tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-102110122024-03-14T00:59:14.467+08:00Comments (0)An English Salaryman Foresees His ... Well, I can't quite make it out from hereMr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.comBlogger1636125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-17078495502782064062013-04-01T23:07:00.000+08:002013-04-02T09:06:47.566+08:00MovedWe're moving!<br />
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From April 1, 2013, keep up with the quotidien rumblings of this blog at its new location on <a href="http://www.cushtie.com">Cushtie.com</a><br />
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All existing posts will remain here, unless Blogger goes loopy and deletes it all.<br />
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So long, thanks for everything, and see you on the other side... Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-71082953349934129972013-03-31T22:44:00.001+08:002013-04-01T15:54:10.075+08:00Five kilometres, painfullyI got out of bed at 6:30. This was a struggle because I was up until 11:30 last night, reading The Postmortal. That was an enjoyably grim story exploring a future where a cure for aging. (It doesn't end well for anyone: there are other ways to suffer apart from getting old.) It's vaguely reminiscient of the Blair Witch Project, crossed with a blog: the conceit is that the whole story is discovered in an abandoned settlement, and for the most part it feels convincing that somebody would be journalling their experience. Not at the end though. I wonder if I would be.<br />
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Such thoughts of mortality aside, I had to get up early this morning because I had a race to get to. It was a 5k over by the Singapore Flyer, which is two miles from our flat. I faffed about for half an hour, struggling to find enough safety pins to fix my race number to my shirt. My wife, half asleep, moaned at me to eat a banana. "They have potassium in them" she protested as I contrarily ate an apple and then trotted off out the door. I got to the start line with time to spare, and surprised myself by being at the front of the queue of runners.<br />
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Usually in Singapore, no matter how fast I'm feeling, I end up with a phalanx of septugenarians in front of me, shuffling as slowly as possible without being completely stationary. I don't like being in the middle of a big group of runners in Singapore, because it's hot enough without the warmth pulsing out of hundreds of people around you, all breathing and sweating away. I was excited to be at the front for a change: I just wasn't sure what that was going to end up like.<br />
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Before the race was a little pep talk from the organisers. They asked if anyone had been out clubbing the night before. One cheery chap waved his arms. They asked if anyone had been drinking. Just that one chap. Apparently people who stay out late boozing don't get up early to go running. Who would have expected that?<br />
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The organisers told us that anyone whod been drinking, or consumed stimulants or drugs in the last 24 hours, should go to the medical tent and not exert themselves. (I thought if you did drugs in Singapore you were meant to go to prison, which might suggest the whole event was a cunning plan to arrest stupid, athletic drug users. Well, it would be a better way than chasing after them. They could probably run quite fast.) This was in stern contrast to how my friends and I used to prepare for races in England. If you could stand up the night before a race and you weren't throwing up out of a car window on the morning of the race, you were not participating in the spirit of things. A different rule for downhill mountainbikers than for runners, perhaps.<br />
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We waited for the start signal, and I inwardly rejoiced that I couldn't hear Gangnam Style. And then we were off.<br />
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Predictably enough, I wasn't at the front for long. Everyone tore off at a tremendous pace: my GPS told me I was going at 3:20 kilometre pace, which (if I could keep it up for 42 km) would mean I'd be a world class marathon runner. I'm not a world class marathon runner. From being in fifth I steadily fell back towards tenth place, and then ground my way round the course, trying to ignore the voice in my head telling me to stop.<br />
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5k isn't a long way, but at the same time it's quite long enough to suffer, and I don't think my training regime was that helpful. Doing a kilometre every day for a month, and then trying to do ten times as much two days beforehand is not the stuff champions are made of. Still, I got round without grinding to a halt: I arrived at the finish line just in front of the first female runner. I guess that's the benefit of Y chromosomes. (I did the same in my first race of the year, when I finished about five seconds up on the first woman: but that was a race so cold we all had jewels of frost across our faces.)<a href="#1" name=1up">*</a><br />
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At the end of the race, once we'd threaded our way through the 10k runners who were finishing at the same time, we were given an enormous medal, a banana, a bottle of Pocari Sweat and a towel soaked in cold water. The towel was my favourite thing; I took off my shirt, wrapped the towel around my neck, and made my way back home.<br />
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Idiotically, I didn't stop there. After brunch and a very short nap, I went out riding at Kent Ridge with one of the alcoholics I used to go mountainbiking with back in England. He cheats now by not being a drunk and also being very fast, while I was a slapdash mess with a pounding headache, fighting with my bike all the way around the trail there. If I can just discipline myself to ride my bike every week, I might one day get a bit better. Not sure that's likely to happen...<br />
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Tomorrow is April Fool's Day. I'm wondering if I can be any more foolish than I've been so far this weekend. Perhaps a bucket of water propped above a door in the office?<br />
Perhaps not. I do enjoy paid employment, after all.<br />
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<a href="#1up" name=1">*</a> It turns out, upon inspection of the results, that I was behind the first three women. I assumed I was in front because the organisers were rushing to hold up the finish tape for the person behind me. Not entirely sure what that was all about, then...Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-73053507613168327862013-03-30T22:11:00.001+08:002013-04-01T12:05:16.855+08:00Something for nothingComedy Central Asia were running a promotional event in a large white tent outside Plaza Singapura today. I spent all morning sweating and fiddling with computers, then went down to see what was going on.<br />
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Comedy events are best conducted in dark, slightly claustrophobic rooms where the laughter can't float away into the void. A tent with open sides, suffused with bleaching hot sunshine is not a very good environment. I stood on the periphery for a while, watching some of the acts, then realised that there was a competition on stage, where every participant would get $250 worth of prizes. I do like guaranteed prizes, so I signed up.<br />
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The rules were simple: everyone got a minute to try to be funny, with four judges looking on, trying to be as irascible as possible. I had to sign a release form, and it informed me that I couldn't swear, say anything racist or ridicule the Singaporean government. I'm not sure what they thought the acts on stage were going to do:<br />
"Hey, _____ the PAP! They're a bunch of _______s, but then what do you expect? They're all ________!"<br />
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I made a note to exclude my rant about Merlions and interbreeding, and then sat in a tiny, very hot room with the other contestants until my shirt was wet through with sweat and it was time to go on stage. Then I blurted out a minute of material, and off I went again, to be presented with a bag of goodies (a laptop bag, a t-shirt, a portable loudspeaker and a voucher for some shoes). <br />
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So that was a profitable outing. I had worried that my subconsciousness would sabotage me, and I'd spend 60 seconds spewing a racist diatribe against the government "because it might be funny" but I'm not writing this from a jail cell, so assume my id was not in the driving seat.<br />
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I stuck around for an hour, but I was wilting: I'm not built for very hot weather, and Singapore has been embroiled in a stuffy, muggy cloud of wet air for the last week. I've been waiting all day for it to rain, but as yet nothing at all. It won't rain tonight either, which means tomorrow's race may be just a little bit utterly unpleasant. Luckily it's only 5k, and I've done more than that in training.<br />
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Unluckily, all my training has been in the last two days. Roll on Sunday...Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-60892456410830196372013-03-29T23:55:00.001+08:002013-04-01T12:03:16.370+08:00GI Joe : RetaliationI don't know why my wife and I were so excited by the thought of going to see GI Joe : Retaliation. The mere presence of punctuation in the title should have warned us off, along with the wholly negative experience I had of watching the previous instalment, back in 2009. But dumbly, we believed the trailers and thought we'd enjoy it. It had The Rock in it - how could it be bad?<br />
