become unmotivated.

I shall attempt to concentrate on the narrower issues first. A first draft of my thesis is due very soon indeed, in a matter of weeks. If I throw all my weight behind it, I might just be able to churn something out, before the deadline. There is the further deadline of the actual submission date to meet. Let this be a test of character then, of any tiny lingering remants of academic ambitions that I might have. I pray I survive it.

25 Things

2009-02-27T23:09:00.000+08:00

I succumbed to the rampant Facebook meme. So here are 25 things you may or may not know about me.

1. The sport I think I am best at is ice skating. (Unfortunate given that I am Singaporean)

2. I am not actually a 12 year ACS boy. I spent Primary 1 studying in Canada where I lived for five years.

3. I tend to like people very quickly, though I have come to realize that falling into like is not falling into love.

4. I wanted to be a Paleontologist and dig up Dinosaur bones when I was 5 years old.

5. I applied to Trinity College in Oxford after going on a school trip to the UK and visiting Oxford on one of those perfect summer days (of which I realized there are only 10 every year). Trinity was recommended by the person showing us around because his girlfriend went there and he said it had nice lawns.

6. I vacillate over making important decisions but I ultimately finally make my call mainly based on my gut instinct (and not reason).

7. I am a terrible procrastinator, and I often like the randomness of doing something at the spur of the moment.

8. When I travel, I prefer to backpack and I prefer to do so on my own. (Though I am on the lookout for good travel companions!)

9. I am probably one of the only people to shed a tear during the sequence where Gene Kelly dances and sings in the rain in Singin' in the Rain, which is one of the most joyous scenes in cinema. (Why? Ask me and I might tell you)

10. I like staying up late, and I am not a morning person by nature or inclination.

11. I still haven't learned how to drive a car.

12. I think that more guys than girls tried to hit on me when I was at University.

13. I have appeared on 4 televised quiz shows in my lifetime, and competed for my University in quizzing. (Yes, there is such a thing as quizzing tournaments!)

14. I sometimes wonder if coming back to Singapore was the right decision and if I should have stayed in the UK. In many ways, Oxford will always have my heart.

15. My dream jobs include writing for the Economist, becoming the film critic of the New York Times, a professorship at a top US University though I would settle for winning $20 million dollars and then being able to do what I want.

16. The first crush I remember having (other than a really sweet and quiet girl whom I always wanted to sit next to when I was five) was when I saw Natalie Portman in Leon (The Professional) when I was 13.

17. I probably have more than 2,o00 books in my bedroom. If a fire were to start, I would be in deep trouble.

18. Caleb actually means "dog" in Hebrew though it also means "Brave one". And I am born in the Chinese year of the dog.

19. I loved waterfalls when I was younger. Visiting Iguazu Falls (in South America) and Victoria Falls (in Africa) remain lifelong dreams. My family visited Niagara Falls a half dozen times when we were in Canada.

20. I attended an American high school for 3 months when I was 13.

21. Reading Science Fiction and Fantasy is one of my guilty pleasures which I picked up when I read Dune and The Lord of the Rings respectively when I was 14.

22. I think it would be wonderful to own a bookshop, a pub, or a cafe, or why not all three

23. I am inherently less competitive now than I was when I was younger, but I still dislike losing.

24. I once met the Sultan of Trengganu's wife in person (a sultana, I have been informed) when I accompanied a close friend on a holiday there. His family knew the Royals personally, apparently.

25. I am a closet romantic at heart despite my somewhat harder more cynical exterior. I call this being an M&M (hard on the outside, soft and gooey inside).

National Myth Making

2009-02-26T01:39:00.002+08:00

I finally decided it was high time I visited the new national museum, given that I had not done so since its re-opening three years ago. I had been to the new wing for theater and movie performances, but hadn't had a chance to view the new Singapore history section, which forms the core of the museum.

History itself is not immutable, and Singaporean history itself, the way it is presented and taught in schools, is very much subject to the overriding grand narrative that the government wishes to portray. Not that the manipulation is as blatant as the continued disavowal of wartime atrocities by the Japanese, specifically the massacre of Chinese civilians, the subjugation of Korean and Chinese women into forced prostitution as 'comfort women' and also the use of prisoners as human guinea pigs for the testing of biological and chemical agents. Still, my encounters with the way Singapore history is taught, and to compulsory 'National Education' campaigns, have made me wary of the specific grand narrative and subtexts that pervade the presentation of Singapore history.

This was evident right from the beginning. The start of the exhibition proper constituted a scene of a village in flames. The helpful tour guide told us that this was Singapore in the past, a prosperous fishing village (Temasek) that had been attacked and destroyed by enemies in Java or Sumatra who were jealous of her prosperity. This scene was played out across a wall that greeted the visitors upon immediately entering the exhibition space, little kampong houses surrounded by coconut and palm trees engulfed in a rictus of computer projected orange and yellow flames, complete with ominous sounding crackles.

Reading in between the lines, it is not hard to see this applying to a more modern context. Singaporean leaders have always seen the world in a hard-edged, realist, perhaps even Manichean way, with Singapore seen as inherently vulnerable, a majority Chinese ethnic enclave surrounded by much larger Malay Muslim neighbours. The message is clear - Singapore's independence must never be taken for granted. These neighbours may grow jealous of our success and seek to destroy us - it has happened before, it can happen again.

It was also unsurprising to see that the initial portions of Singapore history dealing with the lead up to independence was rather selectively dealt with. The usual exhibits outlining the grave communist threats and the communal riots were followed immediately by a picture of Lee Kuan Yew in 1958, returning from Whitehall having achieved self-government for Singapore. David Marshall and Lim Yew Hock, and their roles in the early days of Singapore politics were conveniently airbrushed, not to mention the PAP's early association with the far left trade unions. Self-government was immediately followed by a small series of exhibits showing the advance of such consumer technologies as television sets. Thus subliminally, the PAP government's wisdom led to technology progress and material wealth.

In a recent book by two Australian academics - Constructing Singapore - they contended that the PAP had been so successful in monopolizing the national narrative and implementing their version of the 'Singapore Story' that the younger generation could conceive of no other narrative thread to understanding Singapore's past, present and even future. That is debatable, though probably more true that I would care to admit. However, it should be evident that even, or perhaps because of the pernicious attempts by the government to force 'national education' down our throats, we at the very least view their master narrative with general suspicion and with a studied cynicism.

Oscar Best Picture Nominees - To Watch

2009-02-25T16:23:00.003+08:00

In yet another bit of procrastination, I have compiled a list of Best Picture nominees from the last twenty years which I have yet to see:

2008 - Frost/Nixon
2007 - None
2006 - None
2005 - None
2004 - Ray
2003 - Mystic River
2002 - None
2001 - In the Bedroom
2000 - Traffic, Erin Brockovich, Chocolat
1999 - None
1998 - The Thin Red Line
1997 - The Full Monty
1996 - Secrets and Lies
1995 - Sense and Sensability
1994 - Quiz Show
1993 - None
1992 - Unforgiven, The Crying Game, Howard's End
1991 - Prince of Tides, Bugsy
1990 - Ghost, Awakenings, The Godfather Part III
1989 - Driving Miss Daisy, Field of Dreams

So I have seen a total of 78 of the 100 Best Picture nominees during that period which is not a bad totally, actually. I have also seen all five nominees (making me able to fully judge whether the Best Picture award was given deservedly) on 6 Occasions: '93, '99, '02, '05, '06, '07. I have also seen 18 out of the 20 Best Picture Winners, the exceptions being Unforgiven (1992) and Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Among the remaining nominees over the last twenty years, I will soon be watching Frost/Nixon (in late March '09) when it opens in Singapore. Of the remaining few, I am only really keen to watch Mystic River and Unforgiven (both Clint Eastwood), Quiz Show, Sense and Sensibility, Howard's End and the Godfather Part III (if only to see where Coppola went wrong). I would conceivably watch Driving Miss Daisy (since it won Best Picture), In the Bedroom (because it had an excellent cast). The rest of them don't really entice me that much, perhaps proof, if any were needed, that the Academy can often go very wrong.

Update: 05 Feb 2011 - I realize, rather coincidentally that this list can in a sense stand alone, for from 2009 onwards the Academy began shortlisting 10 films for Best Picture. Since this post I have gone on to watch Frost/Nixon as mentioned, Howard's End and Sense and Sensibility. The Eastwoods have thus far still escaped me. To add to the list, I guess I should watch Ghost, given its cult status, and in honour of Patrick Swayze who died in 2010.

Oscars: The Hits and the Misses

2009-02-24T12:29:00.004+08:00

So the 81st Academy Awards is now over, and we will have to wait another year for another glimpse of the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood elite. In the meantime, we might as well dwell on what was good about the ceremony this year - from the host, to the fashion, to the presenters and the speeches.

The Host: Hugh Jackman was chosen because he was deemed to be charming, with style and elegance in spades, and he could sing to boot. He showed his class by successfully hosting the Tony Awards though the Oscars is a much bigger kettle of fish. The singing ability was definitely on show with two musical numbers - an opening pastiche poking fun at the Best Picture nominees (in the tradition of Billy Crystal) and a later spectacular tribute to movie musicals. Apart from a five minute opening spell, he was largely anonymous. It seems like the Oscar producers, wary of misfiring wisecracks from past Hosts (David Letterman, and Jon Stewart spring to mind), limited the role of the Host this year. This is a great shame - the witty one-liners from the host (misfiring or not) and the repartee were an integral part of the fun of the Oscars. Jackman did thrown in a few funny one-liners quipping that due to downsizing he would soon be starring in a film titled New Zealand and telling Meryl Streep that 15 nominations that makes you think of only one thing - steroids alluding to the recent scandals in baseball. Let's hope they will invite him back and give him more screen time next year.

The Presenters: The producers were keen to cut down the running time so presenters were largely formal and multiple awards were given out. Will Smith alone presented four, quipping that Hugh Jackman was in the back taking a nap. The one major change was in presenting the acting awards. This involved having five previous winners step forward and give a short speech praising each nominee in turn (effectively a hagiography of their performance). It was a nice gesture and it was genuinely touching (at the very least for the nominee), but I felt myself torn about it at the end of the day because it was also somewhat cloying and seemed just a touch self-congratulatory. Still, I would vote for keeping this format, if only to have a chance to see past luminaries again.

The Acceptance Speeches: The speeches have been getting more and more dull, with viewers often subjected to a rattling off of a long list of names in as short a time as possible. I understand the need for the one and a half minute time limit (imagine how long the show would be otherwise!) but it certainly stifles originality, humour and personal style. Mickey Rourke's acceptance speech at the Independent Spirit Awards and The BAFTAs is an example of what an Oscar acceptance speech no longer is. This year wasn't terrible. Kate Winslett didn't break down and cry and even managed a quip about making the speech as a nine year old in the bathroom with a shampoo bottle standing in as an Oscar. Sean Penn jokingly called everyone god-damned homo-loving sons of bitches, and acknowledged how "difficult I sometime make it for you to appreciate me", before calling for equal rights for everyone and predicting the great shame future generations will feel at those rejecting gay marriage. Danny Boyle did a tigger impersonation. But oh how I was wishing that Mickey had won the Oscar and gone on stage and uttered a few obscenities just to spice things up.

