Shiny Shiny

After losing my trusty little Ixus 430 in Cambodia last December, I spent 6 painful camera-less months waiting for Canon to release a version of the Powershot which had both a vari-angle LCD screen and O.I.S. before caving in to a good offer on the Fujifilm F31fd, which is an extremely good compact camera in other ways but has neither of those things. I felt I couldn’t wait any longer for the perfect camera to be released because I wanted enough time to get familiar with a new camera before bringing it on honeymoon in September, and I also knew June to September were going to be too crazy for me to keep monitoring camera release schedules.

And of course, now I’m back from honeymoon Canon has deigned to release the A650IS in Singapore. It looks like ass, but it’s exactly what I spent all this time waiting for. I’ve decided to spend the next three or four months agonizing over how to justify the extravagance of owning 2 digital cameras, at the end of which time the price will hopefully have dropped and I will then pounce. But you can feel free to start affirming or reproaching my future extravagance right now. (For what it’s worth, I use everything else until it dies. I still have a videoless 4th generation iPod, a 2003 Thinkpad, and a 64MB thumbdrive.)

Sounds Of Tweedness

Metafilter’s discussion of the Oink shutdown was going quite predictably until Pastabagel went delightfully classic-rock curmudgeon crazy. An excerpt:

Well, la-dee-da, I beg of thee a thousand pardons. I guess The Melancolics performing Ennui No. 4 at the fucking Knitting Factory on a Monday night is the ne plus ultra of music. The wave of the future is shoe-gaze or shoecore or whatever the fuck you call it. Poor baby has too much anxiety on stage to look at the audience, so he gazes at his shoes. Yeah, that’s so much better to watch than jumping off the monitors while playing your Strat with your teeth and then setting it on fire.

You know what your music sounds like? It sounds like tweed.

Dandy tweed music. That’s probably a band you like. The Dandy Tweeds. From Leeds.

A flaming double neck guitar salute to you, Mr/Ms Pastabagel! And just for that brilliant snark about Broken Social Scene (not excerpted, read the whole rant to get it in context), you can have the soul of my firstborn.

Gettin’ Down To Catchin’ Up

Perhaps my longest absence ever, but let’s look on the bright side, I probably won’t disappear like this again till the divorce. I’ll leave gushing about the wedding & honeymoon to future posts – the point of this one is just to flex long-idle blog muscles (ow ow ow) and reassure you that now I’m married I no longer have to spend quality time with Alec on stuff like meaningful conversations and showing love and support. I can instead devote myself to aimless websurfing, calculating how many maids I can afford to sub-contract for that whole child-rearing thing and generally letting myself go.

(Kidding! I’ll just make Alec pay for the maids.)

(OK, OK, still kidding! It’s just that jokes like these don’t seem to go down very well with people when we make them in real life so I’m using this as an outlet.)

Since returning from our honeymoon we’ve unfortunately had to work pretty long hours. Spare time has been spent converting a tall ang moh’s “gentleman’s-club-influenced” bachelor pad into a marital home capable of housing a small Chinese wife with crippling Internet addiction and a penchant for bright colours.

Now that the teabags are no longer stored 2m off the ground, our next priority is making sure everyone who helped with our wedding knows just how grateful we are, because distracted thank yous and hastily dispensed gifts on our wedding day are really not enough.

And once that’s sorted, we’ll finally, hopefully, get some time to reconnect with all our personal joys again before we become one of those boring couples whose main interests are each other. I’m so out of touch with music at the moment that I don’t even know who the latest overhyped mediocre Internet indie sensation is, and Alec hasn’t worn spandex in public for months. And as for you, dear readers, if there are even any of you left, please keep popping in! I can’t pretend I just write this for me – if I did, I’d keep it on my hard drive – and although I’ll need to put in some work to make it worth your while to keep reading, I’m really hoping you won’t give up on me just yet.

