The mother of all business trips, or As long as I'm moving...

Friday afternoon saw the latest of a series of altercations with the boss regarding why we weren't making more of an impact. I told him for the umpteenth time that he really needed to start taking the US market more seriously, since breaking through there will give us the resources to hit the ground running in almost any other country (and we definitely don't have that yet). This time, though, he listened. I'm not sure why I got through to him this time where I was never able to before, but I did.

He agreed with me. And then he asked me to write up an itinerary for a two month trip to the US, starting shortly after the New Year. So, in January, it's off to San Francisco for a few weeks, then Las Vegas for a conference in February, and probably at least three other cities. I don't know which cities yet, but I could be visiting as far afield as Boston. The idea of traveling with my boss for that long isn't the most appealing thing I've heard. But for reasons that aren't important here, it would have been a big mistake for either of us to try to pull this trip off alone (and I was deeply afraid he was going to try), so dealing with him will be an acceptable price.

Whatever the drawbacks, San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, I've never been to Las Vegas, and I haven't been "home" in over three years. So this was quite the early Christmas present. Stay tuned for more details.

Just what are the Christmas-in-the-tropics blues?

Since I got in a bit of trouble on Facebook for saying I had "the Christmas in the tropics blues" (and I truly am sorry I made my friends in Denver read that!), perhaps I should elaborate a bit here. There's a limit to how much I can do so without betraying some personal confidences, so I'll have to be circumspect. Here goes.

I like Singapore, and I like my job. In this economy, I like just having a job at all, if it comes to that, but for the most part I really do like my job in its own right. But sometimes a job can't help but make you feel rather blah, and I've been working my way through a case of that this week. (I was quite sick the week before that, so that probably has something to do with it.) And yes, while a 30 degree C/90 degree F December is a hard thing for a guy whose other homes have included New Hampshire, Iowa, Colorado and Northern Europe to wrap his mind around, I'd rather cope with the weather here than in any of those places at the moment. My best wishes go out to those who are there now!

Here's where the circumspection (is that a word? it should be) comes in. Since I finished Part I of my novel last week, I finally got to work on Part II this week and it's off to a great start. But I wrote a really good line the other night that made for a rather stark revelation for me. It was something a lead character said about some of the choices he's made in his work- and personal-life, and after getting it down on paper I realized I was really thinking of myself. It made me think about my job and how things have gone in Singapore and certain decisions I've made since I've been here and the results thereof. And yes, it triggered a rather bad case of the blues. When I first came here, I wasn't at all sure I'd be here long, and if I had to guess as to whether or not I'd be at this company beyond the six month internship I had initially, I'd have guessed no.

But here I still am. For the most part, that's been all for the better. As I noted over a year ago, I'm a lot better off here than I'd have been at most other places I might have ended up working. The company has grown quite a bit, and things are looking very positive. Logically, I know this was about the best outcome that could have happened compared to the other places I looked into moving to.

Of course, not all in life is logical. I have always liked Singapore and I still do, but the place can be a bit oppressive in how businesslike and button-down it is, and it's also awfully remote from most of the people I care about. That has had its share of costs, and this week I accidentally brought a reminder of that upon myself when my art imitated my life. More than anything, I wish at some point I could have my career follow my life instead of the other way around. I guess there's no reason why that can't happen at some point down the road, of course. This too shall pass.

Yeah, I know this is one of the more self-indulgent posts I've ever put up here, and that it's also rather cryptic. Sorry about that. I just had to write it down for my own sanity at this point. And somewhat surprisingly, I do feel better!

Bess Lomax Hawes, RIP...and who knew?!

I'm sad to hear Bess Lomax Hawes died last week (I've been sick and also busy with other things, and hadn't kept up with the news), though I have to confess I'm a bit surprised she was still alive. Now, I know who she was, since her family is just as important to folk music as the Kennedys are to politics and because she was a member of The Almanac Singers. (That picture on the obituary, incidentally, is the only picture of them I have ever seen. It pops up every time they are mentioned. You'd think there must be at least one other one out there somewhere.) But somehow, I had no idea she wrote "Charlie on the MTA".

Actually, I had no idea anybody wrote it, if you will. I thought I read somewhere that the original version was a wire recording by an unknown male singer sometime in the 1940s. I suppose that could be true, actually, and the account I read simply didn't bother to mention that not only was the song's authorship known even if the singer of the earliest known recording wasn't, but that said author was a member of one of the most important families in American music. Strange omission, though.

I did know that she lived in Topanga Canyon back before it was taken over by rock stars (or even before there was such a thing as a rock star), because I've read about Woody Guthrie staying at her house on his last trip across the country, after he'd already been committed once. She apparently cut his visit short because of his habit of lounging around the backyard naked when she had little kids. How much more hip could a person be in the early fifties, huh?

Anyhow. There are a number of people I really admire for living a truly full life even if they never become household names, and she was one already. How strange that I didn't know that key part of her life story, though!

Every now and then, petitions do pay off...

Emma Thompson will remove her name from Polanski petition, and good for her! Already one of my favorite actresses...although my appreciation is tempered by the fact that she had to be talked into it. Still, great news.

Oh, and the elections?

Gail Collins nailed it. I don't have much else to add.

I will say that I'm less than delighted with Bill Owens winning in NY-23. He's anti-choice and uncertain at best on gay rights (the official Republican nominee was actually better on both issues), and we really don't need another Democrat like that in the House. Besides that, the whole thing did start with Obama nominating a Republican to be Secretary of the Army, which is a wonderful way to reinforce the already-widespread mentality that Democrats just aren't capable of handling national defense. But at least Owens is a dependable vote on health care, and I can't deny the symbolic value of picking up a seat that includes territory last represented by a Democrat when Ulysses Grant was president, not to mention that the Republicans are now down to two districts out of 29 in New York. It wasn't that long ago that they had almost all the districts outside NYC. That brings the total Republican share of the Northeast House delegation down to 16 out of 92 if I've counted correctly. Has the mainstream media stopped clucking about how Democrats can't win in the South yet?

Work updates, and an invitation

I do try to keep this blog focused on my personal life (stop that laughing - travel, politics, music and occasional angst about stuff in general...that is my personal life), but, well, there hasn't been much of one lately, as work has been quite hectic. No complaints there, given how hard it is to find a job these days. In any case, that, coupled with the fact that my job involves spreading the word about my company's services all over the world, has gotten me thinking I should put out a plug for those services here.

You'll notice I don't mention the company by name. Although I probably wouldn't get in any trouble for naming it here, I do want this to remain mostly a personal-issues blog, so I'd rather it not turn up on a Google search of the company name. But I can and will link to it here. I'd like to encourage everybody to create an account for yourselves. It is free for consumers, with no hidden costs whatsoever, and you can start saving information about your purchases (such as date of purchase, warranty expiration dates, and even saving a copy of the receipt) right away. At participating stores, they'll enter the information for you at point of sale and even register the warranty online. Odds are there are no participating stores where you are unless you live in Singapore; but if I do my job, there will be soon. Now is a great time to get in on the ground floor.

Note we also maintain a blog, on which almost all the recent updates are from me, so you can see I haven't been as silent as you think on the web lately! We are also on Twitter, and yes, all the tweets so far are from me. I hope you'll give us a try, wherever you are, as we will be reaching out to retailers near you shortly. (Next stop, the US beginning in December - I might even get a trip to San Francisco out of it, which you will of course read about here!)

It's October 29

...and Starbucks has its Christmas drinks out.

I'm rejoicing at the availability of Peppermint Latte once again, of course. But still, it's not even November yet!

It did give me a good idea for a marketing gimmick for the company. I'm going to see about setting up a registration drive at my favorite mall in the near future.

"Bowling" for the right to call it that

In these lean economic times, bowling is my one extravagance. Maybe I shouldn't really call it an extravagance, actually, as it's pretty cheap compared to most other ways I could be spending my spare time. But it feels like an extravagance for whatever reason. And I will bowl a 150 one of these days...but I digress.

The last time I went bowling, there was a party of three in the next lane. University students, I think. And they were bowling very, very badly. I'm not talking about people who are just learning how to bowl and are still hitting a lot of gutter balls (that still happens to me more often than I'd like!). They weren't even really trying. They were just tossing the balls every which way and not even always rolling them hard enough to make it all the way to the end of the lane. (Yep, just like Mr. Burns.) They did seem to be having a good time, so more power to them. But I do wonder why anybody would spend money on something like that!