The Fashion: There weren't quite any fashion disasters on the scale of Bjork's infamous Swan outfit this year, but there were still a couple of questionable choices. Natalie Portman (who presented award) came in bubble-gum pink that was oh so girlie-girl though the strapless design was admittedly rather stylish. Sarah Jessica Parker is usually quite the fashionista but her 'barley mint' tightly corseted full length dress, with massive buckled belt could barely contain her cleavage and was strange to say the least. The biggest disaster would probably have to go to Whoopi Goldberg, who presented an award in a full leopard print patterned dress. Animals are so out!

On to the fashion successes. Heidi Klum will always be eye-turning and it takes a gutsy girl to wears full-blooded red on the red carpet, but her dress was a wonderfully intricate creation with origami like folds. Anne Hathaway is one of those stars that can look elegant in just about anything but she was dazzling in her bead and jewel encrusted strapless grayish-white gown. While the trend has been towards the strapless or one-shoulder bared look, I applaud Tilda Swinton for showing that covering it all up can be classy, stylish and beautiful yet edgy as well. Her black/beige combination was a stunner in my mind. Other standouts: Frida Pinto (of Slumdog Millionaire) in her midnight blue lace number, Miley Cyrus in her scalloped shaped glitter trimmed gown, and Marisa Tomei looked stunning in her pearl grey pleated gown (but then she would look stunning wearing practically anything - or in fact nothing at all as the Wrestler amply proved!)

Oscar Predictions 2009

2009-02-20T23:50:00.002+08:00

The movie awards season is culminating with the Academy Awards. Amidst all the hoopla, I have decided to give my take on who will win. It is necessarily a myopic one, given that I have not seen all the nomination films/performances, but here is my two cents worth nonetheless.

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, The Reader, Milk, Frost/Nixon.

Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire
Should Win: Milk

The critical consensus is that this was a weak year in terms of Best Picture nominations. What we do have are five very different films. It is clear that the popular sentiment and the momentum is with Slumdog Millionaire. People love an underdog rags to riches story, and that Slumdog has in spades, though it has enough of an emotional heft to make it more than a lightweight. Slumdog will win mainly because it is the movie with the fewest detractors and because of its happy Hollywood feel good ending. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a superbly made film, but some found it overlong and not really engaging. The Reader was even more divisive - some thoroughly disliked it, though it has the holocaust theme going for it and a fine performance by Kate Winslett. Milk for all its great acting, is too controversial for many of the Academy voters. The two main contenders are Slumdog and Benjamin Button, but expect Slumdog to ride on a wave of sentiment and good feeling to take the award.

Among this year's contenders, I actually liked the two front-runners the least. Slumdog was a well-made film, but it tugged too obviously at the emotional heart-strings for me, and its Hollywood nature seemed just a little bit contrived despite the weightiness and grimness of the setting and the subject matter. Benjamin Button will win lots of technical awards (art direction, visual effects and make-up) and it features excellent direction and technical elements. But the movie was overlong, sometimes slow and seemed oddly detached. I thought The Reader was a movie that was very thought provoking and raised many difficult questions. It was an excellent adaptation. It didn't quite completely cohere though. Milk for me was a superb biopic of a specific time and a place, not just a person, with a knockout performance by Sean Penn. It also featured, for me, one of the most moving scenes in cinemas this year with the candlelit march at the end. It certainly tugged at the heartstrings, but the movie had earned it by then.

Best Actor: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler; Sean Penn, Milk; Brad Pitt, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Frank Langhella, Frost/Nixon; Richard Jenkins, The Visitor

Will Win: Mickey Rourke, The Wrestler
Should Win: Sean Penn, Milk

This is going to be a toss-up between Mickey Rourke and Sean Penn. Jenkins' nomination was reward enough for constantly being overlooked, Pitt was decent enough but didn't even appear on camera for the first 40 minutes of the film, which in many ways was the more compelling portion of it. The strong sentimental favourite is Rourke who puts in a great performance as an ageing Wrestler whose life is on the ropes and headed for a three count. It was a role made for him, and the way it mirrors his own personal decline will win him huge sympathy. If the academy votes with its gut instead of its head, as it usually does, this is Rourke's award to lose.

Sean Penn was simply superb as Harvery Milk. He gave a performance that was so nuanced, so true to character and so real, that he practically lit up the screen throughout the movie. It was a virtuoso performance of technical acting ability that deserves the Oscar. They say that biopics do well in the acting categories which should mean Penn is a lock but Milk's character and the openly gay nature of the role will have drawbacks at the Academy. That is not to say I didn't like Rourke's performance, which given the gritty realism of the role could just as well be a fictional biopic. It was a tough call for me but I will have to go with Sean Penn.

Best Actress: Kate Winslett, The Reader; Anne Hathaway, Rachel Getting Married; Meryl Streep, Doubt; Angelina Jolie, Changeling; Melissa Leo, Frozen River.

Will Win: Kate Winslett, The Reader
Should Win: Kate Winslett, The Reader

The only real contenders here are Kate and Meryl with Angelina as a strong dark horse. Anne Hathaway is still young, and though she showed real acting chops as the attention seeking guilt ridden younger sister the Academy will feel she still has the advantage of time. If she continues to take on edgier, deeper roles, she may well win an Oscar in the future. Angelina was good in Changeling and it was a wonderfully written role in yet another great Eastwood vehicle that has proven successful at spawning acting Oscars in the past (Tim Robbins, Sean Penn - Mystic River, Gene Hackman - Unforgiven, Hilary Swank, Morgan Freeman - Million Dollar Baby). But Eastwood was largely overlooked this year, and Jolie thought she was good, didn't do enough independent of the role to warrant a second Oscar.

Meryl Streep was nominated yet again. Some say she was brilliant, some say she was doing yet another version of the typical Meryl turn, but this goes for any movie she has made in the past decade. I thought she did a wonderfully good job as a nun full of righteous indignation who is determined to hold on to what she believes is the truth. A fifteenth nomination is deserved, but the Academy has shown its reluctance to reward her with another statuette and this will not change.

This will be Kate Winslett's year. Six nominations shows her range, diversity and an ability to really embody a character. She put in a bravura performance, in a truly difficult role - enabling us to empathize with a Nazi holocaust camp guard and feel for her at a human level. Besides, the old dictum holds - Holocaust movies always win Oscars (it certainly did the trick for Adrian Brody in The Pianist).

Best Supporting Actor: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight; Michael Shannon, Revolutionary Road; Philip Seymour Hoffman, Doubt; Josh Brolin, Milk; Robert Downey Jr., Tropic Thunder

Will Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight
Should Win: Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight

This award is a virtual certainty, but it is more than just a sympathy vote given in celebration of Heath Ledger's life and achievements. His turn in The Dark Knight was truly frightening. He made the role of the Joker his own, embuing it with a frightening malevolence, manic glee and perverse delight that was equally disturbing and enthralling to watch. His was the performance that held a superb movie together. The other nominees all turned in notable performances - Brolin providing excellent support to Penn, and Hoffman performing with his usual excellence as the priest at the center of the allegations in Doubt. I was happy that a comedic role was recognized (fewer and fewer such roles seem to get the Academy's attention) and Downey's turn in Tropic Thunder as an Australian method actor playing a Black was truly delicious. That said, as good as the rest of them were, they pale in comparison to Heath.

Best Supporting Actress: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona; Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler; Amy Adams, Doubt; Viola Davis, Doubt; Taraji P. Henson, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Will Win: Penelope Cruz, Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Should Win: Marisa Tomei, The Wrestler

Penelope Cruz puts in a wonderfully turn as a deranged, suicidal and fatally unbalanced ex-lover of Javier Bardem in Woody Allen's latest offering. This is Cruz in her element, darkly fun (and funny) - unlike a number of her recent roles where she was miscast as the smoldering Spanish flame which really doesn't suit her style. Woody Allen vehicles are good for acting Oscars for females (Mira Sorvino, Mighty Aphrodite; Dianne Wiest, Bullets Over Broadway and Hannah and her Sisters; Diane Keaton, Annie Hall) and Cruz is odds on to join the list.

Her closest challenger is Marisa Tomei, who complements Mickey Rourke superbly in The Wrestler as a stripper who is also his sometime love interest. Tomei is as utterly convincing as a stripper as Rourke is as a Wrestler, with both understanding that their occupations are performances of sorts. She gives us a character at once jaded and cynical while also showing a more human side as a single mother, creating a vulnerability that is never forced. She and Rourke hold the movie together, and her performance was a real standout. And I might also add here (though it obviously has absolutely no bearing on my choice) that Tomei is an absolute stunner and a knock out, even post-40.

Amy Adams is pleasant enough as the innocent nun torn between Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman but is very much the third leg in the acting trio. Viola Davis puts in a shattering and heartfelt 10 minute mucus strewn turn as the mother of the boy who may or may not have been sexually abused, but her lack of screen time doesn't give her the depth necessary to win (that is barring another Judi Dench). The academy will feel Taraji Henson's time might come, but it won't be for her role as Brad Pitt's mother.

Best Director: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire; David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; Gus Van Sant, Milk; Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon; Stephen Daldry, The Reader

Will Win: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire
Should Win: Gus Van Sant, Milk

I initially thought that this might be one of those year's where there would be a Best Picture/Best Director split: Slumdog taking Best Picture, David Fincher recognized for lending Benjamin Button the artistic and technical mastery that it has. But I finally succumbed to the Slumdog onslaught. Despite Boyle being much more of a Hollywood outsider than Fincher (in fact that applied to just about everyone who worked on Slumdog), the rags to riches story set in the Mumbai slums has won the hearts of everyone.

Pity then to Gus Van Sant, who has a varied and interesting body of work and does an excellent job putting together Milk. From the choice use of archival footage which was subtle and well chosen (rather than egregious and attention grabbing like Forrest Gump) to enabling us to wholly inhabit San Francisco in the late 1960s, it was a superb achievement which will, sadly, go unrecognized.

Adapted Screenplay: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire; Eric Roth, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button; John Patrick Shanley, Doubt; Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon; David Hare, The Reader

Will Win: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire
Should Win: David Hare, The Reader

Eric Roth's adaptation of Benjamin Button is not so much an adaptation as a re-write, not to mention a large scale plagiarism of Forrest Gump. If he wins, it will be a travesty. Beaufoy did a good job of cutting down large portions of Swarup's novel while staying true to its spirit but I thought Hare's work on The Reader was very compelling, giving us a superbly nuanced piece which was though provoking yet moving.

Original Screenplay: Dustin Lance Black, Milk; Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Peter Doctor, Wall-E; Martin McDonagh, In Bruges; Courtney Hunt, Frozen River; Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky

Will Win: Dustin Lance Black, Milk
Should Win: Dustin Lance Black, Milk

My ability to judge this category is compromised by the fact that I have only seen Milk and Wall-E. There is usually a strong correlation between Best Picture and Best Original or Adapted Screenplay. As Milk is the only Best Picture nominee that is nominated here, it should be a shoo-in. Dustin Lance Black has written an excellent, personal and very heartfelt script, and from what I can tell, he deserves it. (It would be interesting to see In Bruges, which has been touted as a highly original script and film though)

Technical Awards Predictions (Should Wins in Brackets):

Best Cinematography: Slumdog Millionaire (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Best Music: Slumdog Millionaire (Wall-E)
Best Song: Slumdog Millionaire, Jai Ho (Slumdog Millonaire, Jai Ho) but it really should be The Wrestler by Bruce Springsteen which was not even nominated
Best Art Direction: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Best Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Dark Knight)
Best Costume Design: The Duchess (The Duchess)
Best Make-Up: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button)
Film Editing: Slumdog Millionaire (Slumdog Millionaire)

What the Butler Saw

2009-02-12T23:35:00.002+08:00

British humour has always appealed to me. I love the dry wit, the sometimes outrageous farce that is so much a part of everything from Oscar Wilde to Monty Python. So when a local theater group announced a production of What the Butler Saw by Joe Orton, I leapt at the chance to see it.