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It also had Bruce Willis in it, which also fails to redeem it (unlike his great turn in Red, but similar to The Execrables/Expendables 2), but Joseph Gordon Levitt and Christopher Eccleston both avoided reprising their roles. Good for them: there would have been reprisals if they had. Channing Tatum was around for the first 20 minutes and then got blown up, although because of the cinematography you can't be sure if he actually survived to show up in next year's GI Joe; Perfunctory or whatever the punctuation-laced follow-up turns out to be.<br />
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There's not much plot, there's scanty characterisation and there's lots of inconsequential violence. Literally. People get shot, stabbed and blown up left right and centre, but you never see any consequences. For a film with so many deaths, there's a glaring absence of corpses, just red-suited Evil Tibetan Ninjas falling to their deaths (how does that play in China?) and sterile plasticness throughout. It's like it was designed with children's toys in mind.<br />
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Oh. Yes, it is. Whoops.<br />
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Still, despite being a film about children's toys, I don't think it was suitable fodder for the army of six year olds in the cinema with us. A bit like the violent idiocy of Transformers 3, only a person with the mind of a small child would be capable of enjoying this film, and tragically it's small children who should be protected from this garbage.<br />
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On the plus side, no mercy is shown to leading characters, or at least Channing Tatum gets offed quickly so he can go back to making films about male strippers. There's also an avant garde dismissal of cohesive plots: a man is smuggled out of the Korean DMZ at the start, and is then NEVER SEEN AGAIN. Is that a commentary on the lack of character arcs, or just forgetfulness? Or did they assume the attention span of six year olds means the audience wouldn't notice?<br />
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I may be bitter, because the only capital city that is utterly destroyed is London. Perhaps it should be a compliment that it was the most recognisable place to get wiped out, or perhaps focus groups told the filmmakers that you don't want to offend the Indian market by destroying Delhi, or that nobody could distinguish a desolated Pyongyang from the current version.<br />
Really, I think the director had his wallet stolen on the London Underground and was holding a grudge.<br />
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After two hours of clattering, banging, and The Rock quoting Jay-Z lyrics like they were the word of God, we left. Hope, joy and interest had vanished long before. I rather felt I wasted the day off.<br />
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(To celebrate the crucifixion of Jesus, everyone gets Good Friday off in Singapore, but Easter Monday isn't a holiday. One could make inferences about the Singaporean government and what it thinks should be commemorated, but I suspect it's to give parity in holidays among different religions: after all, Christmas Day is a holiday too. I'm not very religiously observant but I do like long weekends. Next time, I'm not going to spend any time in a cinema watching a film with a semi-colon in the title.)Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-38365309561558557942013-03-28T23:36:00.001+08:002013-03-29T12:20:20.640+08:00Fight ComicTonight I had Fight Comic, and I was dreading it because I've had a week of stress, sleep deprivation and very little time to prepare. Whether it's a crick in my neck, a recalcitrant wisdom tooth that likes to tease me by erupting and then hiding again, or insomnia inexplicably provoked by the sussurus of our electric fan, I've been struggling to cope with the world since we got back from Taiwan. Fight Comic is improvised, but it still requires thinking about the topics that might come up and getting yourself in the right mode.<br />
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So to concentrate, I went to the barbers. That's not as silly as it might sound: the combination of hair growth and heat has given me these hallucinations that my beard is strangling me, so to spend an hour in a barber's chair, unable to do anything, was actually very relaxing. Contrast that with all day sitting in the office, unable to do very much but still having to engage some significant portion of my brain. If I could be paid to have my hair cut all day ... I'd be rich. And a skinhead.<br />
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I took my wife to the barbers. After all, she has to look at my head more than I do, so it's important for her to approve the results. When she was satisfied, we went round the corner to Bergs, where I ate a burger that was ostensibly made from felafel and avocado. I think they replaced it with fresh cement: it tasted just fine, but it settled in my stomach as a single, monolithic lump of food. We walked around Arab Street, trying to get my stomach to settle, but it made no difference. And so we both struggled up the stairs to the club, encumbered by baby and burger respectively.<br />
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So, no practise, scant preparation and an evening of doing things rather than my traditional stare-at-a-blank-wall-and-breathe technique. I thought I'd bomb, but even though there was a fairly small crowd in the room, we all got laughs. Not wanting to boast, at the end it was looking like I was first runner-up, which is the best result I've ever had at Fight Comic. I have what might be some promising material about the man who sued Disney after being trapped in the It's A Small World ride, and it's always nice to get something to reuse out of a topical show.<br />
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So that was a whole lot of fun. It's still incredibly hot and I'm incredibly tired, but I've had stage time in every month of 2013 so far. I'm interested to review the video and see if my Easter Bunny stuff worked or not (that isn't going to be usable now until another year has passed) and figure out what else I can learn from this.<br />
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Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-20993634379332713752013-03-27T22:41:00.001+08:002013-03-28T09:42:46.012+08:00RejectionToday I got a rejection letter for <i>The Unwanted Callers Of Cthulhu</i>. I think that took about two months, which makes me worried that it could take the whole year to place it correctly; I'm not sure if two months to read an unsolicited story is par for the course or (worst case) that's actually prompt for the industry and rejections often take longer than that to hear about.<br />
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I'm a little sad it didn't get accepted, but the rejection letter was polite enough and (I hope) I'm now mature and secure enough not to dissolve into a screeching mess that Demands My Genius Be Recognised. Let's wait for the next rejection before allowing that to happen.<br />
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Trying to get something published is a bit like looking for a job: by doing more research on where you apply, you might raise your chances of success. The next thing to do, therefore, isn't just to send it out again, but to think on why it wasn't suitable for that publication, and understand better where it might fit. What I'm not sure is how to go about that. There's a lot of unknown unknowns that I feel might confound me - there may be vast numbers of magazines that I've never even heard of that might be the perfect fit. There's no substitute for good targetting; unfortunately, it means work, which I have to admit to shirking of late.<br />
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Still, fail harder, fail better and all that...<br />
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I would grumble on about the other rejections I've suffered this year, but they've been assaults only really on my ego. When somebody tells you that you can't have something you didn't really want anyway, you shouldn't get aggravated.<br />
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Unfortunately, the operative word is "shouldn't". Hmmph.<br />
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This evening, I hosted an event at the office that included me talking about things for 45 minutes, without swearing, falling over or throwing up. So I'm pretty pleased with that. After my act, we ate Pizza Hut pizza, and as that congealed in my gut I had my brain (and my computer) melted by a demonstration of Benford's Law for fraud detection in R. Interesting, but I had that sickly iced-lake feeling of sliding across something I might never grasp. Maybe I just need more sleep...Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-37576311128418473002013-03-26T23:30:00.000+08:002013-03-27T14:08:42.719+08:00Defeated by the heatWe admitted defeat last night and gave in, turning the air conditioning back on. A week away from the warmth of Singapore has clearly made us weak.<br />
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At the hospital today, in conversation with a midwife, we heard the phrase "Singapore is entering its hot season" which was something I never thought would be used in conversation. It's always hot here: tropics don't get seasons. But perhaps that long cold winter where the mercury drops to 28 Celsius is what she meant. Certainly, it's warm now. We have the air con set to 27 and that still feels chilly to me, but then I'm not trying to maintain homeostasis for two, as that phrase about pregnant mothers goes.<br />