Halloween isn't the only scary day in October

The good news about October thus far:
1. My work visa, which was set to expire in November, was renewed for two years. There was no reason to expect that wouldn't happen, but still, that it did is obviously good news.
2. I may have scored a big investment in our company. Last Friday we were one of five startup companies who were invited to address a meeting of a local investors' group. (The group claims we were chosen from a few hundred applicants - sounds like an exaggeration to me, but why should I argue the point?) Each company rep was invited to give a ten-minute presentation to the group, after which we left the room for half an hour or so before being invited back for lunch. At lunch, the event organizers notified us as to whether or not any investors were interested in us, and if so, we could expect to hear from them in the next two weeks. This time around, only two of the five companies got any interest from any of the investors - and we were one of them.

The bad news: the boss has been on a tear about something or other, and has been really ungrateful for all that has gone well as a result. I don't know just what he's upset about (I do have my theories, but it wouldn't be appropriate to post the details here), but it has made for a very unpleasant week when we should have been celebrating a job well done. The other day he actually accused me of "forgetting" to include certain information in our presentation to the investors, when in fact I had deliberately omitted it because the organizers had told me the investors wouldn't consider it relevant, meaning it would have been a waste of time. We had ten minutes, period, so it made no sense to include anything I was specifically told I didn't need!

I explained this in what I believed was a reasonably diplomatic manner, considering how absurd his complaint was. Believe it not, his response was that "the other presenters" did include the information he had referred to.

That's right, they did.

Of course, they did not get any positive responses from the investors.

We did.

But I should have done a presentation more like theirs.

Even Dilbert can't touch that. Geez.

The nobel prize

See here for my favorite reaction so far.

Since there is no Jimmy Carter or Nelson Mandela waiting in the wings this year, that reason sounds as good as any to me.

Generation gaps within a generation

I'm used to making music-references that go over the heads of people my own age. (The all time champ was the time in France when a friend came to a party with a painted-on mole on her face..."Just like Cindy Crawford," she explained. "Yeah," I replied, "and Peggy Lee had one too." Of course, nobody else in the room knew who Peggy Lee was.) But for some reason, I never see them coming, no matter how many times things like that have happened in the past.

So was I reminded yesterday while Gyle and I were waiting in a taxi queue outside a mall. After we'd been waiting a few minutes - which can seem a lot longer when you're outside on a Singapore afternoon and you want to go home - she commented on the cab shortage by singing. "Where have all the taxis gone...you know that song?"

I replied that I did, but it sounded to me like she didn't have the tune quite right. It took a few minutes of comparing notes before I figured out that I was thinking of "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" and she was thinking of "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" Oops.

LIQUOR RUINS COUNTRY, FAMILY AND LIFE

Well I've been walking through this country
And my eyes are open wide
And the things I've seen and heard
You couldn't imagine them if you tried
-Tom Paxton, "A Rumblin' in the Land"

If I am ever involved in making a movie that involves a high-speed car chase, I have decided I want my stunt drivers to be from India. Having witnessed the trifecta of Boston, Paris and Kuala Lumpur, I thought I was inoculated against shock at crazy drivers. But you ain’t seen nothing, my friend, until you’ve driven through Chennai. All the sightings of entire families on a scooter that used to frighten me in Taiwan? At least in Taiwan they all wore helmets and they didn’t take newborns on the scooters with them, with the mothers holding them while riding side-saddle. Unbelievable.

As if to drive the point home, on one of numerous trips with the drivers my boss hired for our stay in Chennai, I actually got laughed at for fastening my seatbelt. That, of course, just strengthened my resolve to buckle up. Either life is cheap here or everybody is a much better driver than it appears. Trucks share the road with barefoot pedestrians and nobody even blinks an eye.

By now you may have even guessed, if I were to describe Chennai in one word, it would be crowded. Very crowded. That’s not really a surprise, if you know anything about India, but you have to see it to really appreciate just how crowded it is. Definitely an eye-opener to any Westerner who hasn’t experienced the place before. If I ever bother with the Foreign Service Examination again (extremely unlikely, by the way), the experience I gained on this trip will be invaluable.

Before I delve further into my trip to India (my first), I feel I should add a disclaimer here. I have a long history of making people think I was miserable with certain experiences that I actually enjoyed quite a bit. I think this is partially because I don’t shy away from sharing the bad as well as the good (especially on trips like this that were not for pleasure anyway), and partially because some people just don’t get that there is a lot of gray area between love and hate. Lest I sound like I’m blaming it entirely on others, though, I’ve run into this issue enough times to know that I sometimes come across as sounding gloomy when I don’t mean to. So rest assured that regardless of what you might think after reading the following, I didn’t hate India. Far from it.

That said, Chennai is a very poor and crowded city. I saw an awful lot of people living and working in conditions most North Americans and Europeans (and most Singaporeans for that matter) could fathom if they wanted to, and they probably wouldn't want to. Anybody who goes to a place like Chennai and sees only nice things is probably not someone you would want to associate with, to put it bluntly. Although all our meetings were conducted in a clean and modern convention centre (and they went well enough), everything I saw from the car on the way to and from the hotel and the airport was, well, educational. That’s the most diplomatic word I can think of. Chennai is run down and badly overcrowded, and you definitely know you’re in the developing world.

But that’s where the definitely not-gloomy part of the story comes in. As is the case with most poor places (and I really don’t know why this is the case, but it usually is), the people there are remarkably nice. I noticed this on the one and only night the boss and I and our two local escorts went out to eat at a local eatery, the quintessentially Indian type of place where you eat with your right hand – sopping up the beans and sauces up off a banana leaf with vegetable bread – and keep your left hand under the table. That took some getting used to, but I was pleasantly surprised at the locals’ reaction to having a foreigner in their midst. (The boss is originally from India, though he’s now a Singaporean citizen, so I was the only one.) They treated me exactly as any other, except that they spoke to me in English (if they addressed me at all). Back in Taiwan, eating at a place like that always got a lot of attention, though I didn’t mind most of the time, and even in Singapore it sometimes does, even though there are a lot of white people here. Not in Chennai, surprisingly. We had apples for dessert, and I finished mine in the car back to the hotel. When I was finished, I held onto the core until we got back and I could dispose of it in a trash can. Our driver laughed at this (good-naturedly, to be fair) and told me I should have just rolled the window down and tossed the core out. “This isn’t Singapore or America,” he said, “You are in INDIA!” Yes, he was probably joking – but the roadsides in Chennai do in fact look like somebody’s wastebasket. Draw your own conclusions!

Another perk of staying in a city like Chennai is that you pretty much have to stay at a high-end hotel, since it’s either that or a flophouse. So I ate like royalty for all four days there, and had pleasant surroundings for the downtime between meetings. I finally got some work done on my novel for the first time in far too long, too. I love expense accounts.

The trip also brought me to Bangalore, and I was prepared for more of the same. I was pleasantly surprised, though. Starting with the spare but clean airport, Bangalore proved to be a lot more modernized and affluent than Chennai (though you still definitely know what country you’re in). Fortunately, this did not make the people I met any less pleasant to deal with, and the food was just as good. There is, of course, not a lot I can say about the meetings in public except that they went pretty well. There wasn’t a lot of time for playing tourist here either, but the guy I was meeting with did make time for a night on the town for the both of us. Sports bars look pretty much the same wherever you go. The more exotic type of bars do not. At one point in the evening we found ourselves in a swanky looking place with the tables and chairs lined up against one wall. On the other side of the room were lined up, well, a dozen or so young women in traditional Indian garb who stood there and smiled at you until and unless you pulled out a wad of rupees. In that event, the one you flashed the bills at would come over and talk to you for a few minutes. Think of it as chaste prostitution, I guess. No, of course I did not partake of this, but my business contact did. It definitely made for a good scene for a story, anyhow.

The business I was there to attend to was concluded by midafternoon on the last day, but my plane didn’t take off until quite late. That left about six hours to kill, and my contact took it upon himself to fill those with a tour of the local shopping mall (pretty lame by Singaporean standards, but hey, it’s a mall) and a welcome dinner...and, somewhat oddly from my perspective, a visit to his home to meet his family. One of those odd but pleasant cultural differences, I guess, and I am always curious about where and how people in the cities I visit actually live. It beat languishing at the airport all evening.