People often underestimate how difficult and skilled one must be to act effectively in a comedic farce. Because it often involves exaggeration and isn't the most subtle of genres, it is easy to think that farce isn't all that challenging. It is quite a fine balancing act between exaggerating and going completely over the top, especially in terms of the physical comedic elements. At its best, farce is unbridled and uninhibited fun. The actors in this piece did a good enough job without completely hamming it up, with former DJ Vernetta Lopez doing a rather deliciously outrageous turn.

Farce does have the benefit of universality. Mr. Bean is Britain's most famous comedic export (with apologies to Monty Python and Ali G.) because the physical nature of the comedy was able to cross almost every cultural and linguistic barrier. However, Orton's play while, a comedic farce at its core, was rooted in 1960s Britain, and there were elements of irony, and a thinly veiled cynicism at society that earned his comedies the sobriquet Ortonesque.

That made the decision by the director to adapt it for the local audience - to Singaporeanize it, if you will - one that was misguided and one that ultimately misfired. Some aspects of the attempt to Singaporeanize did work well, and was funny, particularly turning a typically British bobby into a localized khaki uniformed, bermuda wearing, grammatically challenged Police Sergaent. Though even the initial laughs wore off as the novelty of the accent and mannerisms wore a bit thin.

More unsuccessful were the repeated attempts to alter dialogue in the play to suit the local setting. A statue of Churchill became one of Sir Stamford Raffles, which only left one wondering about a reference to a certain portion of the anatomy being "cigar shaped". I have never read the original play, but I couldn't help but get the feeling that a plethora of veiled references and black humour was irreparably lost by the decision to meddle with the script. While I understand that the average Joe wouldn't get many of the British turn of phrases, or the cultural references, rewriting the script ripped if not the heart out of the play, then at least the intestines.

It didn't help that some of the rewriting was truly cringe worthy. Lame references to the National Trade Union Congress, to Members of Parliament was well and truly supplanted by a piece of National Education propaganda that was well and truly nauseating. In true Wildean fashion, the true relationship between two of the characters in the play was revealed when they had separate halves of a pendant. That the pendant was in the form of the Singapore crest was kitsch enough. For that to be followed by a two minute exposition explaining the significance behind it - five stars and a crescent moon etc. - was in exceptionally bad taste. Some of the localized references were simply thrown in willy-nilly and seemed rather superfluous (or in the case of what the play attempted to do, it ended up quite rojak and somewhat quite extra).

It was a shame really, because the farce itself was well performed, the play (in the original) was probably superbly written, and on the whole it was still a relatively enjoyable experience. Still, the perils and pitfalls (not to mention the sacrilege) of messing about with an original piece of art were put on rather vivid display here. Overall, it ended up a mis-mash and pastiche, rather like the repeated cross-dressing that took place within the play itself. Sometimes, it is better to leave well alone.

Seen On the Big Screen So Far

2009-02-04T23:04:00.001+08:00

Australia - rather long and self indulgent in spots especially over the second half, but Lurhmann's paean to his homeland is good, wild, rollicking fun for the most part. Hugh Jackman and Nicole Kidman were likeable enough leads but the child actor who play the young half aborigine boy steals the show. A perfect showcase for the marvelous scenery in the outback though the movie was never subtle and could have done with a fair bit of editing.

The Duchess - An interesting portrait of an era through an effervescent young aristocrat ahead of her time. Keira Knightley puts in another sparkling and high spirited performance as the title character the Duchess of Devonshire. Ralph Fiennes does a fine job portraying the everyday odiousness of the Duke, while enabling us to gain a richer understanding of the constraints of class, tradition and society into which he and Georgina are both bound. Somewhat slow at spots but good acting and clear idea of what the film sets out to accomplish makes it worth watching.

Rachel Getting Married - Hollywood loves films about dysfunctional families, and weddings often make the setting of popular runaway hits (think My Big Fat Greek Wedding). Rachel Getting Married succeeds because it avoids the minefield of cliches and gives us a group of characters who are multifaceted and richly written. Anne Hathaway puts in a standout performance as the sister in rehab who struggles with a drug habit, her own need to constantly be at the centre of attention and guilt for her responsibility in a family tragedy. The acting is good all-round here as is the script which creates real meaningful and nuanced individuals. The documentary feel of the movies and hand-held cinematography adds depth. Only beef - wedding sequence at the end of the movie was slightly overlong and removed some of the emotional heft.

Ponyo on a Cliff by the Sea - Miyazaki's latest offering hearkens back to his more whimsical, child-like work from his earlier days, like Kiki's Delivery Service. The animation, as to be expected, is truly superb. The story itself however is rather simple, as is the movie on the whole. Still, a joy for the animation itself.

Changeling - Clint Eastwood seems to just get better and better with age. You run the gamut of emotions throughout this movie from serene happiness, to shock, despair, outrage, horror and then hope. Angelina Jolie takes a superb role and runs with it, though the standout performance is by Jason Harner who manages to ooze charm and odiousness in equal measure in a unhinged manner that is truly frightening. The movies is excellently produced and directed. It does have to follow the turn of the events (it is based on a true story) which leads to a sudden switch in the middle of the film, and a slightly long conclusion where some of the emotional force is lost. But overall very good indeed.

Inkheart - what was an interesting concept - the ability to read characters into life - is ultimately wasted in this movie, which manages to be wearying. The plot begins to make less and less sense as it goes along. The chief crime is that it lacks a sense of fun, which should have been inherent in any movie involving escaped fairytale characters.

The Reader - a wonderfully compelling, deep, thoughtful movie. The elements of guilt and shame are explored through the past of Hanna Schmidt who was a former guard at Auschwitz, though the film, at its core is about the guilt of Michael, the sixteen year old boy she has an affair with. A film which can only be appreciated when thought about deeply. Kate Winslett is very good and will be a front-runner come the awards season.

'Extreme' British Weather

2009-02-02T16:45:00.003+08:00

It is so typical of the British that an "extreme weather warning" was issued after the Southeast of the United Kingdom suffered 15cm of snow in 24 hours. The snowfall led to London buses being pulled off the roads, schools in Essex being closed, and lorries blocking major highways. My initial reaction was to laugh heartily and point out that many parts of Canada, and the Northern United States suffer 15cm of snow in 24 hours as a matter of course.

It was Bill Bryson who commented that the British fascination with the weather was perplexing because the UK had so little weather that was truly exciting. The Americans have tornadoes that can flatten towns, earthquakes that have affected major cities, hurricanes that have swept away large regions of the coast, heavy snowstorms that have knocked out power in entire states. Even one of the most active volcanic areas in the world (Hawaii). The British have rain that kind of piddles down (not even proper rainstorms) and not much else.

Of course, to snicker at the current snow 'storms' in the UK is to miss the point. Such weather is rather extreme for a country which hardly ever gets any wonderful snow to compensate for the miserably cold and wet winter months. If anything, I would view the recent extreme weather as a wonderful occurrence to get outside, build a snowman and have general fun. Just don't expect it to last. I can only wish that such bountiful snowfall had happened while I was still there.

Brideshead Revisited

2009-01-30T23:20:00.002+08:00

The status this novel has as one of the quintessential Oxford novels is more than cause enough for me to want to read it. Although I purchased a lovely hardback edition while studying at Oxford, I never did get round to reading it there. I picked it up again due to the impending release of a new movie adaptation of the book in November 2008, intending to finish the novel before watching the movie. I managed neither. My friend Karin recently purchased the 11 episode ITV adaptation (dating from 1981 and starring a youngish Jeremy Irons as Charles Ryder and scripted by the recently deceased John Mortimer of Rumpole fame). Since she lent it to me, I decided to finally get round to reading the book, and after that watching the ITV series.

The novel itself is to a large degree an examination of the decline of the English aristocracy through the eyes of Charles Ryder's relationship with the Marchmain family. Indeed, it is a telling point that Ryder makes his fame as an artist by painting the aristocratic houses before they are forced to close or to be sold, profiting as it is from their financial decline while also capturing them it their last glory. Similarly, the decline of the Marchmain clan is seen through Charles' eyes particularly through his relationship with Sebastian Flyte (his old Oxford chum) and Julia, his sister.

As for the much vaunted Oxford section, it was a world almost totally alien to me, despite having spent three years in one of the more traditional colleges (women were only admitted in 1979). It was a time of servants, and real separation between the majority who were privileged and those who were not. This upper-class aristocratic reserve was a highly endangered species in my Oxford, ironically as belittled in modern times as those who were not similarly privileged were treated by them in the past. The lifestyle of secretive dining clubs where languid philosophical debates were had in accents that could sear through butter were akin to sightings of a mythical highly endangered species - the occasional report filtered in, but one wondered if they were real or just imaginary. The last vestiges of Oxford as it was.

I should say straight out that I didn't particularly enjoy the book. Reading it in several bits and pieces over a holiday in Cambodia (on the two flights, on a long bus ride between Phnom Penh and Ho Chi Minh City, and in various hotel rooms) certainly didn't aid my appreciation of it. Perhaps as a result I failed to see how subtly Waugh manages to tie the threads of the different sections together. Most critics acknowledge that Brideshead is the most richly written of Waugh's works (perhaps directly as a result of the wartime shortages and privations he faced during the writing of the novel - his various appetites fulfilled on the page where it could not be fulfilled in real life) but I found the language occasionally turgid and sometimes excessive.

Given Waugh's own fervent catholicism, it is unsurprising that religion plays a significant role in the novel. As it is presented in the novel, religion has the ultimate power to redeem, though it also suggests that to try and come closer to God is to invite suffering. Religious redemption comes especially to Sebastian, who finds a measure of solace and self-worth in religion from his dissolute and drunken lifestyle. It also ends up as the irreconcilable stumbling block between Charles and Julia. To Waugh's credit, both sides of Catholicism are presented, and Lady Marchmain's holier than though embracement of martyrdom isn't shied away from. One can't help but feel that the whole notion of faith and guilt and redemption is handled better by Waugh's fellow Catholic Englishman Graham Greene.

A Sobering Though in These Troubled Economic Times

2009-01-29T23:23:00.000+08:00

Many countries worldwide are facing their worst recession in many decades. World economic growth has been estimated by the IMF for 2009 to be only 0.5%, the lowest in half a century. Amidst continued fears of job losses, home foreclosures, fall in stock prices and failing banks, there is the added concern of the social and political consequences that the economic downturn might bring.