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Tonight I read Chimera, the third part of the Subterrene War trilogy. The first part read like a generic war-is-hell story, laced with teenage wish-fulfilment, to the point I wondered if it was pastiche. The second volume went on and on, without really resolving for me, and the third ... Wow. The third was hardbitten military vet meets Apocalypse Now, intermingled with Everyone Thinks The Chinese Are Shits for the grand finale. Lots and lots of power armour, explosions, and a reference to "half of Taiwan" going to war that implies the author doesn't know much about the geography of that island. So, sort of satisfying, but I found it via the free extras tacked on the end of the Milkweed Tryptich, and so it didn't really justify the company it kept. I should say more on this, but not so late at night.<br />
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Today I learned that a hungry wolf that's about to eat you has a similar expression to a happy friendly domestic dog. But perhaps that's because both think you're going to feed them, just in different ways. Time, now, to sleep.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-91883488789242380052013-03-25T22:30:00.000+08:002013-03-27T14:01:30.036+08:00Struggling againIt was silly to spend all week in Taiwan sleeping and resting, only to get the last flight out of Hong Kong on Sunday, depositing us in Singapore at 1:30 in the morning, and only getting back in to the flat after 2am. (There's a separate priority queue at the airport for pregnant ladies, but my wife refused to take it. I was aghast and dumbfounded, as she's not going to have this opportunity to skip the line for a long time now. Maybe that means I could waddle down there with a cushion stuck down my shirt - the family is owed a free ride, surely?)<br />
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It is insanely hot in Singapore, or we were insane to think we wouldn't need time to adjust. The flat was baking hot when we returned, which made it hard to get to sleep, even with the windows open to allow in the musical sound of cats fighting outside. I woke at four, half my body's moisture sweat out of me, the other half drooled into my beard. Have you ever tried to wipe the drool from your beard? It's an impressively disgusting sensation.<br />
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I shambled to work, confused and sad. As I left Chinatown, a man spat on the street in front of me, and I lacked the will to give him a good telling off. Coffee didn't help. I ground my way through email after email, a repetitive task to read the constant repetitions of the same things everyone was saying, then at noon galumphed down to the post office to collect a parcel.<br />
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This was the first good news of the day, and it improved when my parcel turned out to be three parcels: Christmas presents from Sweden and Canada. I may have friends and family who aren't perfectly prompt with the post, but that also means Christmas lasts all the way to Easter. Hopefully my wife will accept that a round of French toast is a suitable substitute for an Easter egg. If not, I'll distract her by pointing out it's less than eight months until Halloween. Literally nothing can go wrong.<br />
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Tonight I struggled to think, to speak, to walk. I hope that doesn't mean that tomorrow I'll have similar trouble trying to eat, drink or work. We're also off for our monthly baby inspection, but the fatigue we're feeling right now, I must ask the doctor to give me an epidural to last the next trimester. Literally nothing can go wrong.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-44870248732677096312013-03-24T19:45:00.000+08:002013-03-27T13:59:41.330+08:00Overcaffeinated againI drank a coffee this morning that was so strong it gave me double vision. Bugeyed and overstimulated on sugar and caffeine, I stumbled away from Fuel. Nearby a woman was yelling into her phone nearby, telling somebody not to accuse her, but just say what she wanted to. That confused me. It sounded like the person on the other end just wanted to accuse her of something. Maybe I should have shared some of my coffee.<br />
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I've been embattled with food all day. Lunch was dim sum, where my wife and friends competed to feed me more tofu-based products than a man can possibly consume. In the afternoon we were back in the mall (which mall? You may ask - well, does it matter? they're all the same, after all...), and I found myself in a bookshop which preyed on nostalgia. Not the books, but they'd diversified and were selling junk food from my childhood. Cadbury's Fudge fingers, Nestle's incredible plastic Caramacs, and those monosodium glutamate enhanced slices of cardboard known as bacon-flavour Frazzles.<br />
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Reader, I ate them all, and every bite was tinged with regret. There are good reasons why it's been twenty years since I ate a packet of Frazzles.<br />
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Frazzled, we went to the airport, and again I bit off more than I could chew, failing to demolish a pizza at Pizza Express. What with this conspicuous consumption, and failing to exercise all week, I'm rather scared of what I'll weigh on my return to Singapore. Perhaps this will drive me to get a decent amount of running in before next Sunday's race. Or perhaps I'm going to discover how much I can slow down.<br />
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I've recorded a few bits for my new video. It's odd being your own second unit, collecting footage from far off locations. Hopefully this week I can do the principal photography, and bash something together at the weekend to startle and amaze. Or at least amuse...Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-63312932403958529732013-03-23T23:00:00.000+08:002013-03-27T13:59:25.612+08:00Ch-ch-changesSometimes it's the way things don't change which is the strangest.<br />
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I've got over Hong Kong failing to disintegrate without me. It's only really <a href="http://comments-zero.blogspot.com/2012/06/you-cant-go-back.html">the first time you come back</a> that you suffer the wierd disappointment of discovering that while you were away, not everybody's life was placed on pause, the way people manage without you being a final proof of your insignificance. Second time around, third time around you can start to rejoice that people are still there, that they can exist without you.<br />
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I haven't got over the air. Coming from Singapore, coming from Taiwan, the orange haze that smears across the night sky is strange and worrying, not a comforting light to welcome you home. It turns out that you forget about the dry stickiness at the back of your throat, the coughing, the clouds of black soot frothing out of the back of every bus. That's one of those thing you wish would change, but don't hold much hope for.<br />
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Another quintessence is the bloody-mindedness of landlords. There's a restaurant at the end of Elgin Street, a prime spot to fill people with booze and food for money, that closed due to a rent hike in 2009. Four years on, it's still vacant, a gloomy corpse of a building that nobody is paying the landlord for. There's now an advertisement banner across the upper floors, trying to attract a new tenant, but the artist's impression is a view of a tranquil and verdant garden, a few beautiful people stood in it, sipping wine. The closest that gets to reality is there's booze involved: I'm sure they'd have the space filled in a second if they cut the rent and put up a picture of two drunks falling into a taxi while eating a kebab. But no: I expect if we visit again in 2016, there still won't be anyone in there, the landlord still holding out for an increase in the rent they haven't been collecting. It won't change. But then maybe it's not the place for a British man to lecture a Hong Konger about property. Didn't we learn anything from the 19th century?<br />
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The other reliable unchangeable is the inappropriateness of slogans on t-shirts in Hong Kong. But that may be fussiness on my part. If a dumpy, middle-aged woman with a tight greasy perm wants to wear a baggy ultramarine shirt with 'GET ME DRUNK AND ENJOY THE SHOW' on it, that's her business. I don't know if nonsensical phrases are better or worse than slatternly examples of wishful thinking: is it better to be unrealistic or just have poor reading comprehension? I should have the courage of my convictions, wear a shirt saying 'WOULD ANYONE TELL YOU IF YOU WERE GETTING MORE STUPIDDER!' but I suppose my cowardice is one more thing that won't change.<br />
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Went to Wan Chai, went for a walk with a friend and his dog, went to comedy, went to bed. Where do we go? Where has the day gone? Where did all the other days go?Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-28096423177896661592013-03-22T23:50:00.000+08:002013-03-27T13:28:01.680+08:00OverflownThe Museum of Fine Art is on the flightpath for Taipei's domestic airport, which means every couple of minutes another plane flies over. They must be rather proud of this, because in the entrance hall of the museum is an installation consisting of some very loud speakers that blare the sound of a plane flying overhead, while a shadow of a plane is projected across the ceiling. This is fun the first few times, but I imagine the museum staff could be quite aggravated.<br />