If I’ve counted correctly, I believe India is the 24th country I have been to. Not bad considering the number was three (USA, Canada and Denmark) just six years ago. And it had some of the best food of the bunch thus far!

Oh, and the rather discouraging title of this post? It was posted outside the hotel bar in Chennai, engraved on a plaque along with the bar’s license number and its opening hours. As an American, I found this perversely refreshing: my country isn’t the only one whose religious right has ridiculous pull in the government after all. The guys I asked about it in Bangalore had a similar reaction; they said their part of India was much more tolerant.

Sail on, Mary Travers!

(I actually wrote this the day after she died, but haven't had the time to post it until now, hence the slightly out-of-date comments in the last paragraph.)


I knew this day was coming the last time I saw Peter, Paul and Mary on television, which would be about three years ago. That didn’t make the news any less sad when I heard it, of course.

Some of my very earliest memories are of my dad singing me to sleep with “500 Miles” when I was a little kid. Nearly three decades later, I overheard one of my kids in Taiwan singing it. That shows how universal her music was, I suppose. There were plenty of other memories along the way, such as long debates with friends over whether or not “Puff the Magic Dragon” was about marijuana (it isn’t), and listening to then-new LifeLines all the time just before and after I graduated from college. The sentiment of “I could no more stop dreaming/than I could make them all come true” was all too fitting for that first leap out into the real world, which saw a lot of dreams go bust for over a year before I got on my feet.

With that bittersweet memory in mind, I cued up my favorite tracks from LifeLines and No Easy Walk to Freedom last night at the hawker center to accompany my roast duck and Carlsberg. It’s a good thing I was in public, or “I’d Rather Be in Love” probably would have had me bawling.

Thanks for the memories, Mary, and “don’t let the light go out”!

Teh Stoopid! It burns!

"Keep your government hands off my Medicare" is an oldie but a goodie...but is it the dumbest soundbite yet in the health care debate? Not even close. I give to you:

People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn't have a chance in the U.K., where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.

Words fail me.

Worth every damn bit of sacrifice!

As I discussed here and later here, getting my employment pass last year was a not-much-fun experience. (I'm currently awaiting word on a permanent residency application, but that's another rant and it really hasn't been that bad so far anyway.) At the time, the biggest saving grace I could find was that it was at least a lot easier than it was in France. But that really isn't saying much.

Coming back from another trip to Malaysia yesterday, though, I was reminded that it really was worth all the hassle. Having the EP entitles me to enter Singapore through the locals-only booth, where there is usually a very short line or none at all. The memory of waiting at the immigration office for two hours and trying to explain to someone who doesn't speak English that "certificate" and "diploma" are the same thing? That fades away. One less line to stand in at the airport? That's a gift that keeps on giving!

Gates and Obama

Drunk with the memory of the ghetto
Drunk with the lure of the looting
And the memory of the uniforms shoving with their sticks
Asking, "Are you looking for trouble?"
-Phil Ochs, "In the Heat of the Summer"

Patrolman Carlos Figueroa said in a police report that he heard Sgt. James Crowley, the arresting officer, ask for Gates' identification and heard Gates say, "No, I will not!" He also said Gates was shouting at Crowley, calling him a racist and saying, "This is what happens to black men in America!"

Yeah, and guess what? It is what happens to black men in America. Gates reacted in a way we now know was wrong, but he had no way of knowing that at the time. What he did know was that he was a black man being accosted by the cops in his own home, which was in a city with a long history of racial tensions. I'll bet not too many of the people who are wagging their fingers at him now have any firsthand knowledge of what that's like. (I have heard of at least one black cop who came to his colleague's defense, but I've always suspected the blue wall is quite a bit higher than the black one.) Obama probably should have kept his mouth shut until he knew both sides of the story, but give him this: he knows what it's like to be a black man in America, and specifically in Cambridge. He made a mistake, but it was an extremely easy mistake to make. Let's get off their backs already.

One of those things I never questioned

For as long as I've been aware of Woodstock, I've been hearing that a varying number of babies were born there. But the evidence suggests otherwise. Who knew?

For what it's worth, I don't buy the explanation the article offers:

There is a theory that neither mother nor child particularly want Woodstock to define their lives, and have chosen to keep their distinction a private matter.

I could see that being the case with the child, depending on whether or not his or her parents sold their VW Bus and became Republicans like so many flower children did, or whether they're among the even more annoying variety who are still hippies 40 years later - and either way, depending on whether or not the kid rebelled against them and to what extent. But the mother? Everybody I've ever met who was at Woodstock (or claims to have been there) never shuts up about it. And yes, that includes the ones who are now Republicans. People just love to tell how they went from one extreme to the other and you will someday too.

Truly worth the wait!

It's about time.

As I wrote elsewhere yesterday, I'm almost glad this turned out the way it did. On the one hand, I hate that so much money was wasted on the court battle when the outcome has been known for months, and I hate that we had to go through the motions on all this when everybody knew it was really just about keeping that seat vacant for as long as possible, and I hate that Sen. Klobuchar's office has been stuck with twice its normal workload since January.

But for all that, let's remember why Norm Coleman won that senate seat in 2002 in the first place. It was because the right wing s**t machine got away with some spectacularly cynical lies about what did and didn't happen at Paul Wellstone's funeral. I consider the whole episode second only to the Florida 2000 debacle. Yes, somebody in the crowd said something not very nice, but it was not the hate-fest it was made out to be at all. But the truth didn't get out until the damage had been done, as usual. As for those who do know the truth and still think the liberals were out of line, it's only fair to ask yourself, what if the shoe were on the other foot? Say it was Tom Coburn or Trent Lott who had died in that plane crash, and Wellstone had come to the wake...do you really believe every single person in the crowd would treat him with respect?

The pathetic thing is, I've met quite a few wingnuts who really and truly believe they would.

And as I noted in my post-election roundup last November, it was none other than Al Franken who set the record straight in his book, Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them. (Anyone who hasn't read that one yet, do it. Soon. Buy a new copy if you can find one; he could really use the cash right now!) So, although it's a shame he nearly lost the race to Coleman and that he - and we - had to wait so long for this day, I love the fact that he not only won, but that Coleman humiliated himself for months afterward trying to fight the results. It's an all too fitting end to a Senate career that began for the worst possible reason in the first place. (Okay, Saxby Chambliss gives him a run for his money on that front, but he's from a state famous for sending scum to Washington. Of course, having said that, I now have to acknowledge the inimitable Rep. Michele "Smalley-Hoot" Bachmann of...Minnesota. I'll quit now while I'm behind.) And then there's the delicious response from Fox News, which has started already.

Finally, a thought on whether or not we on the left ought to still be angry at Franken for almost blowing the race in the first place. Back in November when it looked like he'd lost, I recall a lot of grousing on the blogs that Betty McCollum or Tim Walz could have easily beaten Coleman. Overlooking the fact that we really can't know that for sure (and that Walz barely counts as a Democrat on a lot of issues and we'd have been lucky to hang onto his House seat), it occurs to me that even if that is right, it's partly because they're much more conventional politicians. Which means we couldn't expect nearly as much of them in the Senate. And yes, of course that means our expectations of Franken are now somewhat inflated after all that everybody had to go through to get him there. But why shouldn't they be? Besides that, Franken really is something of a pioneer when it comes to fighting back against the right wing s**t machine. He was doing it back when Bill Clinton was still kissing Newt Gingrich's ring, and the mainstream media was referring to Rush Limbaugh as a "conservative commentator" and other nice sounding titles that gave him a lot more credit than he deserved. I think we can count on him. Mazel tov, Senator!

Timing is everything

If you have to get sick in the midst of the swine flu pandemic, there's one silver lining. When I went to the clinic and said I'd had coldlike symptoms for about a week and they hadn't gone away, I was allowed to see a doctor much more quickly than I usually would! It wasn't swine flu, so there is that. It was a throat infection, and a day's worth of antibiotics later, I'm feeling somewhat better. It seems fitting that this happened during the middle of a move (which I had been greatly looking forward to, but still a move. They're stressful. More on that later.). Between the hassle of moving and the matter of my health, this week started out with it being a pretty safe bet that I would be a lot better off at the end of the week. It looks that way. I guess I'm also lucky that this came during a lull in business travel. The only thing worse than being sick is being sick and having to spend time in airports and on planes and in other people's offices.