Unemployment is certainly a major social evil that will result. Surveys have shown that losing your job is doubly painful - there is the unhappiness caused by poverty as a result of the loss of income but also unhappiness as a result of social shame and loss of self-respect due to the loss of a job. The news is getting more dire by the week, with Starbucks now closely hundreds of outlets, manufacturing and steel jobs declining to add to the job losses in the financial sector.

The most sobering thought of all? In the 1928 German elections, the National Socialists polled less than 3% of the votes. In 1933, Adolf Hitler succeed in winning the Chancellorship. What happened in the interim? The great depression and a major worldwide recession. The example above was of course over-stated and I doubt that anything quite so drastic will result from the current economic downturn (which is expected to last for at least the next two years). Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind the possible severe political consequences of economic collapse. That might be the most sobering thought of all.

You Are What You Read (and Watch)

2009-01-28T23:54:00.000+08:00

I read a lovely piece in the New York Times called "It's Not You, It's Your Books" (March 30, 2008) which I could eminently empathize with. Rachel Donadio, the author, recounted a "Pushkin" moment from a girlfriend who had just broken up with her boyfriend and was looking for some form of justification. Her answer? "He hadn't even heard of Pushkin!"

As a keen reader myself, her story resonated with me tremendously. After all, I am a person who first became attracted to one of my eventual girlfriends (we dated for a year) after she noticed that I was holding a copy of Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of the Hills at a party and mentioned that she enjoyed his books, especially The Remains of the Day. I will freely admit that if I visit the home of a friend (or any home at all), one of the things that I will surreptitiously do is quickly scan the bookshelves to see what lies therein.

As Donadio acknowledges, reading and what a person reads need not be the deal-breaker in a relationship. In fact, inveterate bookworms often get along smashingly well with counterparts for whom the daily newspaper and Reader's Digest is the limit of their literary tastes. Sara Nelson, who wrote the book memoir So Many Books, So Little Time admitted she married a man who read nothing and could not understand her love of reading. He tolerated her eccentric habit however, grew used to sleeping with the glow of a reading lamp in the background, and proved useful by building her bookshelves (he was a set designer by trade).

Indeed, the fact is that the written word is hardly the popular medium of choice in our modern generation. Book loving friends tell me that they are happy to find someone who reads at all - being picky about literary taste would probably mean a life of singlehood dreaming of Heathcliff and Mr Darcy (if you are female) and the appropriate female literary fantasy equivalent if you are male (Lolita? Elizabeth Bennett?). Still as Sloane Crosley, a publicist told Donadio, "if you're a person who loves Alice Munro and you're going out with someone whose favourite book is the Da Vinci Code, perhaps the flags of incompatibility were there prior to the big reveal".

One undoubtedly popular modern day entertainment medium, however, is the cinema. Almost everyone watches movies. In Singapore, going for a movie is about as standard a first date as there is. So while it would be difficult to assess your compatibility with a prospective date over literary tastes, finding out what movies she or he enjoys watching (or even what TV shows) can be instructive.

In fact, choosing the movie for a first date is an interesting exercise, one often fraught with difficulty. Taking a girl to the latest high octane Hollywood summer blockbuster might not send the right message if you are a guy (think Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer), worse is inviting her over for a Star Trek marathon. Insisting on a romantic comedy might be mildly off putting if you are female, especially one involving a woman desperate to get hitched and settle down (27 Dresses immediately springs to mind).

The specific movie you bring your date to can also be very illuminating. I remember taking a girl to watch My Summer of Love, a small indie movie about a young working class English girl who falls for a richer, more posh girl home for the summer from boarding school. She took my choice of a movie with a lesbian theme as a sign of a refreshing open-mindedness about homosexuality (the choice of the movie itself was completely coincidental, I had desperately wanted to watch it). We both enthused about being able to talk about specific scenes that we loved, including a beautiful shot of the two girls in the dark silhouetted by a camp fire.

I once fell completely for a girl with whom I had been exchanging long emails, more often than not about movies. She had amazing taste in movies (in my opinion) and it was refreshing to discuss Altman and Kubrick and Woody Allen with someone who was similarly enthusiastic. One eureka moments transpired when I told her I was keen to find a copy of a Kubrick war movie which was supposed to be a classic. She enthusiastically replied that it was a fantastic coincidence and she had just seen it on DVD and it was great! Turns out that I was talking about Path of Glory and she was referring to Full Metal Jacket. Our passion for film never did translate into very much else, but that was a moment where I truly felt a meeting of minds.

There are however, cases where the opposite happens. A girl I was having dinner with declared that she loved local Singaporean director Jack Neo and she would watch anything he did. I mean Jack Neo isn't bad but, surely there are better directors out there? After she decided one of her favourite movies of all time was I Not Stupid, an involuntary shudder went down my spine. It would be increasingly hard for me to date someone if what I wanted to see was Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Woody Allen), Burn After Reading (Coen brothers), and My Blueberry Nights (Wong Kar Wai) when what they preferred was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Mamma Mia!, and Night in Rodanthe (just to use 2008 as an example).

Things came to a head recently when a date (whom I had just taken to see a movie) told me over dinner that she hadn't liked Wall-E. In fact she found it boring, was tempted to walk out (but didn't), found the plot completely unsubtle and pointless, and I mean, there wasn't even any dialogue in the first half an hour! I was mildly apoplectic. How can a person dislike and be totally bored by a Pixar film? This is a movie that scored close to 100% on the tomatoemeter (at Rotten Tomatoes). It was a beautiful love story to boot (shouldn't that at least appeal to some extent to a girl?). It was also powerfully human and very moving.

Is that the end then? Well, she is cute. But if I do pursue things, and they don't work out, I can always call a friend and moan - "but she didn't even like Wall-E!"

Chinese New Year Punitive Punning

2009-01-26T23:05:00.003+08:00

I have decided that if I receive one more MSN Message, or email, or Chinese New Year greeting of any form, both verbal and electronic, wishing me a 'Happy Niu Year', or some other equivalently poor pun, I shall strangle the person responsible. It is bad enough putting up with bad puns that seem an inherently unavoidable part of the English language. To have to put up with puns involving a transliteration of phonetic sounds of a language without an alphabet, now that is really pushing things to a level which is completely ridiculous.

My Top 10 Movies of All Time

2009-01-19T23:23:00.000+08:00

I've recently gone through and updated a list of all the movies I can recalling watching, either in the cinema, on VCD/DVD (or even on Laserdisc!), as well as on TV. It came up to well over 800 individuals titles. I also attempted to assign ratings for the majority of them, though it proved difficult given that I had seen some of them a long while back. However, in the process of doing that review, I have chosen my 1o favourite movies of all time, as of the start of 2009. In no particular order:

The Shawshank Redemption
Singin' in the Rain
Cinema Paradiso
Pleasantville
Double Indemnity
Patton
Pan's Labyrinth
The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Casablanca
Raise the Red Lantern

A full list of all the movies I rated **** (out of ****) will follow, once I have finalised it. Comments on my choices are welcome.

Australian Open Predictions

2009-01-15T15:23:00.008+08:00

The first major sporting event of the year, the Australian Open Tennis Grand Slam at Melbourne Park, is about to start. Here's my attempt at crystal ball gazing.

The men's draw is by far the easier to predict, with four strong favourites for the title. They are world No. 1 Rafael Nadal, three time champion Roger Federer, defending champion Novak Djokovic, and current World No. 4 Andy Murray. Despite being World No. 1 Nadal must be considered, on paper, the least likely of the four to win. He is probably the weakest on hardcourts (his least favourite surface), and the only one yet to reach a hardcourt grand slam final (he has two semi-final appearances at Australia and one in the US to date)

Federer must always be considered a strong favourite at any of the Slams (perhaps excepting the French), and has a sterling record at Melbourne Park. He also has the added incentive of tying Pete Sampras' record for most Grand Slam singles titles were he to win. To win the title though, Federer will have to overcome his recent hoodoo against Andy Murray (though to be fair, Federer comprehensively beat him in last year's US Open final), and the psychological blow of last year's straight sets semifinal loss to Novak Djokovic. However, few will doubt that if Federer is fully on song, he will be the favourite in Melbourne.

Andy Murray was made the joint favourite to win in Australia by the bookies after his excellent early season form, raising the surprise and ire of Federer in the process. Federer does have a point - it seems a bit presumptuous to make a man who has never won a slam the favourite over a player who has won 13 of them, even if he has beaten Federer twice in a month. Nerves certainly got the better of him last year in New York and he folded in straight sets in his first Grand Slam final. Common wisdom has it that the first slam is the hardest to win - just ask Federer about that - but it remains to be seen whether Murray is seasoned enough, and has the nerves to win it all in Melbourne. Also against him is the heat. Murray's fitness levels have improved enormously over the past year, but the grueling conditions and close to forty degree heat definitely puts him at a disadvantage. If he fails to win his matches quickly in the early rounds, and gets stretched to a five setter or two, there are certainly valid questions as to how well his fitness can hold up.

Novak Djokovic must be considered a contender given he is the defending champion, but his recent form hasn't been the best. Still, the high bounce hardcourts of Australia does suit his game quite nicely, and the 'Djoker' should be a good contender for a quarter-final or probably a semi-final place at the least. If his game comes together, he can win it.

Wildcards: Jo-Wilfred Tsonga is a very dangerous player when he is fit, and he was absolutely tremendous in destroying Nadal in the semi-final last year, hitting 49 winners in the process. He had also dumped out Murray, Gasquet and Youzhny to reach the final. He was again plagued by injuries in 2008, and we can only hope that he has recovered his fitness and form in time for the tournament. Marat Safin, the mercurial Russian (finalist 2004, winner 2005), is always a threat, provided he comes out on court with his head screwed on right. His possible third round clash with Federer is certainly going to be intriguing. Tommy Haas is another old hand plagued by injuries in recent years. His hard hitting game (especially his strong forehand) is suited to hardcourts. He is a three time semifinalist in Australia, most recently in 2007 (he missed the 2008 tournament due to injury). He could well make a decent run.

To say that the women's draw is open ended would be a major understatement. World No. 1 Jelena Jankovic has never won a grand slam despite making the final of the US Open in 2008, World No. 2 Ana Ivanovic was a finalist in 2008 and has a strong chance, but in truth any of a dozen players including the Williams sisters, any of five Russians (Safina, Petrova, Kuznetsova, Zvonerava, Dementiava) not to mention other possibles like former champion Amelie Mauresmo. All this despite the absence of Maria Sharapova through injury, and the two top Belgian players (Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin) who retired the previous year.

Let's start with the Williams sister. Serena has an excellent record at Melbourne Park but her recent form has been patchy at best. Still, she has proven on more than one occasion that she is more than able to play her way into a tournament, including the Australian Open. She has to be considered a top contender. Venus, on the other hand hasn't had the best of runs down under, getting knocked out more often than not in the Quarter-finals or earlier. Her record, and a lack of matches in the latter part of 2008 will count against her, so she is a dark horse at best.

Now to the two Serbs. Jelena Jankovic managed to claim the top ranking in the world without having won a slam (though she made the final of the US Open losing to Maria Sharapova), and without winning that many tournaments in general. However, she has a good all-around game. However, she has also been plagued by niggling injuries, often in deeper stages of big tournaments, so she has to hope that her health holds up. Ana Ivanovic was a finalist last year, and must be seen as another real threat but she too is battling poor form. It all depends on whether Ivanovic can play her way into the tournament and gain momentum in the process, if she does, expect to see her in the semi-finals at least, and if things go well, she might well go all the way this time.