Big Day Coming

It’s just over a year now that Alec and I got engaged, and in less than a week’s time we will be married. Perhaps that’s why I’m a little emotional on the subject, but my sappiness shouldn’t detract from this guy’s amazing proposal, which has now “spoiled market” for the entire male population of the Internet.

I teared while watching it, mostly when I saw the surprise and then giddy joy on his girlfriend’s face as she realized what was happening, but also a little bit when I tried to imagine our wedding day, this Saturday.

It certainly won’t be as cool as whatever that other couple will eventually do, but we’ve put a lot of effort into organizing a celebration that we would enjoy attending ourselves, and have received so much generous and enthusiastic support along the way from friends and family that I almost feel like lots of things could go wrong on Saturday and it wouldn’t really matter.

With a few days to go though, it’s still worth putting in some effort to make things go right, so although I wanted to pop in and mention this, I’m not sure if I’ll have time for another entry before the wedding. If I don’t manage it, I’ll see you on the other side.

(And just to show you I haven’t completely lost my edge, I’ve retained my lame practice of using indie rock references as blog entry titles.)

My Best Men

My best friend Russ arrives in Singapore this Saturday and will be staying with Alec until the wedding. As long-time readers of this blog (if any of you are still around given its recent dwindle into shitness, that is) will know, Alec and Russ have a complicated relationship.

The two of them were on Gmail Chat today ironing out some arrangements, and the following conversation ensued. (To understand the joke you need to read this post’s account of what happened at my graduation dinner, and this and this add a little extra flavour.)

Alec: Michelle and I are discussing who will collect you from the airport. Michelle is full of noble intentions but I’m expecting a resounding Zzzzzz on the actual morning.
Russ: Haha. Don’t worry. I think I can make it to yours by myself :D I just need to remember which bus it is. Thanks though :)
Alec: Suits me though. I can say, I was there at 5 in the morning, to carry all your bags and drive you back and……Finally some closure on the awful dinner in London with [her parents]
Russ: Hahahahaha
(Ha)
:D
But you’d have to do this at least six times
ducks
Alec: #$%#$!!!!
Russ: Hee :) Can I forward this conversation to Michelle? (Hee hee)

Our Farce-Sighted Leaders

My friend Yi-Sheng was supposed to be participating in an IndigNation (a gay pride festival) short story reading event today, but because the Media Development Authority (read: censorship board) classified the event as an arts performance requiring prior licence, as part of the licence application Yi-Sheng had to submit the story he had been intending to read. So he decided to give them something to get their censorial teeth into, and submitted the extremely naughty Lee Low Tar, which I would advise you neither read at work nor while consuming any beverages which are harmful to computer screens or keyboards.

Of course, it was banned, the official reason for which being that it went “beyond good taste and decency in taking a disparaging and disrespectful view of public officers”. You just can’t make this shit up.

Bigging Up The Borribles

While randomly surfing Facebook groups after first joining, I found and immediately joined “The Borribles would kick Harry Potter’s bourgeois arse“, a view which I heartily subscribe to and have hinted at here before too.

From that group I discovered the author’s official site and this article by Peter Lyle for TANK magazine which captures much of what I really love about these books, as well as my usual experiences in trying to tell people about them.

“They’re called the Borribles.”

(Blank look)

“It’s this children’s book from the ’70s.”

(Blank look)

“They’re these oiky kids with pointy ears who live in all the shitty bits of London and fight the grown-ups and the Wombles and…”

“Do you mean the Borrowers?”

Except that for me, no one brings up the Borrowers either. (Which is fair enough really, they were pretty lame.)

Anyway, I just wanted to encourage anyone who’s done with the latest Harry Potter and feels a sense of loss or whatever to give the Borribles a try. They are some of the most memorable and gripping children’s books I have ever read, and I really don’t understand why no one seems to know about them.