Tonight will be my first night in the new flat, and I might even be able to breathe normally enough to sleep through it. I'll have some thoughts on the move shortly. Lots to tell there!

Wacko Jacko

Well, I didn't expect that to be the next way he got his name in the news.

Like a lot of people my age, Thriller was (I think) the first album I ever bought, though I am probably one of the few who got it on vinyl rather than casette (remember, it came out the year before the CD was introduced). Since then, like most people my age, I have gone from loving it to hating it and back to conceding that it is a gem of a pop album even if everything else about its creator was repulsive. At least whatever demons inspired him to such a bizarre lifestyle will not be doing so any longer. RIP.

Overheard in a bookstore

From a few students who apparently aren't poli-sci majors. One of them saw a Francis Fukuyama book and misread the author's name before realizing that's what it was..."Oh, I thought it said 'France Is F**k-a-yama'."

While basically meaningless, I do find that a refreshing response to the guy who predicted the end of civilization.

Dr. Tiller

Back in DC, I volunteered as an escort at Planned Parenthood on weekends for a couple of years before I went to Taiwan. I have avoided discussing that on here because I know some of my friends disagree quite strongly with me on that particular issue. But not now.

When I heard the news this morning, it was entirely too easy to believe. Some - not all, but some - of those folks are just gonzo. Take it from someone who has stood three feet away and listened to them chant and pray and compare me to Hitler, what happened in Wichita was sad, but it just wasn't that big of a surprise.

I have to admit that I do have some positive memories of those confrontations. When the weather was nasty, some of us on both sides had a sense of humor about the whole thing..."God must be on one of our sides, to make the weather this nasty for the other side," that sort of thing. Some of us on both sides also recognized that we were more or less cut from the same cloth, just opposite sides of it. It really does take commitment to turn up anyplace you don't really need to be at 7:00 on Saturday morning.

But still. The ones who said things like "Here come the SS!" when we went to shield patients from them, and then told us in the next breath about the love of Christ; the ones who told crying patients that "you should be crying because you're about to kill your baby," the ones who greeted young families entering the clinic by telling the kids "They're gonna kill your little brother!"; the ones who accosted black patients with their bizarre (not entirely off-base, but still bizarre) theories about Margaret Sanger and her racism...as Jerry Falwell said about people like me after 9/11, "I point the finger in their face and say, You helped this happen."

Random observations from a business trip to Kuala Lumpur

1. It's a shame when your boss invites you to indulge in room service on the company dime, but the hotel doesn't have room service for breakfast, only for dinner. (Who wants to eat dinner in bed? It just isn't the same.)

2. The BMW 760 is just as beautiful inside as out. Getting a lift in one owned by a client is quite an incentive to get out and sell more software, I must say.

3. Whatever images CCR's "Lodi" calls to mind, you probably never envision it sung by a Filipina in a red floor-length evening gown with a synthesizer for accompaniment. At least I never did, until now. But it was surprisingly enjoyable.

4. KL traffic really sucks.

5. Getting a ride to the airport in a KL taxi whose driver offered you a cheaper price than the train on the condition that he could get you there faster is a bigger thrill than any amusement park ride. But wear your seatbelt!

6. Singapore looks just a little bit cleaner and well kept every time I get back from anyplace else in the region.

Tuesday? Must be Indonesia

It hadn't really been bothering me until fairly recently, but my first anniversary in Singapore just went by in April with me having not left the Garden City since the day I got off the plane from Paris last year. That's a rather long time to stay put! But for the first several months here, I had plenty of time for a vacation but no money, and since I got promoted in October I've had the opposite problem. Like I said, though, it hasn't bugged me much. For one thing, I knew the job would involve lots of business travel soon enough.

It's started!

For good measure, I also managed a weekend getaway just before it started. The True Love is in Kuala Lumpur for two weeks on a teaching job, so I flew up after work last Friday to join her for the weekend. Some of my longtime readers will recall that my reaction to KL last time I was there was a bit underwhelmed. I liked it, but not nearly as much as I liked Singapore. That's still the case, but I figure that makes it the perfect destination for a quick getaway.

Of course, my perspective was a bit different this time around, now that I actually live in Singapore. The first thing I noticed when the plane landed? (Well, the very first thing was relief that I'd finally gotten there, as the plane was delayed by two hours. Airasia.com is great for the most part, but very cheap plane tickets don't always come without a non-monetary price!) But after that, the first thing I noticed was all the older cars. By "older" I don't mean "old". I mean "more than five years old and looking like it". Hardly anybody in Singapore ever keeps a car for more than ten years because of very high taxes levied on anyone who does, and Singapore is a much more affluent country than Malaysia. So I knew I wasn't in Singapore anymore when I saw all the not-old-but-older cars. The traffic in downtown KL was a pretty clear sign of that too.

But it was a most enjoyable weekend. I finally made it up to the observation deck of the Petronas Towers (the tickets were gone for the day last time I was there), which is worth the trip. You're only allowed up there for five minutes or so, but there's only so much to see and the tickets are free. The only real drawback is waiting in line for them. While we were in line, I overheard a group of friends behind us speaking French and was somewhat panicked to realize just a year after leaving Paris, I could barely understand a word they were saying. Imagine my relief when (sorry, Pat) I found out they were from Quebec. We got a couple of pictures on the observation deck, although I hated the way I looked in one of them. I really do need to practice my Photo Smile.

Then were off to do our share of window-shopping and fine dining at the slightly-different subset of Western outlets than that found in Singapore. One big advantage KL has over Singapore is that it's a lot cheaper. We also made it to lunch at the local Hard Rock Cafe - one of the less impressive ones I've seen, but at least I can say I've been there. (Amsterdam and Denver are still my favorites, and Paris gets an honorable mention because they have the guitar Jimi Hendrix played on The Tonight Show.) Finally, we visited a street market. I distinctly recall doing just that back in 2004 - it might have even been the same market - and finding the experience underwhelming because it was exactly like the night markets in Taiwan. Since there is nothing quite like that in Singapore, it was quite a bit more of a novelty this time, a welcome walk down memory lane. I also netted a badly-needed new laptop bag.

Wanting to maximize my time with Gyle and away from work, I had bought my return ticket for late afternoon on Sunday. Oops. Luckily the plane was on time this time around. Unluckily, that meant I got back to Singapore at about 8:00. That wouldn't be too bad normally, but I had some practicing to do for the first business trip, which was taking place Monday. So I went to the office at nearly 9:00 on Sunday night and made sure all the bells and whistles were working, only they weren't. Two phone calls and a lengthy wait later (it's a very good thing I like my job as well as I do), I had just enough time to go home and re-pack for Jakarta before bed.

The plane to Jakarta didn't take off until past noon, so at least I was able to make my trip back to the airport fairly liesurely. I got there in plenty of time. The boss, just as characteristically, got there at the last minute and then wanted to go over the website one last time in the terminal. Hey, I wasn't going anywhere just yet anyhow! As workplace drama would have it, we noticed one big error and had to use my personal e-mail account to get in touch with the office to have it fixed because the official e-mail didn't work in the airport for some reason. Then we were off.

Don't worry, the business half of the trip was great. Naturally, that was something of an afterthought to me as we landed in Jakarta, since I'd never been there before. One thing any Westerner who spends time in Singapore is likely to notice is that the locals are terrified of traveling in their neighboring countries. They don't quite say that, of course, but it's easy enough to see that they are from the advice they'll give you. Our marketing consultant warned us repeatedly about how to get through immigration without having to pay bribes by lying about certain things, and if you do get escorted into the back room, just pay the bribe to get out of harm's way, blah blah blah. As it turned out, I was almost glad he'd told us so many horror stories, because the reality was pretty bad (half an hour in line to get my visa!) but not that bad.

Indonesia's visas are among the more attractive ones I've had grace my passport. Pale green and white, and almost worth the wait. As for bribes and bullying guards, I ran into no such thing. More helpfully, we had been told to take only Bluebird or Silverbird taxis as they're the only trustworthy transportation services for foreigners. That, of course, is a pretty valuable resource in a place like Jakarta. Once again on the ride to the hotel, I was reminded how lucky Americans (and Singaporeans) are, as there was poverty everywhere. Nothing I hadn't seen before, but it had been a while since I had seen it. Needless to say, it was a fairly depressing sight and, even had there been time for any tourist activities (which there wasn't), would have taken away any desire to that end by the time we got to the hotel.