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The rest of the museum is quite peaceful; there are a lot of paintings of papaya upstairs at the moment, and when we sat in the garden in the basement we were in a space that was practically silent. After the noisy road and the virtual overflight, it was almost eerie to be sat in somewhere so quiet. So we went upstairs and looked at papaya again, then walked back to the hotel and took a taxi to the airport.<br />
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Back in Hong Kong, I was disconcerted by the traffic. It was a longer journey to get from the airport to Tin Hau this evening, than to travel from Taipei to Hong Kong. Partly that was because we were travelling in a rickety old taxi, rather than a well-maintained 747, but congestion seemed exceptionally bad in Hong Kong this evening. Perhaps it was the crowds of drunks that had been shipped in for the rugby sevens this weekend. Perhaps the streets were thronged with people excited to see us return to the country. Or perhaps it was just that it was a Friday night.<br />
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Unluckily, we'd arranged dinner this evening at a restaurant that's been closed for months. It's hard to make a reservation on rugby sevens weekend, if you are trying to secure a table within 30 minutes and drunken rugby fans have grabbed everything. Somehow we managed to catch a table at an Italian-American place at the top of a new mall in Causeway Bay, and although I ate more than my own bodyweight in pizza this evening, this was a successful night. And so to bed.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-21464003972872044212013-03-21T07:51:00.000+08:002013-03-27T13:27:39.625+08:00Juming Museum, TaiwanThe Juming Museum is an enormous outdoor garden, filled with sculpture. There are dozens of monumental bronze statues of tai chi practicioners, soldiers and people in flight.<br />
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Apparently.<br />
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I keep meaning to visit the Juming Museum, but every time we're in Taiwan we fail. Today was no exception. We had another solid eight hours of sleep, and woke from it feeling drugged, groggy, confused. When we finally worked out that the shortest route to the Juming Museum was a two hour bus ride, our enthusiasm began to pall, and instead we went for a walk around the centre of Taipei instead.<br />
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What we intended to do was visit the Museum of Contemporary Art, but our erring sense of direction meant we went to Zhongshan station and then walked in the wrong direction for twenty minutes, and only after judicious application of coffee did we muster the mental wherewithal to find our way to our intended destination.<br />
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We were last at MOCA more than three years ago, and although it was ok, I felt a little underwhelmed. The current showing was much better: lots of dark rooms and playing with light, whether that was a handcranked hypnosis wheel you could try to induce fits in yourself by spinning, or a tiny train carrying a spotlight, travelling round a track, casting strange silhouettes on the walls of the room, or an interactive piece where your brainwaves would levitate a chair (but only if you didn't get excited about this).<br />
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Best of all was either a heart-rate-activated photographic exhibit, or the Epson Colour Imaging photographic competition, where in a nice bit of irony almost all the entries were in black and white.<br />
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We wandered again after that, lonely as clouds, down to the railway station, to the bus station, to the mall, to a group of shops that proved there was nothing I wanted to buy, and on, until we found ourselves at the cinema, watching Warm Bodies. Because if you can't go and watch a film in the middle of the day when you're on holiday, when can you?<br />
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Later, we were at Taipei 101, to visit the bookshop in the mall. It saddens me greatly that in the five years I've been visiting Taipei, Page One is being pushed ever so slightly further into the distance: it's now lost its grand front entrance space to another branch of Burberry, and you get into it via a tiny side door, like it's a part of the waste disposal area of the building. Within, it still has almost as much space as it ever did, but there's a certain amount of dignity that's been snatched away from it.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-16165214896534118272013-03-20T17:16:00.000+08:002013-03-27T13:26:50.655+08:00Village Of The Cats<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTECVW7U0y8gy42qUcHmT39AX8u2ygplEZIegar7eoxsF-V1tWT3iGvoCAUZodQ9KMHzZv_2ClOCB9DsRTsd4qsKyu5f7TNWiu-jLYQQu9u424AdIoiNImzJo0kGYUerkjEE7hYA/s1600/8588274377_ae6b9820ec.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjTECVW7U0y8gy42qUcHmT39AX8u2ygplEZIegar7eoxsF-V1tWT3iGvoCAUZodQ9KMHzZv_2ClOCB9DsRTsd4qsKyu5f7TNWiu-jLYQQu9u424AdIoiNImzJo0kGYUerkjEE7hYA/s320/8588274377_ae6b9820ec.jpg" /></a></div>After eight blissful hours of sleep, we arose this morning and took a train from Taipei Central out to Pingxi. Or Pingsi. There is some ambiguity here, partly because of the difficulty of transcribing Chinese in a Latin script, and partly because somebody has been round the town applying little 'S' stickers over the X in Pingxi. Or little 'X' stickers over the S in Pingsi.<br />
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The main industries of Pingx/si are looking picturesque and organised pyromania. Tourists visit, photograph some of the ancient buildings, then set light to a lantern that then floats up into the sky in an auspicious manner. This looks very pretty, but I kept thinking of the Japanese scheme from the Second World War to rain incendiaries on the West Coast of America by attaching bombs to lanterns and sending them floating over the Pacific. But then we haven't heard about fiery death raining from the skies around Taipei, so I guess it's ok.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpZYFqj3wp9C19-phQp7PmClXtBnkyOO2MOXXCLKBg78t16zFLtaM8p18s8szpnlsMJom9YNcP-EfwOp4gswHLOf-wEoJB6RnRDGuK-sUdoEY8kQTYsPPpjk6qAlBBNSFWjOd_XQ/s1600/8589368490_9611abc09f.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpZYFqj3wp9C19-phQp7PmClXtBnkyOO2MOXXCLKBg78t16zFLtaM8p18s8szpnlsMJom9YNcP-EfwOp4gswHLOf-wEoJB6RnRDGuK-sUdoEY8kQTYsPPpjk6qAlBBNSFWjOd_XQ/s320/8589368490_9611abc09f.jpg" /></a></div>The P-town is quite pretty, but there's not much to do once you've set fire to a lantern and eaten an ice cream, so we took the train back up the line a few stops to Hougang. We were last in this part of Taiwan about four years ago, when we went for a walk and got lost in the mountains, but we'd never heard of Hougang until recently. Hougang has a 'cat village' which excited my wife. I was excited too, until it turned out the cats had no municipal authority or even a parish council of their own.<br />
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Hougang used to be the site of a coalmine, and there's still bits of the mine left, although there are some mysterious gaps in the history. None of the signs explain if the ruined building in the middle of town collapsed, caught fire, exploded, or was demolished by a bunch of cats in a comandeered bulldozer.<br />
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I reckon it was the last of those choices. There are enough cats for them to have terrified the locals into silence, and then removed all the evidence. Except for the massive ruined coal-sorting plant.<br />
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The village is obsessed with cats. There are little cathouses (feline kennels, not brothels) all over the place, the bridge they're constructing across the railway line is shaped like an enormous cat, and every other shop is selling cat-shaped cakes, postcards, and catfood. Everyone comes to Hougang to feed the cats, and I suppose it's a pretty good reinvention of the place, shifting from heavy industry to commercialised cuteness.<br />
<div style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xDZvFtHpWF7u_Pgdl2GG-86fQ5gpC7ccm4o8PALFxtBDG0w-T3SmzciAboUQ75riMifzEEt_hVLEikfTSI0Lqoo1RG3xffCjCR5VxnmDtx_j_TEmNxo0UaTKhv6nQtYUY5G-pQ/s1600/8588284013_a403773bb0.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6xDZvFtHpWF7u_Pgdl2GG-86fQ5gpC7ccm4o8PALFxtBDG0w-T3SmzciAboUQ75riMifzEEt_hVLEikfTSI0Lqoo1RG3xffCjCR5VxnmDtx_j_TEmNxo0UaTKhv6nQtYUY5G-pQ/s320/8588284013_a403773bb0.jpg" /></a></div>We wonder how they made the leap. My wife thinks it could have been a coincidence, or a concerted attempt to recreate Hougang as a place to see cats. I think it was the cats asserting their authority over humanity, using heavy earthmoving equipment. Whichever, it's awe inspiring to see their total dominance. Even the dogs in the town are docile and obey their feline overlords.<br />
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This must get a bit dull for some of the cats. It's a small settlement after all. One cat had clearly been sent mental by the isolation, and believed it was a duck. When we tried to stroke it, the duck-cat would quack furiously, then purr for a bit, then quack again. Living in a cat village is clearly not as easy as you might imagine.<br />
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Eventually, we fled to Taipei, away from the Village Of The Cats. I wonder how long it will be before the army of intransigent moggies follows us.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-86246117982617159992013-03-19T17:30:00.000+08:002013-03-25T09:08:26.059+08:00Asleep off the jobI rather feel we wasted our first day in Taiwan. We arrived so early at Hong Kong airport that Cathay moved us onto an earlier flight, and were in our hotel in the middle of Taipei at 1 o'clock. The day was ours to make the most of. So we went to sleep.<br />