The upper tier of woman's tennis has been inundated by Russians and the Russian girls will pose a strong challenge even without their belle, Maria Sharapova, who is out injured. Among them is Dinara Safina, Marat's younger sister. Like her older brother, she has a big serve, and powerful groundstrokes. Unlike him, she seems to have her head screwed on right for the most part. Still there are questions whether she will be able to outmaneuver a quicker and more agile opponent on court.

Interestingly, the Russian with the best current form is Elena Dementieva. She's won her first two tournaments of the year and is in fantastic form. Her achilles heel has always been her serve, which is often as fragile as a champagne flute, especially when she is under pressure. Her consistent baseline play, both on the forehand and backhand side, will probably not be enough to overcome that weakness. Kusnetsova is an old hand at the grand slams by now, and has a consistent game, but she will have to play above herself to beat some of the higher ranked players. The same could be said, in many ways of Petrova.

So, it now comes a time when I have to stick my neck out. For the men's side, I predict a Rafael Nadal vs. Andy Murray showdown in the semifinals. Federer will extend his streak in grand slam semi-final appearances, though Djokovic might fall in an upset. It is a really tough call but I expect Rafael Nadal to cement his growing dominance of the men's game and claim the title after avenging his loss to Murray at the semifinals of the US Open. He might well face Roger Federer in the final, where he has the opportunity to extend his dominance over Federer once again.

For the women's draw, it is much too fluid and open to call, but Ivanovic, Jankovic and Serena Williams are the three favourites for me. I will go out on a limb and predict that Jankovic underlines her status as the top ranked women's player by claiming her first slam.

Addendum: My prediction for the Men's draw proved correct. It was indeed Nadal vs. Federer, and Nadal did triumph but what a classic, what a close match it was! He has clearly gotten into Federer's head and the Swiss superstar completely broke down at the prize presentation ceremony.

Atheist Bus Ads

2009-01-12T23:33:00.003+08:00

I was very interested, and somewhat amused to read about a new campaign, led by a group of humanists in Britain and supported by such well know luminaries as Richard Dawkins and A.C Grayling, to fund ads on buses calling into question the existence of God. The campaign, which has raised over 250,000 pounds so far, involves a bus ad stating: "There's probably no God, so stop worrying and enjoy your life". I applaud the campaign for coming up with a creative and open way to question religious belief, and the seeming monopoly of the religious communities in propagating their views. That it was done without the usual condescension and stridency of previous attacks of religion by atheists (Dawkins being a prime example) is surely to be commended.

What was predictable was the response from some religious groups. Christian Voice called the ads "offensive to Christians and others believing in a single God". Adding considerably to the irony is the fact that the campaign was conceived by Ariane Sherine in response to adverts on buses funded by religious organizations, notably "Jesus said" ads, and others providing a website URL which propounded such gems of wisdom as the threat of "spending all eternity in torment in hell" unless one believed in Jesus. Sherine wanted to find a way to propagate the humanist message without being as blunt as the Christians. If she had seriously wanted to match like with like, she should have come up with slogans like "God is a figment of your imagination, stop being delusional" or "Grow up and send God the way of the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus". Clearly tact was lacking in one of the advertising campaigns, and it is evident which one it was.

It is worth noting that there were varied responses from Christians to the ads. Some groups welcomed them, saying that it would re-open debate on metaphysical matters, which have far too often taken a back seat to practical ones in our modern consumerist society. However, the response from Christian Voice is telling because it only serves to underline the gross disparity facing humanists and atheists with regards to spreading their views. Any attempt to question the organized religion or faith is seen as offensive or derogatory or an attack on the foundations of British society and heritage. It is not clear to me why the church, or any other religious institution should be entitled to such a free ride. A Christian quoting bible verses on a street corner is evangelising, a humanist and atheist attempting to put forward their views in the same locale is seen as inciting religious hatred and insulting believers. This double standard is wrong, and must be stopped.

A even more hilarious response was an attempt by one Christian group to have the ad campaign stopped by lodging a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), complaining that the atheist bus ads didn't meet the regulatory body's requirements on grounds of "truthfulness and substantiation". Without any irony whatsoever, the letter to the ASA claimed that the ads "completely fails to reflect the true state of the current scientific argument" regarding God. Since God exists, any attempt to question that notion must necessarily be false advertising. According to them, the evidence of God - in the form of "personal experience, complexity, interdependence and the beauty and detail of the natural world" - has proved largely incontrovertible, and made the statement "God probably doesn't exist" patently false. Adding to the letter's ridiculousness, it was soon revealed that large chunks of it were cut and pasted directly from websites. It seems that the group isn't even capable of independent thought, or aware of copyright regulations.

One excellent suggestion has been made regarding the atheist bus campaign. James Ball, who was a fellow PPEist at Trinity College, Oxford, suggested using this campaign as a controlled experiment to prove the efficacy (or not) or religion. We now have a number of buses going about London with atheist ads, and a number of buses going about London with religious ones. We also have a large control group (buses advertising cosmetics, shoes and the like). Let's track the punctuality of all the various buses and see if a larger proportion of the buses advertising the existence of God run on time as compared to questioning his existence. As James rightly pointed out, beating London traffic is surely something that requires divine intervention in some shape or form.

Book Buying Spree

2008-11-09T18:37:00.003+08:00

Borders was having another huge discount offer (they seem almost periodic now), and I decided to make use of it to brighten up my life with some serious book buying. Strangely enough, I purchased only one new book the previous month (not counting another book purchased as a gift to a friend). It was a second hand copy of The Chicago Manual of Style, purchased at a bargain $9 at a Bras Basah bookstore while on the way back from the National Library building. That is not to say that I didn't spend a significant amount of time browsing, perusing, handling and accumulating scores of titles. I merely restricted myself to getting most of them from the library and ultimately returning many of them unread or at least uncompleted.

This prudence in the area of book buying was not to last, despite my best intentions for this to be so. I first went down to Border's on Friday afternoon. Borders was not only having a coupon discount promotion (30% off for any single book, with an additional 10% off for Border's members) but a storewide discount for anyone (35% off if you buy 5 titles or more, additional 10% for members). I printed out 4 coupons just in case I didn't have that many titles to buy, but as has proven so often in the past, the real challenge was trying not to buy too many titles. Worse still, I ended up going down to Borders again on Sunday afternoon with my sister after a family lunch at Ichiban Boshi.

In sum, the damage was as follows:

Islam: The Religion and the People by Bernard Lewis
The Messengers: The meaning of the Life of Muhammed by Tariq Ramadan
The Whiter Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008 Booker Prize Winner)
Changing Places by David Lodge
Shakespeare's Language by Frank Kermode
Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Other Colours by Orhan Pamuk
Making Globalization Work by Joseph Stiglitz
Microtrends by Penn and Zalesne

My sister also got the following:

Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks
Social Intelligence by Daniel Goldman
a Paperchase Tote bag
Quirkology
a Horse book
a CD/book on beginner's Malay

Regarding the purchases, I have made it a habit to read the Booker Prize winning (and often the shortlisted) novels, so I just had to purchase the White Tiger, this year's winner. Ramadan's book on the Prophet Mohammed had been recommended to me by a friend (Linda from RSIS) so taking her advice I decided to buy (and hopefully, read) it. Bernard Lewis is an expert on Islam and his book represents a basic primer on Islam, its very sects and beliefs which is well written and easy to read.

Given Barack Obama's recent victory in the US Presidential election both my sister and I thought it beneficial to buy his two bestselling novels, to get a more in depth look at the man and his ideas. We were both more interested in Dreams of My Father, his autobiographical account of his family and his search for an identity.

The Audacity of Hope is a far more political book, written when Obama's star was in the ascendancy, a front-lining speech to the Democratic National Convention already under his belt, and just about to begin his term as the junior Senator from Illinois. It seems commonplace, compulsory even for an aspiring politician (often candidates for the Presidency) to write a book, outlining in broad strokes their manifesto, and why they should be the 'chosen one'. Both books offer a glimpse into Obama's guiding principles and should make interesting reading.

Army High Handedness and Reservist Training

2008-11-03T23:30:00.000+08:00

After completing two and a half years of 'National Service' (read thinly veiled euphemism for involuntary conscription), each Singaporean male is then rewarded for their loyalty by being placed in purgatory until the age of 45, liable to called up for up to a month every year by the army.

This year, I tried to apply for a deferment for my Reservist obligations, given that I am currently doing a full time Master's degree, and I would be missing a number of classes (and the entire first week of the new term). However, my application for deferment was denied on two separate occasions. More troubling for me was that an attempt was made to reject my application either willfully or unwillfully on false pretenses. I was informed that doing a full-time Master's degree was not valid grounds for deferment, but this turned out to only be the case for Universities not recognized by the government. There was also considerable confusion over another clause stating that a minimum of 20 hours of classes a week were necessary for a deferment request to be valid, which didn't necessarily apply in my case. I was told they did.

In the end, the issue was only resolved when my mother went to see our local Member of Parliament to lodge a complaint. Ultimately, I must express my disappointed at the high handed way in which the army acted. The reason they gave for the rejection (besides their selective reading of the two criteria above) was that "my presence was necessary for training" and that given I was doing a Master's degree, I could "reschedule my academic activities to before or after my two week reservist obligations". This is patently absurd. I have to attend seminars comprising between 5 to 20 individuals. These seminars are not going to be rescheduled just for my sake.

I must state, in all fairness, that after the complaint to the MP, my Commanding Officer called me personally, and a fair compromise was reached that enabled me to attend all my classes, while still fulfilling my reservist obligation. What I wonder is, why weren't my concerns addressed previously until my mother, in complete annoyance and exasperation at the army, took the drastic measure of lodging a formal complaint with a MP? I can only come to the conclusion that given it was their right to call me up, and my obligation under law to fulfill the request, they saw no need to fully address any concerns that I might have, that is until extraneous measures were taken.

Sadly, this was hardly the first case where the army has acted in such a manner against me. At the end of my full time national service obligations, by way of thanking me for one and a half years of service to my formal NS Unit, my unit S3 (through the Commanding Officer) threatened to postpone my discharge from full-time national service unless I completed an intermediate unarmed combat course. Passing that course was not a necessary requirement for completion of full time national service. One got the impression that the Commanding Officer would have preferred having a spotless 100% completion rate for the Unit as a feather in his cap.

Consider the measures necessary to gain that feather. I was asked to take the test my exact ORD or Operationally Ready Date despite the fact that technically, my obligations to the army had ended the day before. Further troubling was that unarmed combat carried with it a fair chance of injury or accident (a fellow member of my unit broke his hand during a training session, another person I knew injured his knee) but I had already cleared the army medical exam, meaning that the army was no longer liable for any injury that I might sustain in the course of taking the test, particularly since it also fell outside my obligation of service. Furthermore, I had not met the training requirement of attending three quarters of the classes necessary to take the test (due to illness, and fulfilling other obligations such as guard duty).