On a brighter note, the Hotel Ciputra is quite nice - I highly recommend it - and the local Bintang Beer they served in the lounge went well with our first, informal business meeting with a local friend of the boss'. (If you're thinking it was irresponsible for me to drink in front of the boss, guess who ordered the drinks in the first place?) That success had us both in a good mood when we went to the mall next door - complete with security checkpoints at the doors - for dinner. As it was still fairly early at that point, I might have gone out for a bit of sightseeing in a city I was more familiar with. But not here.

The big meeting was the following afternoon, which meant I had all morning to practice, and practice I did. For an hour or so. The rest of the morning was spent sipping sparkling water and waiting for the boss to turn up. We finally got down to business after lunch. The hardest thing about the meeting was finding the office where it was to be held, which was in a strip-mall where tourists don't usually go. Our first official off-site presentation went great, but there's not a lot I can repeat here (nothing too secretive - it just wasn't that interesting!). It was a big enough success that I will probably be going back there next month to finalize a deal. At least this time I'll know where to find the office. Maybe I'll get to the Hard Rock Cafe then too.

We'd had some concerns about getting back to the airport in time during rush hour, but they were unfounded. (Traffic was awful, but it wasn't very far to go.) Getting out of the country proved a lot easier than getting in, something I hadn't been expecting for some reason. So the first business trip was a pretty good one. I finally got what I signed up for.

"Misquoted", "Misconstrued", What do they REALLY mean, then?

(Cross-posted at Daily Kos)

If you've read the Salon article about the tea parties by now (and if you haven't, you should), odds are the line borrowed for the title has stuck with you: "On 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building." It's kind of hard to even begin to think of how to respond to that, or to even try, isn't it? In an article full of outrageous and sometimes disgusting comments, that one really stands head and shoulders above (or below, as it were) all else.

But it's not the most telling line in the story. Close, but not quite.

To me, what's most telling is the way the guy who said that prefaced his shocking comment. Here's the whole remark: "I love my country and I don't like what's going on. Government -- to be honest with you, and this will probably be misquoted, but on 9/11, I think they hit the wrong building. They should have gone into the Capitol building, hit out, knocked out both sides of the aisle, we'd start from scratch, we'd be better off today." (Emphasis mine.)

"This will probably be misquoted but". I read and re-read the quote several times, both on its own and in the context of the article, and I was never able to make any real sense of that. How on earth could he expect that comment to be interpreted as anything less than outrageously offensive? The crazy thing is, it probably made perfect sense to him that as long as he attached that disclaimer, he could claim that he wasn't actually saying...well, exactly what he clearly did say. And of course the FoxNewsMax crowd would get it as well. If we say the guy called for destroying the Capitol and killing every member of Congress, well, we're a bunch of namby-pamby liberals and we're misquoting him just like he said we would! As for what he really did mean, well, I couldn't even formulate an educated guess on that one.

But the quote stuck with me all the same, because it sounded familiar. I couldn't quite place where I'd heard that trick before, but I was pretty sure I had. It took a while, but I remembered. Rep. Sue Myrick, R-NC used it to great effect back in 2003: "You know, and this can be misconstrued, but honest to goodness (husband) Ed and I for years, for 20 years, have been saying, `You know, look at who runs all the convenience stores across the country.’ Every little town you go into, you know?"

Okay, so it's not surprising that two right-wingers used the same offensive rhetorical trick six years apart. Or maybe, it is surprising that it's only happened twice in that time (that I've noticed at least). It is, however, telling. Once I remembered the Myrick quote, I found myself also recalling how at the time, I wondered what she could possibly mean by "misconstrued" and I also wondered how that comment could possibly be construed in an inoffensive way. I couldn't think of a way then and I still can't.

Now that I've seen it twice, it's got me wondering if it's a form of dog-whistle politics. "I'm going to say something indisputably offensive, but first I'll warn you that it 'could be interpreted as being offensive' without actually quite saying that, so when The Liberal Media calls me on it, we can say 'Well, he/she told you it could be misinterpreted'." What do you all think? Have you ever heard anybody try to justify those comments, or offer up an inoffensive interpretation, no matter how implausible? Has this actually been going on for decades and I just never noticed?

(Halfway through writing this, it occurred to me that Jerry Falwell's "apology" for his comments about 9/11 sort of fit here too. But he really just implied the "this could be misinterpreted but" rather than saying it, and he only even did that after being rightly criticized for his comments, not while he was making them in the first place.)

Minor complaints

One of the few good things about a long streak of bad luck is that you realize that a lot of annoying things just aren't that important. Since things have turned around pretty well for me since last year, that means I'm easily able to recognize that the right to complain about minor things is really kind of a luxury. Since I haven't had much to say on the blog lately, now is as good a time as any to note a few such things I've noticed about my current home. As with every great place to live, not everything is great. But close enough - usually.

Probably the ultimate Singapore stereotype is that people here are excessively slavish to the rules, down to the letter and common sense be damned. It's always "do exactly what you're told - even if it's not really what you're told after all." I was reminded of this recently when I ordered a coffee at Starbucks. The barista apparently rang up an iced coffee when I had not ordered it iced. When I got to the other end of the counter, the guy there called "Grande iced coffee!"
"I ordered a hot coffee," I told him.
"No, it says iced!"
Oh, well then, my mistake!
I did get my hot coffee, so no hard feelings. But geez.

Life here is extremely efficient, too. Sometimes that means details get lost in the hurry. Sometimes it's worse than that. While out to lunch a few weekends ago, I gave the waiter my order and noticed that he kept jumping in with an "Okay!" before I was actually finished with each part of the order. I knew without a doubt he was going to get something wrong, since he obvously wasn't really listening in his haste. Sure enough, when the drinks arrived, I could see something was wrong. I had ordered two sparkling waters. The sparkling water at that restaurant (like most) always came in bottles, but he had two glasses of what looked like sparkling water.
"Last time, I got a bottle..." I began to enquire.
Again, he was super-quick to the draw. "No! Always in glasses!"
When he'd set the glasses on the table and gone off, I figured out what didn't add up. It wasn't sparkling water, but Sprite. Same first syllable, you see, and he simply hadn't listened to the rest of what I said.
Once again, I did get what I really wanted in the end. But how frustrating is it when you see a problem coming, sense that something is off and try to ask about it, and still end up with a mistake? I was, of course, soon laughing it off as another distinctively stereotypical moment. And I was ever so slightly relieved the waiter had let me speak long enough to explain his mistake. I did have to talk fast.

This one isn't unique to Singapore, but is especially common here with all the malls and hawker centers: I really do not like it when people "camp out" on tables at food courts, leaving their umbrellas or packs of napkins or such to stake their claim to the table while they're off getting their food. I get that it's a competitive society and you've got to do what you've got to do. What does bug me is that someone often gets a table ahead of someone who actually got there first but got straight in line for food. If I get there first with my lunch, that means I probably got to the food court first, which means you can wait your turn.

Not a complaint, but a rather interesting observation: the local Borders accepts Brunei currency. I'm not sure why I find that interesting, but for whatever reason, I do. Last time I was there I asked the cashier if they get much of it, and she said they do. They don't accept currency from Indonesia or Malaysia, even though they're both much bigger and somewhat closer.

To err is human, to forgive divine

...but nobody ever called me divine.

Some of you probably remember my rather nasty romantic misadventure a while back. My wounds have healed, of course, and I'm now happily involved with someone else. I don't know what she's up to now and I wish her no ill will. That said, I haven't forgotten how crushing it is to meet someone perfect for you, only to learn she'd rather be with someone she really ought to stay the heck away from. (Yeah, I know, that means she's not perfect for you by definition. Consider it the curse of a really wonderful first date...it does inflate expectations!)

In any case, that experience has had a couple of lasting impacts on me, like any sordid affair will. One of those is that when I hear stories about people messing around with their bosses and ending up in big trouble, I feel a lot less sympathy and a lot more schadenfreude (sp? - hey, I speak French, not German) than I used to. Even in cases where I really know I shouldn't laugh or feel anything but sympathy. Like this one, from right here in Singapore.