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After about an hour, I woke up and nudged my wife. "We should get up" I groaned. "We're going to miss the sunset in Danshui."<br />
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We've been to Taiwan umpteen times. Every time, we take the train from the centre of Taipei up to Danshui, a picturesque area on the northern coast, blessed with beautiful sunsets and a long boardwalk past dozens of tiny craft shops. And every time, we miss the beautiful sunsets because we don't get onto the train until much too late. At best, the last red glow of the sun will be fading over a warehouse next to the rail line, three stops south of Danshui. This holiday, we were going to make a concerted effort to catch the sunset.<br />
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"I know" my wife moaned, half conscious. "Just a little more sleep."<br />
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We passed out again. We had started far too early in Hong Kong, and last night I'd taken the foolish decision to stay up until 1:30 in the morning to watch A Haunting In Connecticut 2: Ghosts Of Georgia. I'd failed to observe the simple rule that you should never watch a film with a colon in the title. Unless you're a proctologist, I suppose.<br />
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AHIC2:GOG was simply dreadful. There was a little bit of creepiness near the start, which is easy to do if you put a family with a 'gifted' child in a cabin in the woods, miles from anywhere, but it soon descended into cliche and a plot so lacking in twists it was like driving down the M20 between Ashford and Newingreen. There are few people who are reading this who will have had the opportunity to make that insufferable commute; for those of you who aren't fans of the English motorway system, let's just say it's damnably straight, and leave it at that.<br />
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It was also a plot that required a cast of idiots. I would reuse that simile about the M20, but then I worry that a cartload of angry Kentish types (sorry, types of Kent, they are below the Medway) would come bust my windows.<br />
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Anyway, I was sleep deprived and so unconsciousness came easily. We both awoke at 3.<br />
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"We should get up" I croaked.<br />
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"Yes" my wife murmured.<br />
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At 4, we woke up again, and finally managed to crawl from the bed. We'd taken two plane rides and spent hundreds of dollars in order to sleep all afternoon.<br />
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On reflection, that's not a complete waste. There's little chance that Chinatown would take a pause from the banging and shouting to allow an afternoon nap, and if we hadn't lain in bed so long, we might have missed the little glimpses of politeness that Taiwan exemplifies.<br />
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First, as we left the hotel, we saw a daschaund trotting across a busy street, bereft of owner. In some cities it would have been left to trundle around until its little legs gave in or it ended up squashed under a car, but instead a passerby caught the dog, and tied it's lead to something so it wouldn't run away again. I hope the owner finds it. If not, we'll retrieve it when we get back to the hotel tonight, and it can sleep with us.<br />
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Second, as we waited at a busy intersection, a tiny old lady, about waist-height on me, began to haul her metal trolley across the road, before the lights had changed, and while some cars were still turning into the junction. The woman next to us ran forward and caught her arm and guided her back, before she could get squashed.<br />
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You could put negative interpretations on either of these, to do with careless dog owners or old ladies having to pull metal trolleys around in the final years of their lives, but it's better to be positive. We are on holiday, after all, and if you can't peer through rosy-tinted glasses when you've slept half the day away, when can you?Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-76852619749683318512013-03-18T20:02:00.001+08:002013-03-25T09:13:07.612+08:00Pardon My FrenchOne of my favourite places to get coffee in Hong Kong is Fuel. It's a New Zealand coffee bar with a couple of branches; one in the upper reaches of the IFC mall, and the other submerged in the basement of the Landmark mall. At both, the coffee is good. The staff are generally both friendly and attentive (although there was one time it took them 5 goes to make me an espresso, which suggests a strange combination of diligence and incompetence). Finally, they serve an artery-hardening selection of baked goods, including a chocolate coated, sugar-slathered slice of caramel that, like a Proustian madeline, makes me think of happiness in Hong Kong and rage with a database simultaneously.<br />
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My wife sent me to Fuel to caffeinate myself while she cut a swathe through the jungle of maternity wear in a shop on Pedder Street. I detoured via the Michelin-starred boulangerie on one of the upper floors then, stomach lined with high class croissant, descended to [re]Fuel.<br />
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As luck would have it, there was one last caramel slice waiting for me. I took it over to the only spare table in the cafe and began to fail to use the fork I'd been provided with to eat it. The slice is so gooey, yet so dense, yet so brittle that using cutlery rather than just gnawing lumps out of it is bound to end in failure and disappointing pieces of caramel slice spread across the tabletop.<br />
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Thus I was sat there, curled over my food like a greedy gecko with scoliosis, cramming in the caramel while all around me, respectable pinstriped types drank tiny cups of coffee with great care and attention.<br />
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Next to me were two almost identical men. One had a shaven head, the other an almost offensively luxuriant mane of Continental hair, like a Gallic version of the Patrick Bateman played by Christian Bale in American Psycho. They were animatedly discussing something in French.<br />
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Talking French isn't a breach of ettiquette. Like most languages, there is the capability to sound pleasant, just as there is the potential to sound like a yokel. That wasn't what spoiled my day.<br />
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It was the corporate buzzwords that kept mingling their way into the conversation. I don't know if it's just me but it's not nice to hear "<i>french french french french</i> <b>DEEP DIVE</b> <i>french french french</i> <b>DOUBLE DOWN</b> <i>french french french</i>".<br />
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If you try hard, you can get corporate banality to wash over you without a trace. Likewise, if you're not fully proficient in French it can just be a mellifluous background babble. But the combination of the two keeps wrenching your attention back, staying you from being able to concentrate on the caramel slice at hand.<br />
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This is the language of Voltaire, of Descartes, of Balzac. It wasn't designed so they could exchange horrible phrases like "leverage synergies" and "work smarter, not harder". Perhaps they were being ironic, satirising an Anglophone co-worker who was too reliant on such phrases. But they sounded too sincere.<br />
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I'm British. That means I have a fundamental distrust of sincerity, particularly when it's Johnny Foreigner. I considered giving it a bit of the old excuse-moi, avez-voice le savoir faire necessaire pour self knowledge, but I didn't want to get punched out by a pair of Parisian bankers on my first day on holiday.<br />
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Excuse my prejudices. <br />
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They may have been Belgian accountants.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-50821412567756942372013-03-17T22:06:00.001+08:002013-03-25T09:50:29.982+08:00Sleep, interruptedI was taking a siesta this lunchtime. Or a nap. Or a snooze. I was feeling exhausted: I'd been drinking hard last night and the hangover was hitting me hard. I tried to read The Finkler Question to cheer myself up. That was a sign of how bad I must have been: nobody reads Booker prizewinners to lift their spirits.<br />
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Earlier this week I read The Teleportation Accident, which was on the Booker longlist this year, and, a bit like Ned Beauman's previous, it was an elaborate, baroque tower of plot that toppled over a few pages from the end. It was also the sort of book that makes you very depressed, in the way it points out the failure of people to live up to their potential, but it does have some nicely horrible ironies (there's a conversation early on between two Germans asking what to do with six million unemployed) and admirable cruelty to all the characters involved.<br />
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The Finkler Question is filled with unlikeable people, with bad things happening to them, and that doesn't make it very relaxing. I gave up making myself suffer and took myself to bed. And then the storm started. Rain was blowing in horizontally and thunderclaps began to blast like distant artillery. Instead of a relaxing nap, I had to scurry around the flat, closing the windows against the further ingress of water.<br />
