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Behold The Cursed Cupcakes Of Cerberus

Work has been hell, but at least that provides me with a convenient segue into the rather amusing Black Oven (via Boing Boing). I'm not into baked stuff, but those Frostbitten Molasses Cookies Entombed with Ginger sure look tempting. "Packed full of grim and evil spices, they will leave you feeling despondent and isolated within their stronghold of flavor."

If you are still in the mood for dark delights, you are satanically commanded to read the Black Metal Dialogues and I swear upon Ragnarok which advances upon us as surely as rigor mortis inhabits a corpse that you will spew the apocalyptic laughter of the true spawn of Loki.

Hungry Eyes

At the Ponggol Nasi Lemak branch in Tanjong Katong, there is always a little cat that darts and scurries under and in between the parked cars in hope of scraps from the tables of the pavement diners. He keeps his distance and isn't as insistent as strays elsewhere can be, but there's no questioning what he's after. I took the photo on the left while waiting for Alec to bring back our plates of nasi lemak.

Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)

I picked up Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go in the library simply because it was a nice handbag-friendly size for my commute, but if (like me) you've lost track of Ishiguro's work since An Artist Of The Floating World or The Remains Of The Day, this one's worth a read.

NLMG reminded me how wonderful Ishiguro is at illuminating the silences between people, the myriad things that may come to your mind during a conversation but which, for all sorts of reasons, you decide to leave unsaid. I don't think I noticed this in his other books that I've read, but in NLMG he's particularly adept at bringing this to life in the interactions between women, or at least it's very true to my interactions with women anyway. I think he really skewers the things that can render even conversations between fairly close, caring and not particularly immature girl friends a mire of unvoiced resentments. Kathy is able to be annoyed with Ruth's various facades and disingenuities, while understanding (and sometimes appreciating) why Ruth puts on the acts she does. Ruth is able to engage in genuine and close friendship with Kathy while she continues, through knowing inaction, to deny Kathy a precious and irreplaceable happiness. Tommy, the third major character in the book, is also quite accurately characterised (as far as my interactions with guys go, anyway) as being more straightforward, less calculative, not completely oblivious to all that's going on between his two close girl friends but simply not wired to view things through the convoluted web of surface-vs-imputed-meanings that girl interactions have to be filtered through.

Do you know what I mean, or does none of this strike a chord with you? I mean the insecurities and disingenuities of your girl friends which chronically and acutely infuriate you, yet because you figure that they wouldn't be like this if they weren't fragile, you decide to be the bigger person and not crush them by letting on that you see right through them. But because you're not perfect yourself, you can't totally let go of your annoyance either, and it ends up colouring your interactions with them anyway, anything from throwaway comments which indirectly target an insecurity, to deliberate obtuseness when they're fishing for affirmation, to finally just limiting the quantity/method of your interactions. (I have girl friends who I like in person, but I don't like how they come across on their blogs, or vice versa, and other girl friends who are lovely alone but put on facades in certain social settings, so I sometimes try to pick how and where I interact with them accordingly.) Perhaps the dispassionate observer might wonder why you don't just cut off these dysfunctional relationships, but there's the rub - underneath all this bullshit you still like these people, you know they have good hearts, and you want to believe others will ultimately give you, too, the dignity of the holistic analysis, rather than write you off for your own annoying faults. And so we hold on to these relationships, and everything left unsaid represents the good and bad we can't let go of.

That was a bit of a tangent, wasn't it? Anyway, the point is that the major strength of Never Let Me Go, for me, is how consummately Ishiguro gets all of the above. Another of its strengths is how elegantly he unfolds the story, but it's a little tough to discuss this without introducing spoilers. If you pick this book up cold as I did without knowing much about it, I daresay you will be a little surprised initially at the opening chapter's hints about the central premise of its plot, and you might even be dubious about whether it's your sort of story - I was. But I soon found that this didn't matter, and (with apologies for being so cryptic, really) the third major strength of the book is how he uses the first strength to illustrate how little it matters.

Is A Pity

Aw, hell naw. If I'd only known about Lambchop's wonderful cover of Sisters Of Mercy's This Corrosion before our wedding, it would totally have gone on the playlist. Don't get me wrong, I loved ending the night dancing to Nina Simone with Alec, but words like "Gimme the ring, kissed and toll'd" would've been a fun counterpoint to soppy stuff like "I bless the day I found you", even as wonderfully true as the latter may be. Future brides-to-be, don't pass up the opportunity I missed!

(Based on what I wrote a while back about what I like and don't like in cover versions, this song goes straight into the Complete Re-Imagining, OMG Awesome! category. Another direct entry is Grizzly Bear's cover of He Hit Me It Felt Like A Kiss.)

(Endearing extra: The This Corrosion cover can be found on the bonus disc for Lambchop's album Is A Woman. The bonus disc is called Is A Bonus.)

Born Again

I have not always been a big fan of the current Pope but upon reading this article in the NYT, I felt all our theological differences melt away. Truly, I can now wholeheartedly accept and follow his leadership of the Cat-holic church, and am keen to learn and absorb his many teachings about the Cat-echism. Furever and ever, amen.

