What if you were getting stupider?

I'm wondering if a service could be provided to let you know that you were getting dumber as your life trundled on. It would be useful, that's for sure, but it's probably not a commercially viable enterprise. As I read just the other day, there's a surplus of people who need their asses kicked, but few of them are likely to pay for it.

Money can't buy you taste

As I walked through Soho last week, I saw the most ridiculous car parked on Elgin Street. I paused, performing a genuine double take, then went back to the flat and got my camera, so I could prove I'd seen this:

(That was no trivial undertaking in itself. I had tired legs from running, four flights of stairs to climb, and one of the heaviest cameras Canon have seen fit to make.)

Flying around, United in boredom

I made a mistake flying back to Hong Kong from San Francisco; not only did that mean flying for two hours in the wrong direction to start with, the flight from SFO to HKG is much more punishing than going from Seattle to Tokyo and then flying on. You're just not meant to be sat on a plane for 14 hours, especially when the only entertainment is watching a movie on a screen at the front of the cabin. No screens in the seatback? No individual in-flight entertainment? What are we, animals?

On and off the train in Singapore

This evening I took the MRT up to Orchard Road, intent on teasing shop assistants by pretending to being a paying customer. Instead, I was going to try on every pair of running shoes I could find, then go home. In these days of Occupy Wall Street, it's the closest I get to Sticking It To The Man.

Stupid, stupid, stupid

As we walked through the Pacific Place mall yesterday, an angry-looking man in his late forties scuttled out of the music shop that persists in selling people compact discs in this age of downloadery. He had the look of the sort of vaguely demented eccentric who asks irrelevant questions at the end of public lectures on science: wild hair, anorak, vaguely unkempt.

"Stupid shop!" he exclaimed with some rage and vigour. Then he dashed back inside the shop, waved what looked like a bank card at the nonplussed security guard, threw it on the floor and then stomped back out.