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In the afternoon, unable to go back to sleep and not wanting to read more depressing books, I took the train out to Expo, an enormous shed near the airport where there was a cutprice book sale going on. Although Singapore thrives on being well-organised, the book sale was just row on row of books, with no rhyme or reason to their arrangement. Every twenty books or so you'd see the same title, repeating over and over again. As though books were just commodities to pile up, with no difference between titles: just book upon book upon book. A bit like the great vortex of toaster ovens that you find when you're in Mustafa, and lost.<br />
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I ended up buying a book with a picture of a chicken on the cover. Some sort of pun about cocks would be in order but it's late in the evening and I haven't had enough sleep.<br />
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I've not being getting enough sleep, or enough exercise, so I tried to rectify this by giving the Kinect a go. Twenty minutes of jumping up and down later, I was drenched with sweat and wobbly-legged. I hope that's a good sign, or a good start, or something.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-49079398116466147202013-03-16T17:54:00.001+08:002013-03-25T09:41:26.319+08:00How do you like those onions?I woke aggressively hungover this morning. Last night, after being informed of my obsolecence by a Samsung employee, I'd clearly been affected, and ended up drinking heavily at a bar called The Bank, at 1 Shenton, on Shenton Way, which is a street full of banks, and thus a terrible place to give directions to. I suppose if they'd called it The Toilet it would be worse, but only slightly.<br />
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My wife came out to meet me, but since the taxi driver didn't believe that 1 Shenton existed, and all points on Shenton Way are equivalent, she took half an hour to find me. It's not easy to explain to somebody where to go if they can only tell you that they're outside a bank on Shenton and you're in The Bank at 1 Shenton.<br />
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All I had for dinner was a packet of crisps and a slice of disappointing cake, and then three pints of lager, a quarter of a bottle of gin and a bowl of onion rings. Clearly the onion rings are what made me hungover. That, and owning a broken, out of date tablet.<br />
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I woke up at 8, feeling dire. I'd strained my neck somehow, making it exceptionally painful to look over my right shoulder, and from time to time the pain worsened, as my eyes crossed and all the strength departed my body. I tried to sleep, but in this discombobulated state I failed to do so. Instead I read Richard Herring's Warming Up blog, which has been printed up in book form. The book covers 6 months in 2003 when he was about my age, and terribly gloomy and worried about the path his life was taking. I wonder if I should have taken succour from this, or seen it as something to aim for.<br />
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Because we were out all week and avoiding boring things like grocery shopping, there was a lack of any real food in the apartment, apart from bread, and booze. I had to walk to the supermarket to buy fruit, when I was in the precise state that required me to lie in bed while somebody else fed me fruit. But alas, my wife was at work and I was bereft of bananas.<br />
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I'd like to say the walk made me feel better, but after ten minutes in the unforgiving sunshine I felt at least as dreadful as before. I managed to write 750 words for my novel, which, while little, is more than I've done in weeks, and then went for a run. All I managed was a mile, so all in all this was a quite unsatisfactory day for any sort of achievement.<br />
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On the positive side, I didn't fall down the toilet while carrying out my ablutions today - that always felt like a real possibility.<br />
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This evening we're visiting a friend for a barbecue. He's asked me to bring onions, ice, cream, mustard, and dessert, the last of which seems fairly redundant, because if you're not happy with a sweet course of ice, cream, mustard and onions, then frankly there's no pleasing you. I have a fairly significant fear that I'm going to be made to get very, very drunk again. It's the onions that are going to break me.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-62267933420289117472013-03-15T23:52:00.001+08:002013-03-25T09:41:55.475+08:00ObsoleteLast weekend, our tablet crashed. I was in the middle of browsing a webpage of little importance, when the screen froze and the tablet refused to comply with any further swiping-based instructions. <br />
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It's scarcely more than a year old, so I figured I should get it fixed rather than sling it out. That meant I lost a couple of hours of my life trying to reinstall the operating system, the object either showing a picture of a cheery green android to taunt me, or else remaining resolutely black. <br />
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Clearly I wasn't going to make progress on my own, or with the handy (but unhelpful) suggestions on the internet. I took it to the Samsung shop on the way home, and they told me to take it to the basement of Dhoby Ghaut, where the repair centre lives. <br />
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The Samsung repair facility in the bowels of Dhoby Ghaut is a horrible place to be. It has been lit with those ultra-white light bulbs, the kind that save energy while giving your skin a blueish tinge, until your veins practically glow and you think you might be dead. Somebody gives you a ticket and you wait until it's your time. <br />
<br />
It was soon my time. My skin was still turning blue. <br />
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I explained my predicament. The customer service representative listened, then walked away, then came back, then walked away again, then came back again to tell me we'd need to replace the motherboard, for $300. <br />
<br />
I blanched. The CSR couldn't tell, because of Samsung's lightbulb decisions. I walked out, put out that the cost of repairing a year-old tablet was 50% of its purchase price. As I left, I asked a feckless young shop assistant how much a new Samsung 7.7 would cost, rather than this exorbitant repair. <br />
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"You can't buy one" he said. "Obsolete." <br />
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I fled, uncertain if he was describing the tablet or me. Damn you, Samsung.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-57679460900907891402013-03-14T17:26:00.001+08:002013-03-15T12:03:40.384+08:00Wrong numberMy phone rang at 2 yesterday afternoon. I'm too cheap to pay $60 a year for caller ID so I answered, in case it was my wife or someone was ringing to tell me I'd won the football pools.<br />
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It was neither, it was somebody who wanted Simon Hopkins. I'm not, and never have been, Simon Hopkins, so I told him it was a wrong number.<br />
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Usually at this point the caller hangs up (sometimes they apologise first, but really it's no great matter). But not this one. Oh no. He ploughed straight into his script to sell me a credit card loan.<br />
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As I said, I've never been Simon Hopkins, and nor do I harbour a secret desire to become Simon Hopkins. I was nonplussed by this man's determination to change my identity. Before I could persuade him of this, he was asking if I was Singaporean or not. <br />
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I told him I wasn't, and hoped it would stop there, but no, that was just a segue into asking what my monthly income was. I'm not in the habit of telling random callers how much Simon Hopkins earns, so I told him to hang on a moment and then put the phone away in my desk drawer.<br />
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One would assume a few minutes of phone purgatory would dissuade this gentleman of any hope of closing a sale, but apparently not. When I pulled the phone back out, he was still asking me how much I was paid. Well, I had to reward his dogged persistence somehow.<br />
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"$48,000" I said. "Per month."<br />
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Then I had to put the phone on mute while I stuffed my fist in my mouth for a minute. The prattling continued and I passed my phone to my manager, who now took on Simon Atkins' identity.<br />
<br />
"Yes, this is Simon Atkins" he bellowed when asked. Either my phone is terrible (well, it is a Blackberry, after all) or it doesn't matter if your name changes half way through a phone call. Or your voice.<br />
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He told us we qualified for a loan of up to 4 times $48,000, which would be $196,000. At a rate of interest of a measly 5.6%.<br />
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"5.6% interest?" my manager asked. "That's not very good. I'd expect no more than 4.2."<br />
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The man rambled on about pointless financial products for a while. We put him on hold. I tried to understand how 4 times 48 had stopped being 192 and become 196. We took the man off hold. We put him back in my drawer. He kept asking if Simon Hopkins/Atkins/Upton was interested.<br />
<br />