Whatever Colours You Have In Your Mind

Via J-Walk, I enjoyed this summary of what goes on during Bob Dylan's radio show.

Here are all the topics on which he's given out Useful Tips:

• How to Hang Dry Wall
• What to Pack When You're Traveling
• How to Walk Like A Runway Model
• How to Give Yourself Dreadlocks

Here are some quotes. Almost all are very endearing, it was tough to pick just a few:

• "The distinctive voice of Aaron Neville. A lot of people think we sing the same."
• Re: Tex William's Brother Drop Dead - "Some people die too soon. Others, you're kind of hoping. Tex Williams has a song for such a situation."
• Re: Howlin' Wolf - "This next song is entirely without flaw and meets all the supreme standards of excellence."
• "The harmonica is the world's best-selling musical instrument. You're welcome." (I've never met anyone else who agrees with me on this, but I'm not ashamed to say it - I love the sound of the harmonica! And it's pretty much because of Bob Dylan.)
• "A giraffe can go a long time without water. But he wants to see a menu right away."

After reading all this I instantly wanted to listen to him, but unfortunately all my Dylan albums are still back in my old room at my family's place. I haven't moved my CD collection over yet because, well, there's no shelf over here capable of accommodating it. Perhaps a trip to IKEA this weekend...

Phat Pharm

(Short update: Decided Movable Type was crap. Tried to migrate entries to Wordpress. Numerous problems. Decided Wordpress was crap. Cussed a lot. Considered quitting blogging. Solved the numerous problems. Whooped and cheered a lot. Crowned myself supergenius. For the moment, finalizing new Wordpress design but maintaining old Movable Type installations just in case.)

While gremlin-fighting continues, I'm resorting to lazy linkblogging. Check out these hip-hop animals at the Animal Pharm. (Thanks to brother-in-law James for sending me the link.) My favourite is the animal formerly known as ?uestlove.

Ickle Note

Comments don't work if you click the "Comments" link at the bottom of an entry, but they will if you click the permalink (i.e. the time of posting) and write your comment into the form there instead. [Edit: Comments are fixed. Still battling many other gremlins though. KNNBCCB.]

Will battle various Movable Type gremlins this weekend. Should be fixed soon.

Occasional Foodiness

We do a fair bit of cooking but I haven't bothered to write much about it here since cooking is hardly a novelty to either of us. For the same reason, I have hardly any photos of the stuff we've cooked so far, because taking a photograph of my food before eating it would just never occur to me. But since my sister was crouching over our baked fish, snapping away like the keen food photographer she's become, I thought I'd try my hand at it too, and am quite happy with the result.

It's fish baked Greek style with dill, tomatoes and potatoes, from a Nigel Slater recipe. We used kurau (threadfin) steaks, and the dill is from our makeshift balcony herb garden. It's a pretty great recipe because you hardly have to do anything - you chuck potatoes, onions and garlic in a baking tray with olive oil, bake for 10 minutes (180C), add the fish on top and surround it with tomatoes, season with herbs, lemon juice, salt and pepper, bake for 35 minutes more and it comes out perfect.

Apart from that, we also made chicken piccata and roasted aubergine, tomato and chickpea soup, and much credit for the delicious success of those dishes goes to the reliability of Elise's recipes. My mum made braised cabbage with wholegrain mustard, which went very well with everything else, and I whipped up apple, pear and banana smoothies for dessert. It was probably the easiest, cheapest, least stressful, most universally successful dinner party we've ever done. And contrary to Alec's yuppie parody, I can assure you that all ingredients (except the chickpeas, weirdly, we needed Cold Storage for those) can be purchased in NTUC Marine Parade.

Movable Type Misery

Due to an extended period of Movable Type related chaos involving a perfectly good MT 3.2 installation suddenly refusing to work, deceptively simple MT 4.1 upgrade instructions totally divorced from the horrible reality of the process, error messages in several different fruit flavours, lousy support documentation by Movable Type all round (you get the feeling they're trying to conceal the sheer multitude of problems that can arise - all the solutions to my problems were not found in their documentation but in blogs or contributed by users in the Movable Type forum), and much swearing, Googling and cgi patching by me, the nuts and bolts of this blog might be a bit fucked up while I sort out all the things broken by the upgrade.

For example, search doesn't work and the category archives that used to list in the sidebar have gone fishing. Also, comments don't work if you click the "Comments" link at the bottom of an entry, but they will if you click the permalink (i.e. the time of posting) and write your comment into the form there instead. Feel free to mention anything else you've noticed.

Why not just use Wordpress, you wonder? Damn good question, and I'm considering it seriously. I even installed Wordpress on my server in the midst of my frustrations last week and have been tinkering round - I'm not sold on it yet, but where I was previously too lazy to switch over because I didn't feel like having to recode my templates, I'm now sufficiently pissed off at Movable Type to see it as a matter of principle. So perhaps change gon' come, depending on whether my principled outrage manages to trump my congenital laziness. We'll see.