Cast Of Characters + Economist Style Quiz

So far this site has featured Crazy Elbows At Eye-Jabbing Level Girl & Very Sweaty Shirtless I’m-Soooo-Cool-Because- You-Can-See-My-Calvins-Over-The-Top-Of-My-Well-Filled-
Trousers Guy, Stupor Guy and possibly a few more characters I’ve forgotten about since. Bryan introduces the world to a whole host more. Unexpectedly Attractive Birthmark Girl Who Slouches sounds particularly intriguing.

In news of the random, pointless and childish, here’s thumbing my nose at you, Ken. I beat you by one mark in the Economist style quiz. 9/12. Nyah.

Of course, in the same paragraph where I gloat over achieving this standard in writing style, I engage in obtuse mixing and mangling of cultural references, probably to incomprehensible effect. Always the hypocrite.

One Year

Ineffable [2008 annotation: that’s the name of my old blog] is a year old today. Fancy that. :)

This probably calls for some attempt at taking stock, a State Of The Blog address of sorts, except that I have nothing particularly profound to say.

Reading over a year’s worth of posts, I do actually like most of what I’ve written here, and how I’ve written it. I don’t think my writing has changed very much, either in style or subject matter. I write about how I’ve spent my days, partly to give friends who read it an idea of how I’m doing, but more to remind myself what the hell I do with my time. I write about where I’ve been, what I’m reading, listening to, watching.

I write almost nothing about the things that affect me most deeply, or that evoke the strongest feelings: rage, hurt, infatuation. (None of these happen to me very often at all, actually, so you’re not missing much.) I prefer dealing with these privately, because rage and hurt are always at someone, and I feel a bit nasty airing dirty linen like that on a public site. Infatuation (probably the rarest of the three) gets only very carefully calculated and massively understated references because I am generally far too romantically clueless and shy to let the relevant person know about it, let alone the world. Depression gets only occasional mention, because my problems are infinitesimal in the wider scheme of things, and whinging is boring.

So what of me are you left with, gentle reader (assuming you don’t already know me in real life)? Perhaps very little. You don’t hear the Michellisms that pepper my speech, the accent that I don’t believe can be anything other than refined Singaporean but which people keep insisting is Caribbean; you don’t see me dolled up in girly pink, or attitudinal in leather and gelled hair, or slouching around the house in baggy indie-rock T-shirt and drawstring trousers; you don’t really have a sense of what sets me off giggling quietly to myself, or collapses me with hysterical laughter while people look on bemused; you haven’t looked me in the eye, or hugged me, or even handed me the salt.

You do, however, have a glimpse through a chink (no pun intended, ha ha) in the armour that not everyone who actually knows me gets. You read what I write about friendships I treasure that I’m sometimes too shy to say to the people involved in real life. You have the benefit of reading me edited for coherence and comprehension, rather than having to deal with my tendencies towards convoluted sentences, tangents, and habit of speaking in disclaimers. You get the expert tour of what I think is good and reasonably interesting about me, without having to wade through the rest of the mulch.

And what if you know me in real life as well as read this blog? Well hey, lucky you. :P

I don’t exactly have any big celebratory plans for this anniversary, but I thought it would be good to refer you to a smattering of posts I particularly like for one reason or another. (I’m going to Amsterdam from tomorrow till Saturday, so I also thought this might make up for not posting in the next few days.)

An essay weekend
A bookstore stole my day
The Lazarus glove
Generation surrenderist
Linkage jitters, reality bites, and the nonpersistence of memory
Don’t read Douglas Coupland on Valentine’s Day
The weekend my spring began
Birthday wishes
Commonwealth cynicism
Fire drill epiphany
Feeling low (and tangential)
Yo La Tengo!
Girl Narrowly Escapes Exam Disaster, Contemplates Bestiality
How not to make it in health advertising
Xtreme X-Files dissatisfaction
Giggling in church
Musings on conversational self-censorship
The first belly laugh of the summer
Michelle down. Michelle back up.

Incidental Hobbitness

I’ll write more tomorrow. But right now what needs to be said is that:

  • Friday was great
  • Saturday was great
  • Sunday was great
  • I haven’t been this happy for a long time
  • And incidentally, my hobbit name is Tigerlily Proudneck of Longbottom.

That There Blog-Twinning Thing

I’ve probably found out about this blog-twinning thing a bit late, but was intrigued to find out that my blog (which got in there somehow, I didn’t submit it) is apparently similar to saranwarp, amplified to rock, entropy and josh blog.

I have mixed feelings about this.

A little bit of self-deprecating yeah, rightness, given that my usual reaction to reading long-time favourite Josh is “Shit, I obviously know nothing about music”, and have long envied Jared’s (Entropy) uncanny knack of writing about a lot of what I’ve been thinking about, only more eloquently, meticulously and passionately.