After thirteen minutes, he gave up and the line went dead. Or rather, I thought he'd given up. He called Simon Haddockfins seven more times before I deigned to answer again (I had been in a budget meeting and unable to negotiate a loan far in excess of my total earnings) and explain that no, I really didn't want his loan. Not even at a special rate of 6%.<br />
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Which was pretty special, as it had started at 5.6% a phone call and an eternity away. Perhaps it is time for me to start screening my calls.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-73654988092784619472013-03-13T20:17:00.001+08:002013-03-13T20:17:38.458+08:00Stuck at the officeToday my brain is rather ruined; something broke that needed an awful lot of manual fixing, and that took up five and a half hours of my life that I won't ever get back. At the end of that, I was already pretty broken - it wasn't the sort of time consuming fix where you have to wait five hours for it to complete, it was the sort where every five minutes for five hours you have to press a button and wait for five minutes, which does terrible things to your powers of concentration. What I've learned from that is how important it is to get somebody else to do the grunt work, if humanly possible. Grunting won't make you better at anything (including grunting) and it appears to have made me worse. I've now been in the office for twelve hours, and that's not good for my mood or my productivity.<br />
<a name='more'></a>Still, the sun is shining outside. Well, the sun was shining outside; now it's dark. I did get outside, but only as far as Starbucks to purchase a sandwich. Long days are not good for your diet. I can content myself with the thought that I'm saving money: sitting in the office means there's no need to run the air conditioning or the lights back home, except we never have the air con on anyway, so that's not so much of a benefit. Drat. Wasn't I meant to be being optimistic?<br />
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I hope there's an end in sight to all of this. Well, there is at least one: I'm going to be on holiday next week, and whether the broken thing is fixed or not, I won't be able to do a thing about it while I'm halfway up a mountain. If only it had broken <i>next </i>week, I would have dodged a bullet: I could have done my clever stuff, gone away, missed the saga of things breaking and being fixed, and carried on being clever the next day. Ho hum.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-29968821910895899672013-03-12T22:11:00.001+08:002013-03-12T22:11:38.483+08:00Wrestling with Kindles againOut running the other day, I had the thought that I should compile all those posts I wrote about Bond films, and stick them up on Amazon as a book. Not because I want to make lots of money from a blog post, but because there's probably a lot of people who'll never read my blog, but who might be looking for something to read on Amazon. It's good to be in several different channels at once, and perhaps some of them would then decide to read Diet Croydon as well.<br />
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It wasn't as easy as I thought it would be to convert 23 blog posts into a e-book. Partly this is because the blog had lots of pictures scattered through it, and I wanted to take those out, but also because I moved all the posts into Word first, to reformat them and split them into nice sections, and unfortunately if you're going to create an e-book, Word is not the best place to start.<br />
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After <a href="http://comments-zero.blogspot.com/2012/01/supposedly-fun-thing-ill-never-do-again.html">my previous hijinks</a> with preparing books for Kindle publishing, I swore off doing it ever again, but a lot can happen in a year. Well, you can forget a lot in a year, and unfortunately I also failed to write a clear enough how-to tutorial last time round, which means I'm starting almost from scratch. This is one of those unpleasant and vaguely aggravating tasks that, by the time you're finished, you're so annoyed with that you can't face trying to document it. Since I create a new book every 14 months, this time I'll try to write it up properly so the future me doesn't go through the same pain. But in short: Word vomits out some very strange, style-sheet riddled version of your book that won't render at all nicely on a Kindle, <i>or</i> plain text, which also won't render nicely on a Kindle. I am amazed they haven't developed ePub support within Word in the last year and a half, but perhaps that just isn't meant to be on the roadmap in Redmond.<br />
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I slept fitfully this morning, waking a few times from bad dreams involving Russian roulette, and could hardly peel myself away from my bed this morning. Today I did learn some new things to do with programming procedures in postgres: it's wonderful when your work allows you to make alliterations and get paid for it. However, this does not feel like the time or place to discuss writing loops or functions. I'd feel especially clever if I had managed to chain together postgres and R and build an enormous machine for spewing out graphs, but I fear that may be a task for the end of the week. Just like sausages, the end result will be impressive but the process to get there may be vile and revolting.<br />
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Because I didn't get up until late today, I missed my morning run, but since I have been off the coffee for a week, I didn't need the run in order to wake myself up. I still felt guilty about not exercising and went out this evening for a run, but in doing so I learnt something else: a belly full of cheese, bread and chocolate is not a good foundation for strenuous exercise. I didn't actually throw up on the pristine streets of Singapore, but it was a close run thing. The cool air first thing in the morning is still the muggy, hot air in the evening, and that's true whether you're in a suit or a moisture-wicking vest.<br />
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Still, when it's subzero in London in March, it's not right of me to complain about a bit of hot air. I still enjoy complaining though...Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-36509121399893080292013-03-11T22:30:00.001+08:002013-03-13T20:20:19.293+08:00Rescue?<center><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdozB8O8UMkvFD6bzAeSpIUn46a0AgbBUZ1yNGJg9HCtwN5eeNNstladeJwOuQidwLZrzN_UrEXgwjCSRqyx6lm7FNJMjgvt1DcxBdxFVvHFfO3mQFnZWnnD3zL5s32YVcylPN_g/s1600/2909090483_2c9e56b2ac.jpg" imageanchor="1"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdozB8O8UMkvFD6bzAeSpIUn46a0AgbBUZ1yNGJg9HCtwN5eeNNstladeJwOuQidwLZrzN_UrEXgwjCSRqyx6lm7FNJMjgvt1DcxBdxFVvHFfO3mQFnZWnnD3zL5s32YVcylPN_g/s1600/2909090483_2c9e56b2ac.jpg" /></a></center>There's a man in a house, surrounded by fast-rising floods, and another man comes by in a rowboat.<br />
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"Hop in" he says, "I'll take you to safety."<br />
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"No need" says the guy in the house (for he is fairly devout) "God will save me."<br />
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"Whatever" says the man in the boay, and sculls off in a bit of a sulk.<br />
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The waters rise. Soon the ground floor is submerged and the chap relocates upstairs. Along comes another boay with a couple of firemen in it. (With all this water slopping around, fires are few and far between.)<br />
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"Hop in the boat and we'll save you."<br />
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"No need" he says, slightly nervously. "I'm sure that God will save me."<br />
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"Sure?"<br />
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"Yes..."<br />
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"Sure you're sure?"<br />
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"Yes..."<br />
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"Fine then, we'll be off." And the firemen sail away, and the waters rise.<br />
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Eventually, the plucky man has to climb out of his window, clamber up the drainpipe and cling to the chimney stack on the top of his roof. As the waters lap at his feet, a helicopter circles overhead.<br />
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"I say" says the pilot. "You look like you need saving."<br />
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"Who, me?" the chimney-cuddling chap. "I, er ..." and his faith wobbles for a moment, like the tiles on the roof. A gust blows. "No, no, I'm alright, my God will save me." If anyone else in this flooded waste observed this exchange, they might almost have detected a note of sarcasm in the homedweller's voice.<br />
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"Oh, uh, right" shouts the pilot. "It's just we're almost out of fuel, and ..."<br />
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"No, don't mind me."<br />
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And off goes the helicopter, and the waters rise.<br />
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A short drowning later, the man arrives in Heaven. St Peter gives this bedraggled wretch a look up and down, then asks: "What are you doing here?"<br />
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"I'd like to know. I was waiting for God to save me."<br />
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"Well, he sent you two boats and a helicopter, what else did you want?"<br />
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"Oh yeah? Would it have been too much trouble for them to say who'd sent them? That's the trouble with omniscient beings: they think they know it all."<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div>There endeth the parable of the irate man and the annoyingly vague deity.<br />