The response of my unit? Do the test - or else. Do the test or you will no be given your freedom. It was quite a despicable form of blackmail. Sadly, this method often proves effective, because many servicemen will be cowed into just doing what these senior officers want, for fear of the consequences. It is thus easy for these officers to view their soldiers as pawns that can be steadily advanced and sacrificed in order to meet the greater objective of securing their own promotion and advancement. Sadly for them, my family refused to be cowed. They raised many of the concerns I highlighted to the S3, to which they received no satisfactory response. They then threatened to lodge a formal complaint to Mindef, citing that they believed I was being bullied into taking the test. Ultimately, my S3 admitted they had no grounds to force me to take the test.

The Commanding Officer then canceled a planned meeting with my parents to discuss the issue, stating that he "no longer saw a need to meet with them". My father exploded, saying that he had taken a day's leave to settle the issue, which he felt was important and he saw a need to meet with him. He then informed my S3 that he would personally drive me to camp on the date I was to receive my civilian identity card and my release from the army, and if I was not out of the camp in two hours, he would personally drive to the Ministry of Defence to sort things out there. I was out of the Camp in one and a half hours.

The ultimate irony was when I had to approach my S3 to sign my discharge forms, and he somewhat placatingly and somewhat indulgently asked why I had "caused so much trouble". I have since been asked that same question in other contexts. The question is: was I the one who attempted to threaten a national serviceman into doing a non-compulsory test on spurious grounds? Was I the one who selectively mis-read the criteria for deferment from reservist training? If these valid concerns had been taken into account originally there would be no need to "cause trouble". The real tragedy seems to be that trouble is necessary for an individual national serviceman's voice to be heard in the first place.

Bradley in Singapore

2008-10-28T22:52:00.004+08:00

I had the opportunity to catch up with Bradley Perrett, an old friend, for drinks today. Bradley, who currently writes for Aviation Weekly magazine, was stopping by Singapore for a week and I felt duty bound to take him out for a few drinks, especially given his love of Tiger Beer.

My family literally stumbled upon Bradley while on a holiday to London in December 2000. We had met, quite by accident, two other Singaporeans who overheard my comments (as well as my accent) regarding the musical Starlight Express during the intermission. They later introduced us to Bradley, who lived on a wonderfully cosy apartment on Charing Cross Street, a virtually heaven for both him and myself, given our shared love of books.

It is always enlightening talking to Bradley. On this occasion, we talked about airplanes and ships (a great passion of his), but also about the threat of nuclear proliferation. Bradley took the alarmist line, viewing nuclear weapons as a great danger, particularly its proliferation to states such as North Korea and Iran. I tried to argue from a viewpoint of limited deterrence, and the view that nuclear weapons actually help to limit conflicts by making escalation so costly that states automatically alter their behaviour (the recent Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan as a prime example).

Anyhow, it is always lovely talking to Bradley, and I would greatly welcome the opportunity to converse and meet up with him again.

In a subsequent MSN conversation we had, Bradley sent me his views on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He had read (and I was reading) a new account of the crisis by Michael Dobbs titled One Minute to Midnight. Bradley took the interesting line that Nikita Krushchev was the man primarily responsible for bringing the world back from the brink of nuclear annihilation. Far from it being an excellent example of successful decision making by an American administration, Bradley argues that Kennedy and his advisers were largely irresponsible, and nearly brought about nuclear armageddon. After thinking further on the matter, I have come round more towards Bradley's point of view.

Murray Perahia in Concert

2008-10-24T18:16:00.000+08:00

I had the privilege of seeing Murray Perahia in concert. He is probably one of the outstanding living pianists still plying their trade today, and one of my personal favourites (along with Martha Argerich). His program included Bach's second partita for keyboard, Beethoven's Appasionata Sonata, Chopin's Ballades Nos 3 and 4 and assorted other works by Chopin.

I was especially looking forward to the all-Chopin post intermission portion of the programme, and it did not disappoint. One of Perahia's most popular recordings is his wonderful rendition of the four ballades, and he did not disappoint in his live performance of the latter two. He also performed an assortment of other Bach pieces (Mazurkas, Waltzes, Preludes) with aplomb.

More disappointing, in my opinion, was his rendition of the Bach partita, which is somewhat surprising given that Bach is a major part of his oevre. Perahia's recording of the Goldberg Variations remains one of my favourites to date, and he has recorded Bach extensively, but his performance lacked the crispness and clarity of his CD recordings.

It was inevitable that Perahia received a massive ovation at the end of what was a relatively short performance. He came back for three curtain calls, performing parts of two of Schubert's impromptus, and a Chopin piece that I could not identify. All in all, a wonderful concert by a world reknown pianist that everyone was more than thrilled to see

iPhone

2008-10-12T23:34:00.000+08:00

I discovered that my mobile phone contract had run for over 30 months, giving me the option of renewing the contract, with the benefit of purchasing a new phone at a discounted price. It also meant that I was finally able to register the line under my name (it was previously under my dad's) and set up a Giro payment scheme for my phone bill (the bank account name must the same as the person to whom the line is registered to).

In the end, after weighing up the various options, I ended up getting myself the new Apple iPhone. My mom's plan was also due for renewal and because she is on a more expensive plan, purchasing the iPhone on her renewal meant that I could purchase it for $520 instead of the $870 that it would have cost under mine. However, given that I wanted to sign the new contract under my name, that necessitated purchasing a discounted phone on my plan as well, unless we wished to forgo the opportunity to buy a new phone at a cheaper rate. My mom, after a rather protracted selection process, ended up getting a Motorola V9, the main drawback being that the phone was a tie-in with Ferrari, and had a Ferrari logo stuck on the back. My dad tried to convince her that it was not worth getting a Samsung phone, similar in design (they were both flip open models) that cost over $200 more, the main additional feature being a 5 mega-pixel camera.

As for the new iPhone, I have only tested it out briefly so far, and the general impression is that it is unlike any phone I have ever seen before. It is more or less identical in design to an iPod touch, modified to include phone functionality. This means of course that it is completely touch screen - no keypad at all, and it is quite a kick to dial a number by pressing virtual digits on the screen. SMSing can be somewhat clumsy at times on the virtual QWERTY keyboard, but something that one could get used to. An additional feature for SMSing is that the iPhone tracks SMS 'correspondences' (similar to the way Gmail tracks email conversations) featuring a chain of SMSes linked together in comic book style speech bubbles. Another potential benefit I can see is being able to sync the phonebook with all its stored numbers, with my macbook, giving me a back-up copy of all my various contacts and phone numbers in the event (God forbid) that something were to happen to my phone.

In sum, it was a grand idea for Apple to move into the phone market, and the iPhone represents more of an addition to the existing design and technology rather than a fundamental new development. However, where Apple succeeds is that the iPhone represents a very real integration of technologies like music, photos, organizer etc. with phone functionality that the latest generation of phones have been moving towards, but which most existing phones have not quite succeeded in achieving thus far. It is easy to see why the iPhone, at least for the moment, is the hottest phone on the market.

It's Camels All Round

2008-10-07T18:42:00.003+08:00

On one particular occasion when my sister invited some friends over to our home, a particularly nerdy lab mate of hers (who was unsurprisingly going out with an equally nerdy fellow lab mate) started pontificating on the difference between one-humped and two-humped camels. This certainly stuck in my mother's mind as she commented about this afterward (citing this as rather strange behaviour). I would have thought that my predilection for strange facts would have inured her to that by now.

Still, as if to prove that no knowledge is ever useless, this piece of information came up in a pub quiz I was taking part in a few months afterwards. How many humps does a Dromedary Camel have, it asked. I could not for the life of me remember. It seems that camel humps was one of the few random bits of information that I found difficult to digest and my team got that question wrong.

So when it was mentioned that Bactrian camels, native to China, have two humps unlike their Arabian one-humped cousins, in The Man Who Loved China, a book by Simon Winchester about Joseph Needham and the inspiration behind his magnum opus Science and Civilisation in China, I decided once and for all to set the record straight. So, Bactrian - two humps, native to East and Central Asia (also highly endangered apparently). Dromedary, far more common, native to the Middle East (and also the ones you are likely to pose for a photo with in front of the Great Pyramids in Egypt before getting asked by its handlers for a fee), and most definitely one humped.

So there, this hardly proved to be one hump too many!

J.B Jeyaretnam (1926 - 2008)

2008-10-05T23:32:00.001+08:00

I was extremely saddened to hear of the passing of J.B Jeyaretnam, stalwart Singaporean opposition politician, who died of a heart attack on 30th September. Even more saddening and shocking for me was the fact that I only realized the fact a good 4 days later, having failed to read of it in the papers. More stunning still to me, it had not come up in the course of my daily conversations on interesting happenings in the world with my friends. I stumbled upon the news randomly while surfing the web. It will be the greatest dereliction of duty, whether one agrees with him or not, to not pay some homage to JBJ's service as a public figure and his ceaseless quest to promote democracy and justice in Singapore.

I was thus tremendously pleased that The Economist choose to feature JBJ in their obituary for their October 11th-18th issue (they only feature an obituary for one notable individual per issue). JBJ also received mention in many famous newspapers around the world, including the New York Times, and most of the British dailies. The Economist perhaps put it best. Quoting Lee Kuan Yew's assertion that the government engaged all those multitudinous libel actions to protect the government's reputation and not to silence the opposition, the publication noted that "Certainly, Mr Jeyaretnam, most distinguished of that tiny band, was never silenced. Lee Kuan Yew may have been the infinitely greater statesman, but some would have judged Mr Jeyaretnam the infinitely bigger man." I am inclined to agree.

The Return of the Prodigal Son

2008-10-01T23:55:00.001+08:00

When my quiz team recruited me on that fateful day over a year ago now, they commented that I was a classic 'ringer' given my quizzing pedigree. Little did they know. I had missed the quiz on 17th September after my class overran and I heard later that my usual team had finished in an abysmal 5th position. The following week, I was asked to be the substitute quizmaster as Pete was suffering from some hip trouble. My team took part, without me, and finished 3rd, outside the prizes for the second week in the a row.

This might seem to be just a minor run of bad fortune, but it has to be put into perspective. With me in their side they have never finished outside the top two. Indeed, at one point our team was so dominant that the quizmaster was attempting to come up with a suitable handicap for us after we strung together five consecutive wins, and nine in ten weeks. Lo and behold, I fail to join them for two weeks, and they splutter into a fifth and a third placing!

I could hardly afford to abandon them this week though I was quick to point out, tongue firmly in cheek, how badly they needed me, so I went for the quiz. Things got a little more complicated when Iris, an old friend from my ACJC days, ambled into the pub quite unexpectedly, having made a reservation to do the quiz. It was her first time there and she professed herself fond of 'trivia nights' as they call it in Melbourne where she studies. Oh, if there were only more ladies like her! I was sorely tempted to abandon the lads and join her team, but my loyalty held, and I stuck with them. Bros before Hoes as they say.

Given the return of the prodigal son to the team, it was quite inevitable that we triumphed this week and quite handily at that. It was a comfortable victory, apart from a round where we were forced to guess if individuals were dead or alive - far more difficult than one would necessarily think. In that round I made the gaffe of thinking Sir Roger Bannister (first man to run the four minute mile) dead - I had mistakenly thought they had a memorial service for him when I was at Oxford!