Reading the books again as a grown-up living in London gave me new insights into what made them so great (Lyle likens the presence of London in the books to its presence in the writing of Dickens, and to the Dublin of Joyce’s Ulysses) and the rest of the article continues to open my eyes to things I hadn’t thought about before: that the areas in which London’s Borribles choose to make their home – Battersea, Tooting, Wandsworth, Stepney, Whitechapel, Neasden and Hoxton – are today an “index of then down-and-out, since gentrified, bits of the city,” and that “in an era when children’s books about chosen ones, picturesque and ethnically-cleansed boarding schools, timeless English architecture and the universal use of received pronunciation dominate the entire fiction market, The Borribles is a celebration of everything that doesn’t fit with that vision.”

You can read the first chapter of each Borrible book at the site, though if you’ve never read any of them then I recommend (in case of spoilers) that you only read from the first book.

Random Joo Chiat

I’m a bit weddinged and kittened out. Here are some photos of Joo Chiat instead.

Can you believe this is just sitting in a Joo Chiat driveway? I did a double take as we walked past and Googled my hunch once I got home – yup, I’m pretty certain it’s a Ng Eng Teng work.


Another view

Peeling pillar on the five foot way

Not the best photo – I was too busy drooling in anticipation of this place’s divine otah. You can get better in restaurants, but as far as cheap street-side otah is concerned I haven’t tasted better. The site says it’s open from 7 am to 7 pm, but they’ve definitely also sold us otah before at about 3 am, which is of course when it tastes the best.

If You’re Smitten, Adopt A Kitten!

Seriously, people, we need to find them homes. I’m gonna pimp them a bit more right now, and if you think you know anyone who might be interested in gaining karma, increasing the cuteness levels of their daily existence and falling deeply in love, please direct them to this post!

 

You might have noticed from the pictures in the previous kitten post that two of them are pirate kitties. So after naming them Jack Sparrow and Davy Jones, my mother and sister went on to name the remaining two Smee and Blackbeard, but after some genital scrutiny it was concluded that Blackbeard ought to be renamed Tigerlily.

 

This is Smee. I think he’s the second cutest after Tigerlily, but don’t tell the kittens I’ve been ranking them like this in case it’s damaging for their self-esteem.

 

Davy Jones is perhaps a little less photogenic than his siblings, but he’s just as happy and healthy and I think his centre parting is quite sweet, like an old man with Brylcreamed hair. Or Hitler.

 

Jack Sparrow is so hyperactive that none of his portraits came out well, so I had to settle for some action shots instead. Here he is trying to climb the cardboard fencing we initially used to keep them enclosed, while Smee snoozes on the left.

 

And here he is inspecting a flowerpot for clamberability. Tigerlily looks as if she’s playing with a dead palm frond, but she was actually falling asleep in that “head droop… head droop… I’M AWAKE I’M AWAKE! …actually, no I’m not…zzz” way.

 

Lastly, here they all are with their long-suffering mom. You can even see Smee’s little paw kneading her belly.

 

If you’re interested, please contact me! “name of this blog” at gmail!

Fuzzballs Seeking Good Homes

My family generally tries to sterilise all the strays we can get our hands on, but Mother Cat (we call her MC for short) was heavily pregnant when she first appeared, so there wasn’t much we could do. After she’d given birth she came to our driveway to get fed, but the kittens were nowhere to be seen. Until Tuesday, when in the process of watering the plants my mum spotted a ball of fur which turned out to be a soaked kitten. Careful inspection under the plants revealed four more soaked kittens.

My mum dried them off (after first trapping a stressed-out MC) and created a little den for them and MC in the corner of the garden, where they’ve been happily snuggled ever since. Four kittens seem healthy, but there was a rat-sized runt who was shunned by the rest, including its mother. It died yesterday.

As adorable as these darlings are, we can’t keep them. If they keep living in our driveway they risk getting killed on the road outside (where we’ve lost 2 cats already) or wandering into neighbouring houses and getting savaged by dogs. We can’t bring them into our house because we already have three housecats and more would really be pushing it. If you’re interested, or know somebody who might be, post a comment and I’ll contact you with further details!