Some bewilderment. I see many areas in all the above blogs with which I’d like to claim similarity, but I don’t actually see very much real similarity, substantively speaking. We all kinda like music, but express that very differently through our sites, contextually and structurally. We write about our personal lives, ideas and belief systems to considerably varying extents.

Smidgens of glee. Someone actually thought of submitting my blog to this project, which is nice. (Thanks, Mum.) Someone actually committed some seconds of thought to comparing my blog to others and clicking the necessary buttons. Someone actually thinks (albeit misguidedly!) that my blog inhabits the same expository landscape as blogs I really, really admire. Well, yay. :)

Links From John

As always, John is my tall, chronically and terrifyingly messy, Newcastlian guide to the realm of the truly bizarre:

My reaction to this news story: why on earth was the giant Norwegian rocking horse even built with a penis? Surely rocking horses don’t have to be anatomically correct? This intrigues me. I’m going to have to start groping every rocking horse I see, just to check.

I wasn’t in the UK in 1992, so this is the first time I’ve heard of Ghostwatch, which sounds fascinating in terms of the War Of The Worlds effect it apparently had on less observant members of the British public.

And finally, there’s the good ol’ Fortean Times, which John describes as “the home of all weirdness”. Uh, John? There’s also your room…

The Invisible Library

The Invisible Library collects books which have only ever existed in other books, which is the wonderful sort of idea that floats around in my head from time to time, gets scribble-listed on scraps of paper and then promptly lost, which is why it’s a good thing someone else actually took the time and trouble to put it all together and get it online.

Books that sound intriguing:

  • Maniacs In The Fourth Dimension (my favourite fictitious author Kilgore Trout, in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five)
  • Incessant Fartings of Imperial Scriveners
  • The Law’s Codpiece
  • What Bothers Priests About Holy Confession (all from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel)
  • Everything You Never Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Forced To Find Out (Douglas Adams’s The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe)
  • The Blancmange Tragedy (Edward Gorey)

Brit TV / Dumb E-Business Moments

Slate thinks the Brits do TV better. I suppose they haven’t seen the Richard Blackwood Show then.

Some favourites from the 101 Dumbest Moments in E-Business History:

4: In November 2000, the Internet Underground Music Archive — a.k.a. IUMA.com — posts the following on its website: “Ladies and Gentlemen, we are overjoyed to present you with the ten winners of our ‘Name Your Baby IUMA’ Contest. Congratulations to these bold, beautiful babies — Iuma Thornhill, Iuma Ross, Iuma Becht, Iuma Carlton, Iuma Farish, Iuma Devi, Iuma Godfrey, Iuma Daigre, Iuma Radnedge and Iuma Hebert!” Each baby is guaranteed $5,000 (and, presumably, a childhood full of schoolyard beatings).

12: In October 1998, an e-commerce software vendor launches with the name Accompany, which, when said aloud, sounds exactly like “a company.” As in “Hi, I’m calling from Accompany.” “Which company?” “Accompany.” And so forth.

31:Boo, Part III: Founders Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander begin spending their venture capital booty. The New York Times later breaks down their expenditures, which include $150,000 annual salaries for the founders, plus $100,000 apiece to rent apartments in London and another $100,000 to redecorate them; $654,100 on promotional giveaways like disposable cameras and snow globes; $600,000 in public relations fees to the firm of Hill & Knowlton (mostly for setting up lunches with fashion editors); a $42 million ad campaign; a staff of 420 people, a.k.a the boocrew, housed in offices spanning from New York to Paris to Munich to Stockholm; and $5,000 per day to a crew of fashion consultants and hairstylists to perfect the look of Miss Boo, the site’s computer-animated mascot …

59: Utek, a business development company that finds, acquires, develops, and finances university technology for its customers, issues the following warning in its prospectus: “Our management has limited experience operating a business, has had no experience in managing and operating a business development company, and has little or no experience in corporate finance and corporate mergers.”

62: An uninhabitable, fire-damaged Silicon Valley house sells for more than $1.5 million.

90: Beenz.

Photoshop 0.1 and some thumbscrews

Whee, Django’s got all used CDs at $7.99 for a week. I hope I haven’t just made a huge mistake by buying The Sebadoh.

Radiohead played songs from the upcoming Amnesiac at SXSW. The uncanny “similarity” between Kevin Raub’s report at CDNOW and these track descriptions at a fansite makes me wonder who’s been plagiarizing who. Meanwhile, Kid A continues to grow on me, and Amnesiac looks set to be interesting listening at the very least.

My heart goes out to Bushonics speakers everywhere, not. Ah, politics. It almost makes you long for those good ol’ Stalin days, where Photoshop 0.1 and a couple of thumbscrews were all you needed to conceal the terrifying truth about politicians from the great unwashed masses.