I want to feel bad for the both of them. But I keep thinking of what my best friend back in DC used to say when his prudish girlfriend hassled him about his fondness for South Park: "I don't want to like it, but I do!"

Exactamundo.

Truly a long, exhilarating, exhausting, stressful yet relaxing, poignant, wonderful weekend

We were wild and young and willing
We still are in some ways
And every now and then
We still have one of those good old days
It makes me proud when I think out loud
About lovers and dreams and songs
How it always kept me going
And the best ones are never gone!

-Keith Sykes, "Those Were the Days"

I don't know why things can't balance themselves out a bit more in life. But at least when I get hit with one truly crummy thing after another in rapid succession like I did a year and a half ago, it's entirely plausible to think when things do finally get better, they'll get a lot better. Such were my thoughts at some point or other this past weekend, when I really didn't get a lot of time to think because I was busy with both work and play.

First, the news I'm sure you were all waiting for. Our product is out, and it's a hit. Well, at least it's a hit with the crowd that's been exposed to it thus far. We introduced it in a promotional event at an electronics store here over the weekend, and without sharing more information than I should on my personal blog, I can say expectations were surpassed. Actually, we didn't just surpass our goals, we destroyed them. It wasn't even close, as I feared it might be right up until about an hour and a half into our promotion, when our first batch of customers appeared. I had planned to keep track of them by hand, simply marking off each person who signed up. That seemed plausible for the aforementioned first hour and a half, when nobody showed up. But once people did start trickling in, that proved impossible as they were just coming in too fast to mark off one by one.

It didn't let up all weekend. By late Saturday I had perfected my "sales" pitch, and by Sunday our paid helper was doing it at least as well as I was, which gave me a chance to breathe a bit. (I put "sales" in quotes because we weren't actually selling anything. Our product is free for consumers. But the more popular it is with consumers, the easier it will be to sell it to companies, which we'll be doing pretty much immediately now that it's out.) It's just the beginning, but what a beginning it was!

On a directly related note, a few of our ads are now officially out. Have a look at my favorite one here...and yes, that is me telling her to look on the back of the refrigerator for the serial number.

Somewhere in the midst of all that, I managed to squeeze in a Saturday night out with an old friend and his wife who were in town on their way to Bali. Monday found me with a well-deserved day off from work because the event had gone so well, so the three of us were free to play tourist (well, it was playing for me at least) all over Singapore. I finally got around to having a Singapore sling at the Raffles Hotel (which I made a point of not doing last time I was there), financed in part by the cash bonus I got for a job well done over the weekend. (They're not cheap!) That event led to what must be the gayest photograph I've ever been a part of, but Pat and I have knocked around enough to be okay with that. I wish I could link to a few of our greatest hits, but I was not so far ahead of the curve to be blogging in 1999. Let's just say Slurpees, Niagara Falls, a certain Dixie Chicks song, various past- and future girlfriends, styrofoam, late nights and a lot of caffiene can really inspire some terrific memories, from DC to Paris and now to Singapore. I'll have to see about posting a copy of that picture here when I get it. But that was merely the most amusing moment of a long day full of such moments. It's remarkable how easy it can be to renew old bonds once they're established. It all ended with the best night's sleep I've had in months, partly because most of the stress from work was gone for a change and partly because I was exhausted from all the walking on Monday and the talking over the weekend. All totally worth it!

Every now and then, I wax excessively poetic about the plight of the expat, and how it can be rough having friends all over the world and so rarely getting to see most of them, while so many of my friends have settled down. The upside of that is that when we do get together, some truly wonderful times usually ensue. They certainly did this time. The fact that it could all happen in an exotic locale thousands of miles from home is just icing on the cake, I suppose, but I do like icing. Thanks for the memories!

What happens when a humanities major works with an office full of engineers

It's a common stereotype that engineers are inarticulate and extremely literal-minded. (Apologies to Brent, Pascale et al if you read this...you'll see what I'm getting at, I promise!) Stereotypes exist in the first place because some people fit them. So I was reminded the other day while driving back from a business meeting with my boss and a colleague.

I was trying to do a verbal run-through of how a consumer would sign up for our service (which is finally being unveiled this weekend - yay!). "Let's say I'm buying a computer, and I already have an account with [our service]" I began.

The boss cut me off. "How did you sign up for us?"
"On a computer, like everybody else."
"But you're buying a computer now!"
"Right."
"Then how did you sign up if you didn't have a computer?!"
I laughed. He didn't. "I signed up on my old computer," I finally said. That seemed to satisfy him. I resumed my hypothetical case. "So I'm buying a computer and I have an account with us-"
Now it was my other colleague's turn to butt in. "Nobody has an account with us yet, David," he explained in a very serious, matter-of-fact tone. "We don't go online until this weekend."

You think he was joking. Nope.

I do like my job, really. The minor issue of being right-brained in a room full of extremely left-brained people is usually no big deal, and it's probably good for my job security. They need someone who can explain what we do in language a non-techie can understand, and I've gotten to be quite good at that, and they know it. Just that it can occasionally be exasperating.

Luckily, I got a taste of this back in France. I wasn't aware of it until partway through my second semester there, but I had something of a reputation for being "the literary one" of our class because of my unorthodox-for-HEC educational background. It popped up now and then in the form of suggestions that group-projects be done in my room because "Dave has all those books that'll inspire us" (just by virtue of their presence on my shelf, you'll understand) or my popularity as a resume-proofreader. As it was usually an enjoyable occurrence there, it proved to be a good preparation for the unintentional absurdity that occasionally happens here!

The good and the just okay

I've been meaning to put up an update of what's been going on at work, but I've been putting it off until something really big happened. The good news is, that's getting closer all the time. The bad news is, I've been saying that since October.

A bit of a recap: I've been a bit vague about what I'm actually doing in Singapore, mainly because I shared a bit more than I should have about my internship back in Luxembourg and I don't wish to make that mistake again. (Then again, maybe it's just that the company back in Luxembourg was one messed-up place all around and I should have shared more stories about how that was the case. But I refuse to dwell on that false start now that I've successfully moved on. Anyhow.) Also, there wasn't a whole lot to report at first. It's a software company, and I'm doing marketing and strategy. I'm hoping to branch off into finance eventually, and for the time being I get to handle that too as there isn't a lot to report as far as finances are concerned. Our flagship product has been in development stages since before I started, and the original release date was set for October. Since startups never run too smoothly, that date got pushed back to the end of February. I'm slated to oversee our official release event at a road show at a local department store here, which was going to happen this coming weekend.

That event has now been pushed back one more week. The good news is that it looks like this delay really will be the last one. It's really just as well, as preparations for the big event hadn't been going as smootly as they could anyway.

Frustrating? Sure. But with all the stories in the news about sky-high unemployment, I don't dare complain. I really don't want to complain much anyway. There's a lot of creative work in this job that I've enjoyed so far - everything from writing scripts for commercials to market research on exotic locales where I think we might be able to sell the software. So, yeah. No complaints. It's not what I wanted to be doing when I finished my MBA, but several of the companies where I did want to end up are now out of business.

More updates as they come!

Wish I'd thought of that

As my earliest readers might remember, my very first trip to Singapore ended with me getting stranded in Hong Kong for several hours. It wasn't a very pleasant experience, but I didn't let it bother me nearly as much as this woman did. By sheer patience (okay, and spending a bit more money), I ended up with a first class flight back to Taipei. Maybe this is the way to make that happen faster?

By the way, I have seen it suggested that maybe she had a legitimate reason for being distraught, such as having a sick relative she was desperate to see. If I find out anything like that was the case, I promise to remove this. But if not...okay, it still wasn't in very good taste to put this on YouTube either way. But as millions of people have said by now, "If you don't want it posted on the Internet, don't do it."

Suburbs, Asian style

In almost ten months in Singapore, I haven't had many occasions to visit what the locals call "the heartland." That's basically the northern half of the island, far enough from downtown that it almost feels rural in some places, but never too far from an MRT stop. Before this weekend, I'd been through the heartland on the MRT once, at night, so I couldn't see much of it because it was dark outside. The fact that I've only had that one trip through and I was only passing through speaks for itself, I think.

Yesterday, I finally visited it for real. The reason why is fairly odd (visiting a branch of the health club I joined to see if we could identify the branch from a picture in a contest set up by the club...yes, really), but I did look forward to seeing a corner of Singapore that had up to now held some mystique in the form of spots on the MRT mapp that I had never ventured very near.