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Last week I was annoyed. I wasn't quite being flooded out, but I did have somebody dangle an escape ladder before me, only to snatch it away in a fit of reorganisation at the last minute.<br />
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It was strange; by that point, my antennae were beginning to twitch, to tell me that particular escape route wasn't the one to take, but I was too afraid to turn it down in case it was the last helicopter out of Saigon, the last religious rescue dinghy, my final chance at redemption. So I should have been glad that the decision was plucked from my hand. But again, it feels like you're the bigger man if you turn something down that you don't want, instead of being told you can't have it.<br />
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I told my parents. My father said "ah, yes, I could have told you they were a difficult crowd to get on with." It would have been nice if he'd told me that before. But then, if you're picking and choosing between rescuers, you might not listen to somebody telling you one of the ropes looks a bit frayed.<br />
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I told my wife. She was resigned to me not resigning.<br />
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I told my manager. He tried to get me to clamp a bulldog clip onto the end of my nose.<br />
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Today, l learned very little. If I think now, of all the things I encountered today, few led me to excited paroxysms of joy. I spent the afternoon in an icy room, with somebody constantly clearing their throat behind me. After an hour, I could stand it no more - I was ready to punch out one of my many computer screens. I got up, and fetched the coughing man a cup of hot water. I learned it's better to light a candle than curse the darkness. It's also a good idea to give people water, in a work environment, and not stand there screaming "stop snorting!" again and again.<br />
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Or at least not until the helicopter comes for you.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-67726215895794794572013-03-10T22:35:00.001+08:002013-03-11T09:12:03.412+08:00An early start, confounding brunchThis morning my alarm went off at six. I rolled over, turned it off, and slept for another hour. Then I got up and went out for a run.<br />
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I managed 10 miles, which would have seemed easy a few months ago, but today was an unmitigated slog. The only thing that took my mind off the pain was listening to the dragonboat teams, each presided over by one of The Angriest Men In Singapore, yelling at his rowers and telling them to put more effort in. I don't have the aptitude for dragonboating. Or rather, I lack the mental forebearance that would prevent me trying to bash a man's head in with a paddle.<br />
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I got home, showered and then found my wife aghast, standing in a puddle of liquidised fruit. We'd failed to adequately secure the base of the blender after the last time we washed it, and so when she'd lifted it up to tip out our smoothies, they exited through the bottom of the blender instead, onto the countertop. The bad news is all that fruit went to waste; the good news is that after we'd scrubbed and mopped, our kitchen has never been cleaner.<br />
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Still, I needed food and sleep. We had breakfast at Jones The Grocer in Dempsey Hill. It's a strange place where they only serve brunch after noon. But at noon, surely you're already eating lunch, which means it can't be brunch any more. That seems obvious to me. Not that I'd eat brunch anyway, for <a href="http://comments-zero.blogspot.com/2010/09/too-much-of-good-thing.html">reasons I've explained a long time ago</a>. Either way, I got no sleep until 2:30, when we got home and I crashed for half an hour.<br />
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But the day was not done. We had an English-style barbecue to go to. That is, it rained constantly, the charcoal refused to ignite, and when we did cook anything, it was charred on the outside and bloody on the inside. Even the vegetarian sausages.<br />
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I miss England so much. <br />
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The only thing I learned today is that it's useless to light a fire with Singaporean firelighters. They're one of the least flammable things possible - perhaps for safety reasons. We eventually got the barbecue going by setting light to the box the firelighters came in, but even when that was merrily ablaze, the firelighters appeared quite, quite inert. That must be a metaphor for something.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-41754587851909143932013-03-09T23:37:00.001+08:002013-03-12T21:52:26.333+08:00How to escape a desertToday I learned something that might be useful, if I'm ever stuck in the desert with a broken down vehicle. If you want to signal to a rescue aircraft, one way is to shine a mirror at it. But it's hard to be sure that you're pointing the mirror at the right angle. So here's what you do: stretch one arm out, pointing towards the plane, with your index and middle fingers making a V. Then hold a mirror in your other hand and shine it so the reflected light shows on your fingers. Now you've got a pair of sights that you can use to aim the reflected light from the mirror at any spotter. Very handy, although I'm not planning on going wadi-bashing any time soon. (I do so hope that means driving a 4x4 over sand dunes, and not some sort of racist violence.) <br />
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Today I deleted around 250 emails, and now there are fewer than 20 in my inbox. This week I'm going to test new email behaviour: I'm only going to read emails twice per day, and work on my projects the rest of the time. I'm not sure if a week is long enough to educate the rest of the company to stop being so reliant on this imperfect means of communication, but it's a start. <br />
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I also turned on the Xbox and did half an hour's exercise withe the Kinect, for the first time in over a month. This was excruciatingly painful, and by the end I was sweating too much to do some of the exercises (the perils of sweat on a smooth, tiled floor) but it may have made me a better person. We'll see tomorrow when I go running. When my wife called me on the way home from work, I was incapable of speaking; this may, or may not, have been a good sign. <br />
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This evening I undid most of the good work by going to a party and eating lots of cupcakes. We met a very avuncular man, the host of the party, who was born in Balham. I'm always overjoyed to meet another South Londoner, even if my own status is a little quasi-, having been dragged up on the mean streets of Beckenham. "Straight Out Of The Borough Of Bromley" doesn't quite have that gangster cachet.Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10211012.post-43243958406717267142013-03-08T23:05:00.001+08:002013-03-09T14:07:49.078+08:00Mad for MexicanThis evening we returned to Lucha Loco, a Mexican restaurant near our flat that combines wonderful food with terrible service. This is surprising, because they're one of the few places not to automatically add a service charge to your bill, which you think would be an incentive to the staff to be more attentive and helpful. Which they are, it turns out, as long as you sit at the back of the restaurant. <br />
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Unfortunately, we nearly always sit at the front, a demented whirlwind in which either nobody appears to take your order for half an hour, <i>or</i> as soon as somebody takes your order, somebody else arrives to ask if you're ready to order, just before a third server arrives to see if you'd like something to eat. You'd think they'd be able to have a system to divide up the tables into some sort of zones. You know, like almost every restaurant in history. <br />
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At the back of the restaurant the same chaos isn't evident, and we were seated there and served without fuss. The staff were solicitous without being over enthusiastic, and the kitchen is like a terrifyingly efficient machine for producing tacos at near-light speed. <br />
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Usually we go overboard and stuff ourselves silly; tonight, feeling fat and also cautious, I limited myself to two bean tacos and some chips, meaning I had room for the blue corn cake. This is a wonderful dessert, sweet and yet earthy, as though they were feeding us fresh loam. I don't think I'd ever have thought that a sweet dish that was redolent of soil would be enjoyable, but there you are. <br />
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Today I don't feel I learned very much, until late afternoon when I read about the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/feb/23/change-life-helsinki-bus-station-theory">Helsinki Bus Station Theory</a> of Creative Endeavour. According to this, like all the buses leaving the Helsinki Bus Station, everyone starts off on the same path. It's only if you ride it for long enough that you notice there are different, interesting places that you might be heading. Time to pick myself up and try again. Although what optimist thought a bus could be a cure for scepticism about feeling joy?Mr Cushtiehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16692225606363497906noreply@blogger.com0