Afterwards, Iris, her sister and her friends headed over to Lau Pa Sat for supper, and I was quite happy to follow. It enabled us to catch up on our assorted acquaintances from our Junior College days and reminisce about the good and not so good old times. Come to think of it Iris is just the last in a long string of old friends who seem to be wandering into the Shoe. First it was a couple of old ACS(I) friends, then it was Edwin, Julian Han and of all people Sheryl Tan (a classmate from my first three months in JC) who popped by the Shoe the week I was the quizmaster. It was wonderful to see them all again, especially Sheryl who seems far more talkative now than I ever remembered her to be (but then again she was the quietest person I knew). So old friends in a familiar setting, perfect all round.

A Walk in the Rain

2008-09-30T23:37:00.002+08:00

I had decided to join my parents, and my uncle at Lunar since it was the eve of a public holiday. The usual suspects were there - Kent, girlfriend in tow and an assorted group of his friends who proceeded to more or less take over my Uncle's usual table; Edmund; and Yanni, a friend of Kent and his girlfriend. It was the birthday of Darren, one of the managers at the club, who has treated my uncle marvelously, and judging by the number of well-wishers he was well-liked indeed.

The real adventure began when we decided to leave for home at around 3.45 am. Clarke Quay is never the best of places to attempt to get a taxi on any occasion. On the eve of a public holiday it turns into a mess. To make matters worse, it was raining rather heavily, thus affecting the number of available cabs. The taxi queue was long, and it wasn't moving, the phone lines were jammed as everyone in the vicinity was attempting to call a cab, and in short the situation was quite hopeless.

I thus attempted to cross the road to flag a cab instead of waiting hopelessly in the queue. Despite waiting in the rain for the better part of a half hour, it proved a rather hopeless situation. There were scores of people lining the roadside, some walking a good 500m down the road in either direction. I later heard that my uncle had walked all the way to the City Hall area in order to get a taxi. I finally gave up, only to find on my return that my parents had disappeared from the queue and had somehow managed to get a cab.

Seeing that joining the queue (which had ballooned even further) was a hopeless scenario, and I didn't have a handphone with me to attempt to call a cab (which was probably hopeless too), I decided that I might as well go for a wander. All the better if I were to find a late night kopitiam for supper. So I started off in the rain, which didn't bother me one jot as I had already been pretty much soaked through. It was definitely interesting, and somewhat surreal wandering off aimlessly, in the pouring rain, with no particular direction in mind, in an area linking Clarke Quay and Chinatown that I had not seen much of previously.

In the end, sadly, I only passed one deserted coffee shop, before locating a 24-hour McDonalds which served breakfast. So it was a Big Breakfast for me at five something in an already bustling McDonalds. I then found myself just a few steps from Chinatown MRT station and I took the very first train of the morning home, finding myself with an interesting assortment of early birds - night workers returning home, some office workers getting an early start, teenagers (why are teenagers always out and about) headed somewhere, probably some of them having gone through a night of revelry.

There was something perhaps oddly magical about it all, the warm fuzzy glow that comes about after imbibing a few whiskies, the almost familiar patter of rain, lessening in intensity but still falling, largely deserted streets haloed in street lamps, and the sense that at this moment, at least, you are free to glower, and to laugh at the world in turn, perhaps even simultaneously.

Faldo's Failure?

2008-09-22T23:35:00.001+08:00

Following Europe's heavy defeat in the Ryder Cup, Nick Faldo has come in for some heavy criticism. As the team captain responsible for making a number of key decisions, it is inevitable that his tactics and selections have been called into question in the wake of the defeat. It seems to me that Ryder Cup captains in general, and Faldo in particular, are often blamed, justly or unfairly, when their team loses. Ultimately, it is the players that win (or lose) the Cup out on the course, and in this instance there is little doubt that the Americans were just better on the weekend.

That isn't to say that the Ryder Cup captains do not sometimes make the most bizarre and baffling decisions. Hal Sutton's decision to pair Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson together despite the fact that they clearly loathed each other springs immediately to mind. In such instances, criticism of the Captain is justified. However, I believe that most of the decisions that Nick Faldo made at Valhalla were fairly sound. For the sake of argument I will go over them and other factors that might have led to the European defeat:

Wild Card Selections: Faldo was heavily criticized for his choice of Ian Poulter as a second wildcard over Darren Clarke. Poulter however, by scoring four points (which could easily have been a full five had he and Justin Rose not thrown away their foursomes match on the first day) has more than justified his selection. Any criticism now that Clarke, or Monty or anyone else might still have been a better pick seems spurious against the fact that Poulter turned out to be by far Europe's best performing player. Monty was seriously out of form and it is doubtful that his erratic play would stand up to Ryder Cup pressure. But all that is speculation. Poulter and Casey were chosen, they played well (especially Poulter), and it is facile to criticize Faldo in this regard.

Resting/Dropping Garcia and Westwood: Faldo was criticized for dropping Garcia and Westwood for the fourballs session on the second day. There seems some merit in this criticism given Garcia's tremendous fourballs record - he has never lost a fourballs match. Garcia and Westwood have also done tremendously well together in the fourballs in the past. However, I believe that Faldo did make the right decision. You have to choose your pairing based on how well the players are playing on the day, not their past record. Garcia and Westwood were not playing at all well (they failed to muster a single win between them throughout the Ryder Cup). Garcia's fourballs record was only preserved on the first day when the American's threw victory away on the last hole. Besides, the session when they were dropped was the only one that Europe won. Had Faldo stuck with Garcia and Westwood blindly, he would probably be criticized for putting too much faith in his trusted guns and for an inability to make tough decisions.

Bottom Loading the Singles: Faldo was criticized for leaving Europe's best players at the end in the singles, especially when their matches became redundant after the Americans had sealed the victory earlier on. It is suggested that had he top loaded the singles, and put some blue on the board, momentum would swing Europe's way. However, it is first worth noting that Europe lost the Ryder Cup in the middle order, not the front, and also the fact that the singles pairings is a notoriously fickle exercise. Starting things off with Sergio Garcia (with such an excellent Ryder Cup record) is hardly a slouch, but Anthony Kim looked like he was game to beat anyone on the day. Some of the Americans were just on amazing form - Oliver Wilson played his round 4 under (through 15 holes) and still lost to Boo Weekly. With Europe behind, Faldo was gambling on his players pulling some points back early and his big guns being inspired into sealing the deal. Unfortunately, this did not happen. Still, I give him full marks for having the guts to try.

Lack of Assistants: Faldo was criticized for only appointing Jose Maria Olazabal as an Assistant Captain, and of being too egoistic to have more support which was important for a European victory. Faldo has been dogged by claims that he is standoffish and arrogant throughout his career. The crux of the question is whether Faldo's leadership style and his purported need to make all the key decisions affected the team negatively. Would having more assistants have helped? It would certainly have meant that Faldo could afford to have more people on the course monitoring play and offering advice or just a calming word or two to the players where needed. In my opinion, it probably would have helped Faldo to have an additional assistant or two, if only to reduce Faldo's immense workload, and to provide a trusted ear, where needed.

The issue with Faldo is, he probably wouldn't have wanted an additional advice. In the end, I think this issue had been played up too much - it would have been more significant had the Europeans had more inexperienced Ryder Cup players/rookies or if the rookies had wilted under the pressure. Instead, it was Europe's Ryder Cup old guard that failed to perform and you would hardly expect Faldo to have to mollycoddle them. Also, Faldo has his own style of captaining the team which should be respected. Seve Ballesteros before him was endlessly energetic - which extended to his offering advice while his players were out on course, including one occasion where one of the them proceeded to dump his next shot in the water. Faldo's style was different, a no-fuss assured style of leadership which I believe the Europeans responded to. Some players, notably Garcia, could have done with a more fiery, less phlegmatic style, but then again, not all of them.

There's No Place Like Home: The recent European success in America belies the difficulty of winning the Cup away from home, especially when there is a partisan crowd out in force. The crowd at Valhalla was most definitely partisan, though mostly in good taste (Westwood's complaints at Boo Weekly stirring up the crowd aside). Playing at home also gives an advantage in terms of setting up the course favourably to your side. The Americans certainly did that at Valhalla. If there was one factor that won or lost the Cup it was putting. The organizers made sure that the greens were slick and fast, which definitely favoured the Americans. Much has been made about the contributions of the American Ryder Cup rookies, about their enthusiasm, but the whole American team was buoyed by the crowd, which was a big X factor throughout the weekend.

So in the end, I would suggest, that the Americans won because they played better over the 3 days. That may be the most facile and unhelpful of statements, but that doesn't make it any less true. There is a understandable tendency in the wake of a defeat to dissect the decisions made, and engage in what if recrimination. This is especially the case with Ryder Cup captains. Perhaps we should give Faldo a break and in true Ryder Cup spirit, applaud the Americans for playing a marvelous weekend of golf.

Lord of the Rings Marathon

2008-09-12T23:22:00.000+08:00

I finally succumbed and bought the DVD Special Edition Box Set of the Extended Versions of the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Quite a mouthful, and indeed quite representative of the length of the movies themselves.

What better way to celebrate the immensity of the purchase (it set me back around S$130) than to hold a massive marathon movie session to view all three movies back to back (to back) in its extended format? I had previously attended a Lord of the Rings marathon where all three theatrical releases were shown through the night at a cinema in Oxford, but this would be the ultimate test, with all the additional cut footage bringing each movie beyond four hours in length.

Watching the extended versions of the movies turned out to be quite a fun game of detective work, as various people chimed in as to whether this or that particular scene was 'in the original'. It also presented an interesting view into the movie editing process, particularly in scenes which had been retained, but where specific shots had been cut or edited. It is a pity that some scenes had to be cut out, particularly extended footage of the Shire at the beginning of The Fellowship of the Ring, and the Houses of Healing scene in the Return of the King. The scenes involving the Mouth of Sauron were also immensely cool. One scene which I was happy to see cut involved Aragon in the Halls of the Dead, and involved Aragon, Gimli and Legolas running for cover to avoid being inundated by cascading skulls. That was Peter Jackson at his most B grade horror kitsch.

I must thank Edward, Vernon and Karin for staying all the way through the whole night, and Rachel and Hiankai for coming for portions of it. There is nothing like watching the Lord of the Rings with a group of fellow Tolkien fans. It was also something to watch the three movies together, as a seamless whole, which they are undoubtedly meant to be. Now, I have to start working on the three DVDs of extras, commentary, interviews and other footage, which should be an adventure in itself!

Mom's 50th Birthday Party

2008-09-07T23:05:00.002+08:00

It is a truism of course that you only turn fifty once (in fact that can be said for any particular age in your life), but celebrating a half century on earth is certainly a special occasion that calls for a huge celebration. Given my parents, and their ability to have fun, it was bound to be a memorable evening, as indeed it turned out to be.

The party was held at a small pub - Utopia 17 - near Chinatown which had been booked out specifically for the occasion. My dad had planned quite a few fun activities in advance, and among the festivities was a wonderfully creative lady that made balloon sculptures, a task where my mom had to find three people that matched her height, weight and waist size exactly, one where my dad has stuck five one thousand dollar bills in a glass bottle and my mom had to take them out, and finally a special salsa dance with a (supposedly) sexy dancer hired for the evening by Cat, a family friend.