Wow. I thought I had seen cookie-cutter housing back in the DC suburbs. I hadn't seen anything! Block after block after block of square apartment buildings all over the place, and construction of a few new ones here and there, and a shopping center at nearly every stop, looking more or less the same as the other ones, which look more or less the same as the one at my stop. But I'm glad I got to see it. As things continue to look promising for our company, I'm beginning to give some thought to where I want my next apartment to be once I can afford to choose a place rather than having it choose me. Up to now, I thought there might be a trove of lovely and cheap places out in the heartland that I hadn't even seen yet. There are a few that I could see from the train, but nothing to measure up to what's available downtown (and will probably be in my price range if current trends continue - prices are dropping everywhere). So at least I can mark a lot of places off my list now.

The health club branch wasn't the one we were looking for, by the way.

The rich really ARE different from you and me

Among the many ways in which I'm glad Bush isn't president anymore, there are several that sound funny at first blush, but if you think about it, they're really pretty sad. One of these - perhaps the biggest one, actually - is that I can now usually tell The Onion apart from real newspapers.

Usually.

I saw excerpts from this article on Daily Kos earlier today, and before checking the link I was sure it was some kind of joke. But the New York Times isn't known for its sense of humor. (Maybe you've heard the joke about the world's easiest job: the New York Times comics editor. All you ever have to do is say "No.") After reading the article and the blog it links to, I'm persuaded that these gals are somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but also that they're somewhat serious about it all as well. For one thing, it really isn't very funny to pretend you're as shallow and materialistic as the image they're presenting. So they're probably sincere about it.

Disgusting, yes, but I found myself feeling oddly relieved after reading it. Of all the many, many times over the past several months that I've been glad I didn't end up working at a bank, this has to be the strongest case yet. The idea of ever getting anywhere near that community...ew. That's all.

The thing is, even if I did find myself on Wall Street, odds are I wouldn't have ever been mixed up with anybody like that. I'd have worked with them and perhaps gone out for drinks with them occasionally, but I'd never have actually been one of them. There's something intangible that means you're either one of them or you're not, and no, being a Yale alum does not automatically put you in the club. In fact, it marks you out in a big way at Yale - somehow, everyone can tell whose grandfather was a senator and whose grandfather was a jukebox repairman. Not everybody cares, but everybody can tell. And of course, some do care. The ones who whine about how busy their still-employed boyfriends are in the New York Times are among those who do, needless to say.

Thank heavens for my unglamorous but recession-proof job and for a girlfriend who makes slightly more money than I do!

I always expected this in Paris, but here?

At the gym last night, I noticed one of the TVs was showing The Price is Right. I was watching one of the other TVs, with a talk show about the inauguration, but during a commercial I looked over at The Price is Right. They were in the midst of the Showcase Showdown, and one of the prizes was...a trip to Singapore.

I'm sure they do have some kind of backup plan for cases where a prize would be inappropriate like that, but it seemed pretty funny to me all the same.

Let the whining begin

If you're anything like me, you might be wondering what the first round of "the Liberal Media is shilling for Obama" was going to be. (First after the inauguration, I mean - I know they've never really shut up about how the media was in the tank for him throughout the campaign either.)

I just found out. Perhaps not surprisingly, it came from one of that odd breed of wingnuts who think Bush's only problem was that he was too liberal. In any case, the issue at hand was Obama's line in his inaugural speech about being the 44th person to take the oath of office. He's really only the 43rd (Grover Cleveland was only one person, after all), and well, if Sarah Palin had said that, why, The Liberal Media would be all over her for how stupid she is!!

For what it's worth, I have always believed we should stop counting Cleveland twice. But right or wrong, that's how it's been done throughout my life and for quite some time before, quite possibly since 1893. I don't recall anybody making an issue of the frequent references to Obama's indisputably stupid predecessor as "Bush 43," or his indisputably arrogant father calling him just "43". (He also reportedly sometimes called him "Quincy," which is at least a bit more clever, but also disrespectful to the best ex-president we ever had, who really does not deserve to be compared to Mr. I-Don't-Recall-Any-Heaviness-Ruining-My-Time-At-Yale. But I digress.) If this is the best the right wing s**t machine can do against Obama, the next four years ought to be a lot of fun. It'll be interesting to see if anybody takes this the least bit seriously. Sad to say, I wouldn't be too surprised if some people do - what else do they have to work with at this point?

My comeback to the above, by the way, was to suggest that Sarah Palin probaby doesn't have the foggiest idea how many presidents there have been. It almost makes you wish someone would ask her..."Oh, well, y'know, I know about the presidents. All of them. I think it was Ronald Reagan who said 'give me liberty or give me death,' you know, and up here in Alaska we take that serious and we take our presidents serious, you know? By golly, I don't care how many presidents there were, I'm runnin' for the future and my children's future!"

By the way, Cleveland's service as president was interrupted in the first place because of a dirty trick that could have taught Karl Rove everything he knows. Somebody duped the British ambassador into endorsing him, which cost him the usually-Democratic Irish American vote in New York, and he won the popular vote but lost the eletoral vote. Lest anybody think the right wing s**t machine and its love for exploiting ethnic tension is a modern-day phenomenon...

Is this heaven? It ain't Iowa...

You've probably heard at least some of the fuss about all the inagural balls in DC. I decided to stay over here in the tropical sunshine, though, because I couldn't get tickets to this ball...

So that's why they made playlists...

Last Thursday was a really good day at work. I'm not at liberty to go into details about it right now, but things are looking pretty good for our company and for me starting in a few months. To celebrate, I went out to dinner after work. So it was pretty late when I got back to my place. No problem there, as I had my beloved iPod to keep me company, set on Shuffle as usual.

Now, the Shuffle function can lead to some pretty odd segues. But anybody who has seen my record collection knows that's just how I like it. I've actually had some conversations that have led me to believe the variety on my iPod isn't all that extreme really. The strange thing about Thursday, though, was in the very lack of diversity of songs on the walk from the MRT back to my building.

I hadn't really been paying much attention on the train, because usually you can barely hear the music over the crowds - even at night. (Nothing in Singapore is ever not crowded!) Anyhow, I first noticed the odd phenomenon shortly after leaving the MRT station. Over 2,000 songs, roughly 200 of them by Jimmy Buffett (yeah, I know, big surprise), and from a guy who specializes in songs about parties and the beach, which one comes on at the end of a really great day? In the Shelter, the one about a runaway teenage smack addict who has just run out of luck. What are the odds? Well, I thought, it can't possibly get much more miserable than that, can it?

I had to go and use the actual word "miserable," didn't I? Next up? "Empty Chairs at Empty Tables." Yes, really. Literally and figuratively, plus miserable. Oh well. Now, remember what I said about odd segues? You probably aren't expecting the next song to be another showtune from a different show. I wasn't. I was wrong. It was "You've Got To Be Carefully Taught," from South Pacific. Is it fair to say that continued the depression-fest? Well, perhaps "depressing" isn't exactly the word for a celebration of racism, but...

I got to the apartment door just in time to hear the opening riffs of Pink Floyd's "Another Brick in the Wall." Part one, that is - not the radio-friendly one, but the slow and even-more angst-ridden one you never hear on the radio.

It was a pretty good weekend, in spite of the bad omen. Maybe I just need to make a happy-songs setlist, but I honestly didn't think my collection at large was quite that angst-ridden.

Now DEFINITELY ain't the time for your tears!

I've always thought "it's wrong to speak ill of the dead" only goes so far. Is it really speaking ill to tell the truth about someone who just wasn't a decent human being?

You may have heard by now that William Zantzinger, the real-life villain of Bob Dylan's Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll, died last week. What you probably didn't hear was the full story behind that one line tucked into the next-to-last paragraph of the obit, about how Zantzinger "later became a foreclosure auctioneer." Yes and no. What he actually did was become a slumlord in the 1980s. When he became delinquent on some property taxes, the bank foreclosed on some of his properties - but his tenants didn't know that, so Zantzinger continued collecting rent from them. When some of those tenants fell behind on their rent, he sued them for the back rent. And he won. He was eventually caught, and spent a year and a half in jail (three times as long as he'd spent for murder!). At least one account I've read of that case mentions that some of his tenants - in shacks without running water or plumbing - supported him at trial, saying they'd be homeless without him. Sounds like a variation on battered wife syndrome to me, but I guess that's beside the point.

As for his claim that Dylan's song is "a total lie," to be completely fair, it does get a few things wrong. Zantzinger's family did not "react to his deed with a shrug of the shoulders," nor was he released on bail "in a matter of minutes". But the main point - that he beat a woman to death and basically got away with it - is true. I guess you can't prove conclusively that his social standing and his victim's race were factors in the injustice, but it's hard not to connect those particular dots. (Tellingly, Dylan never actually mentions in the song that Carroll was black. There's absolutely no need to.)

I understand the rules about being respectful of the deceased, but I find it a bit disrespectful of his various victims that so much was not said in that obit.

Hope they do that for everyone!

Every now and then, the big question arises of whether someone here is especially nice to those who are obviously foreign. I probably shouldn't worry about it, since I don't go around trying to take advantage of anything, and besides, the issue probably swings both ways, i.e. the guy at the lime juice stand just might try to charge me a bit extra because I'm white. I actually did have a run-in with a lime juice hawker just last night, but I don't think he was racist, just not very bright.

In any case, my story of the week. The entire office went out to lunch on Friday at an Indian place - a very swanky and probably expensive one. (It was on the boss, so the rest of us never saw the bill.) The occasion was that our chief operating officer was in town. It proved to be a good way to get to know the guy. But that's beside the point. The point is, when the waiter came to take orders, we ended up all ordering a lunch formula menu sort of like they have in France. For the main course, I asked if they had my favorite Indian dish, chicken sagwalla (which I hadn't seen on the menu). He said no, but he could talk to the chef about it. I assured him that wouldn't be necessary and settled for chicken tikka. It was quite good, anyhow. But the formula included free seconds of anything we wanted. When I asked for seconds of the chicken, he brought out...chicken sagwalla!

Come to think of it, if there was a deciding factor in whether or not to go the extra mile for the picky American, it was probably that they knew our bill was going to be quite large and they wanted to make it worth our while so we might consider them for our next corporate lunch. I can live with that.

60 Signs you've been in Singapore too long

Eight months in, some of these make all too much sense to me.
(In the spirit of several of the following, I feel compelled to mention here that I did not write the list. It came to me in an e-mail.)

60 signs you've been in Singapore too long, especially if you come
from a Western country :

1. You know that "cum" means something completely different from what you originally thought.

2. You've lost your sense of irony, sarcasm, and cynicism.

3. You don't know what's lame and what isn't anymore.

4. You think there's nothing wrong with putting chili sauce on everything you eat.

5. You wait for instructions from people in authority before doing anything. Always.

6. You join queues without knowing or caring what the queue is for.

7. You know what "queue" means!!

8. You can type an SMS on your phone as quickly as you would if you had a regular keyboard.

9. Your idea of a good night out consists of having dinner at a hawker centre, drinking beer, and then going to another hawker centre and eating again.

10. You've lost your ability to criticize people in higher positions than you, even if they're wrong.

11. You would buy a $20 product you don't need if it's on sale for $10 just to save the money.

12. You forget to say the last consonant in words like "faCT", "aTE",etc.

13. You think it's okay to have only one meaningful choice on a ballot.

14. Every task you take on and every group you form is incomplete without a mission statement and a cheesy slogan.

15. You think that in a country where young people have little privacy, pornography is completely banned, music and movies are censored, students of the opposite sex in a dorm can't stay in the same room without open doors, and everyone works so much, that people should still want to get laid.

16. "Crossing the country" means taking the MRT to the end of the line.

17. You don't just know what "kiasu" means, you have become it!

18. You think that corn and beans are dessert foods.

19. You would cross the entire country all day to find the places that make the perfect fried noodles, or roti prata, or ice kacang, or chili crab. And none of these places would be close to each other.

20. You have a high tolerance for nagging.

21. Most or all of these acronyms make sense to you: NUS; NTU; ERP; SDU; PAP; MRT; LKY; GCT; PRC; TIBS; SBS; SMS; JB; JBJ; AMK; AYE; PIE; ECP; ISD; ISA; 5 C's; CPF; CHIJMES; SPG; CWO.

22. You use too many acronyms when you talk, or you create new ones.

23. You think that nothing makes a girl or guy more attractive than to dress exactly like hundreds of thousands of other girls and guys who all dress exactly like girls and guys in malls.

24. You think that $100,000 is a reasonable price for a Toyota Corolla and $1,000,000 is a reasonable price for a bungalow, but $5 for a plate of fried noodles is a barbarous outrage.

25. You believe that not being able to get decent roti prata outside Singapore is enough to keep the best and the brightest people from leaving.

26. You see nothing wrong with forming committees of select elite people to deliberate and study ways to stimulate creativity and spontaneity.

27. You justify every argument with the phrase "in order for us to be competitive in the 21st century".

28. You think everything should be "topped up".

29. You have a naive belief that the war against ants will somehow be won.

30. You don't think any dish of Western food is complete without baked beans.

31. You see nothing unusual about an organization of trade unions spending more time owning and operating supermarkets, drugstores, amusement parks, nightclubs, and financial services outlets than planning the next strike.

32. You believe that a lack of land is enough justification for the goverment to do what it wants.

33. You wear winter clothes indoors and summer clothes outdoors.

34. Durian and belachan no longer stink to you.

35. You like to have fun, but not too much fun, since you need to correctly gauge the amount of fun necessary to achieve the optimal result. Any more fun that that would bring shame to your family and your country.

36. Seven french fries with lunch are more than enough for you.

37. You forgot what a city organized around a grid looks like.

38. In a country where people use smart cards for public transit, you have no problem with construction workers riding in the open backs of pickup trucks.

39. You think paying $50 for a bottle of booze that costs $15 at home is a bargain.

40. You're not confused by a street naming system that locates streets like Clementi Road, Clementi Street, Clementi Crescent, Clementi Lane, Clementi Drive, Clementi Way, and Clementi Avenues 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 all within walking distance of each other.

41. You think that skinny girls and guys are the most attractive of all. (How did they get so skinny in the first place?? Do you know how much oil is in nasi lemak, char kuay teow, duck rice, and your average curry??--ed.)

42. You get irritated if you don't see a sign telling you how long your wait's going to be for a bus, a train, or the expressway to take you where you want to go.

43. You're certain that Holland Village is for hippie bohemian artist types and not overpaid yuppies.

44. When you cross the border into Malaysia, you automatically and deeply fear for your life and your wallet. Especially your wallet!!

45. You think that no vegetable should ever be eaten raw for any reason. Except for cucumbers.

46. No matter what you're doing at the moment, you'd rather be shopping.

47. No matter how miserable you may be here, you thank God you're not in Indonesia.

48. You're impressed by high-rise apartment buildings with actual lobbies instead of bare exposed pillars on the ground floor.

49. You don't have a problem with four different direct payment systems spread out over seven different cards in your wallet.

50. You forgot what chewing gum tastes like.

51. You say "handphone", not "cellphone" And you think there's no such thing as a handphone that's too thin.

52. You're not bothered by the fact that government cares whether you know how to use a toilet or urinal correctly. (People squatting on toilet bowls? What the...???--ed.)

53. You're sure that the best way to change social behaviour is through consistent and comprehensive government-sponsored campaigns that permeate as many aspects of daily life as possible. And when they don't work, you never speak of them again.

54. You think chicken floss, corn, mayonnaise, and tandoori spices are proper pizza toppings.

55. You agree that what the government thinks of your personal habits and lifestyle should determine whether you get a condo and how much you pay for it.

56. You've become a fan of either Arsenal, Man. U., or Liverpool when you barely knew what soccer was before you came to Singapore. And you don't care that none of these teams are Singaporean!

57. You think a bus is incomplete without a TV.

58. You accept that expressways here are cleaner than toilets rather than the other way around.

59. You know why this list needs the following disclaimer: "This list is intended only as an amusing, light-hearted, and exaggerated look at life in Singapore and is not meant to be taken seriously. There is no intention on the part of the author of this list to make any untrue, misleading, or defamatory statements concerning any person in particular, nor to make any statement intended to cause offense. If any such offense has been caused, the author apologizes and retracts the offending statement. In any event, the author's NOT WORTH SUING, so don't trouble yourself."

60. You understand everything on this list!!