The guests represented the diverse range of friends and acquaintances that my mom had accumulated over the years, including their current salsa group, a large group of clubbing buddies (both current and past), former students of my father's from way back (Jude, one of my dad's very first students), to the present (Grace and Luke), and indeed a former student that has since gone on to become a business professor as well (Brian). Some of my friends who have become well known to the family also came, notably Fergus, as well as Jasmine.

It turned out to be a very long evening indeed. After the club shut at 3am, the whole group ended up heading over to Dragonfly to continue in the revelry. We all ended up heading home at around 6am or so. The following afternoon was spent sorting through the gifts. Notable among them was the huge amount of alcohol - two bottles of whisky, one of martell, three bottles of champagne, and around eight bottles of wine. If we aren't already closet alcoholics we are well on are way to getting there given this haul! Grace and Luke were creative in giving my mom bird's nest (to be taken presumably the morning after big clubbing nights). So it was definitely a birthday to remember, even as 50th birthdays go.

Palin and Pregnancy

2008-09-02T23:36:00.004+08:00

As if her announcement as the VP candidate wasn't cause for enough surprise. It has just been revealed that Sarah Palin's 17 year-old daughter, Bristol, is five months pregnant. Bristol has decided to keep the baby and will soon be marrying the father. Both the McCain and Obama camps have rightly pointed out that this is a private matter that should be left to the discretion of the Palin family.

It is unlikely that Palin's appeal to the social conservatives will be damaged by news of the pregnancy given the decision of her daughter not only to keep the baby but to marry the father.
What Bristol Palin's pregnancy is bound to do is highlight once again the enormously high teenage pregnancy rate in the United States. What it should do is raise questions about the role that social conservatives (and the policies they advocate) have to play in creating this situation.

America has a startlingly high rate of teenage pregnancies. According to statistics cited by the BBC, around 750,000 teenage American girls get pregnant every year. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) that keeps tabs on such statistics has revealed that about one third of American girls get pregnant before the age of 20. Of these pregnancies, 80% are 'undesired' or 'occurring sooner than desired'. These are shocking statistics to say the least.

One reason that has been cited for the high teenage pregnancy rate is the social conservatives insistence on advocating abstinence only sex education, a policy supported by current President George W. Bush. Critics suggest that the statistics have shown that teaching abstinence is not only ineffective but socially irresponsible. The evidence suggests that a huge majority (around 90% or greater) of teenagers break abstinence only pledges, and worse of all, those who make such pledges are much less likely to use any form of birth control or protection when they do end up having sex.

Sarah Palin herself is a strong proponent of abstinence only sex education. In fact, she pledged during her campaign for governor that she would categorically refuse any funding for sex education programs in Alaska. To her, teenagers should be encouraged not to have sex, not how to protect themselves when and if they do. This is highly unfortunate given that Alaska has one of the highest teenage STD transmission rates in the whole of the United States. It does seem perverse that Governor Palin would withhold funding for a policy designed to give teenagers information that might help them to protect themselves from infectious diseases (besides unwanted pregnancy).

Bristol Palin's pregnancy is certainly not unique among American teenagers her age. Republicans are trying to present this as yet another instance where Palin has shown herself to fit the typical soccer mom image she identified herself with when accepting the nomination. That this pregnancy is so commonplace as to resonance with the average everyday American must be cause to cast light on Sarah Palin's policies on sex education.

Bristol is 17 years old, and she will soon find herself a mother, a role many would agree no 17 year old is really ready to face. The fact is that American teenage girls are sexually active, many at a relatively young age. It will be delusional, and more than that, irresponsible, for Sarah Palin to pretend otherwise.

Addendum: Nobody is questioning that the Palins gave Bristol all the support she needed when she found out she was pregnant. Still, feminists will be outraged at what to them is a shotgun marriage forced upon an unwitting 17-year old on the basis of throwback pre-women's liberation good as apple pie family values. There is of course also the possible influence that Sarah Palin, with her strongly avowed pro-life stance, had on her daughter with regards to keeping the pregnancy itself. Some commentators were highly bemused by the suggestion that Palin, a pro-life conservative, could win over Hilary Clinton supporters. There was little doubt she would really resonate with female voters. It was just a question whether the voters would delve deep enough to realize just how conservative she is. The pregnancy is bound to put that in the spotlight.

So 'Nice'

2008-08-28T18:24:00.003+08:00

I had an English Literature teacher who absolutely banned the use of certain four letter words in his class. Contrary to what you might think, it was not the common swear words or expletives that would set him on edge it was the four letter words 'nice' and 'good'. He taught a class on practical criticism, so it was common for him to hand out poems, or extracts from plays, have us read it and then, inevitably ask us what we thought of the piece. The fastest way to draw his ire was to reply that you found the poem 'nice' or that the poet's use of language was 'good'.

The problem with saying that something is 'nice', particularly a poem, is that to a degree, you aren't really saying much of anything at all. 'Nice' and 'good' are words that have been more or less leached of any specific context or meaning to the point where they only express generalities. Saying that something is 'nice' probably gives it a certain sense of warm fuzziness, but in practical criticism, and I would argue for much of writing, what is needed is a greater degree of precision.

I was reminded of my English Lit teacher's one man war on 'nice' when I encountered this extract from Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, which I am currently reading. Catherine Moreland, the main character of the story had just described a book she was reading as 'nice' only to be rather impertinently asked by her friend Henry Tilney if she meant its binding. When asked why she should not describe a book as nice if she finds it so, Tilney replies:

"Very true, and this is a very nice day, and we are taking a very nice walk, and you are two very nice young ladies. Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! - it does for everything. Originally perhaps it was applied to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement; - people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word"

I rather agree. Indeed, I could have hardly put it more nicely myself! Or perhaps, what I meant to say is I could not have put it more succintly, accurately, or comprehensively myself. So the end result of this post? Perhaps, using the word 'nice' is well, not so nice after all!

Saving Federer's Season

2008-08-25T23:30:00.000+08:00

It has been a very disappointing year by the stratospheric standards of Roger Federer. Having won at least two grand slams in every year from 2004, he has yet to win a grand slam this year with just the US Open to go. He was humiliated by Nadal in the French Open final, and worst, lost to Nadal on his own turf at SW19 in an epic final that denied him the chance of a sixth consecutive Wimbledon title. He then crashed out to James Blake at the Olympics though he redeemed himself by winning a gold in the doubles for Switzerland. Then, immediately afterwards, he finally lost the world No.1 ranking for the first time in more than 200 weeks, a serious psychological blow enshrining Nadal formally as the top player in the world, something that had been apparent throughout the year in all but name.

But has this really been such a disastrous year for Roger Federer? Perhaps only because he is a victim of the inflated expectations that his dominance of men's tennis over the past three years has created. No wonder that he gets along so well with Tiger Woods. But in a sense, this year has been a disaster because of the very lofty expectations that Federer places on himself. He believes that he deserves to be and is the best player in the world. This isn't the case anymore. It used to be a question of whether Federer could overcome his hoodoo with Nadal at Roland Garros. Now Federer must be asking himself whether he can ever beat Nadal, on any surface, period.

Let's put things into perspective first with regards to the US Open. Federer has already won it an unprecedented four times in a row. Nobody has managed that since the great Bill Tilden in the 1920s and nobody has ever done it in the Open era. John McEnroe won three in a row and so did Ivan Lendl in the 1980s but Federer has already set the standard in terms of his recent dominance of the tournament (it remains to be seen if Federer can match Lendl's record of 8 consecutive finals). History suggests that Federer can't maintain this streak. The fact that he is supposedly having a bad year and is more vulnerable than he has been in a long while, seems to point to a Federer defeat.

Which is why I believe that Federer will win this year's US Open. What Federer has going for him is that the hardcourt (particularly at the Grand Slams) is probably Nadal's least favourite surface. His previous best showing was a QF defeat to Mikhail Youzhny in 2006, hardly a stellar record. However, Nadal's semifinal performance at the Australian Open earlier this year (where he was defeated by a truly inspired Jo-Wilfred Tsonga) gives an inkling of how much he has improved playing the high bounce hardcourts of the Grand Slams. While the Wimbledon defeat to Nadal was galling, it was not altogether a shock (more pundits had actually backed Nadal to win). Nadal had reached the previous two Wimbledon finals against Federer and had pushed him closer and closer each time. If Federer were to meet Nadal at the US Open (and this can only happen if they both reach the final) it would rank as a far bigger shock to me if he lost than the Wimbledon 'upset'. That defeat, were it to occur, would truly be the final shattering psychological blow, but I don't think it will.

In fact, I will go as far as to suggest that Federer's biggest threat will be Novak Djokovic in the semi-finals. The Serb is oozing with confidence (though less so after a disappointing Olympics and US Open run up) and defeated Federer at the Australian earlier this year en route to winning his first Slam. He is also a smooth operator on the hardcourts and this is his breakout year. Amidst all the hoopla and the struggles with Nadal, the talk of rising stars like Djokovic threatening the established order, it might be easy to forget one thing - Roger Federer is a winner. He is four time defending champion. My bet is at this US Open he will respond like a champion and restore his pride. Discount him at your own peril.

Obama's VP Choice

2008-08-24T23:49:00.001+08:00

There is still considerable doubt in the minds of many commentators as to how important the choice of a running mate actually is to a prospective Presidential candidate. Nobody would dare suggest that it is a crucial life or death choice for a campaign. Still, there is a sense that it is vaguely important, and definitely warranting considerable attention. I believe that as much as Hillary Clinton supporters will be disappointed by Obama's decision, his choice of Joe Biden can hardly be considered a surprise.

To start with, in assessing Obama's pick, we have to first justify his non-choice. There was a significant portion of the Democratic party hoping for a 'dream ticket' of Obama and Clinton. Given that she took almost 48% of the vote in the Primary, is it a valid question to ask if Obama could even afford not to pick her. Will too many Hilary supporters be alienated to see her miss out? It is my opinion that it would have been a mistake for Obama to choose Clinton as his running mate. To begin with, the campaign was too long and too bruising for there not to have been genuine wounds and deep differences that have been exposed. Not grave enough to heal, but enough to make a joint ticket uncomfortable at the bare minimum.

Choosing Clinton would also have compromised Obama's core message, the basis on which he has driven his campaign irrepressibly forward - that of change - particularly given the Clinton ties to the political establishment. Change and Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton just does not sit at all well together, even if the latter Clinton were only to be the VP. Ultimately, Obama has to gamble on achieving party unity, and on Clinton being magnanimous enough in defeat. I am willing to gamble that after eight years of George W Bush and neoconservatives, the Democrats already have a powerful incentive to unity. Obama's ability to inspire will hopefully do the rest.

As for Biden, the pluses have already been noted right from the beginning. Huge foreign policy experience, including his position as the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, covering a major perceived weakness of Obama's campaign. A solid working class background that will appeal to a group whose support Obama needs to win. Biden's links to Pennsylvania, will be especially useful in what is widely considered a key state in the election. The negatives? Biden does have a reputation for shooting from the hip, but I believe that won't really matter all that much. The election is really about what the Presidential nominee says, not really his running mate, so long as the running mate does not make a completely outrageous statement or one that totally contradicts the candidate's stance. That won't happen with Biden - he and Obama agree on the fundamental issues (indeed more so than Obama and Clinton) and he is far too savvy and experienced a political operator to make a huge gaffe.