Kids Say The Darnedest Things
Thom teaches English in Japan. His blog entry today is priceless.
May 20, 2008
Moose and squirrel also suspected
Actual BBC News headline: "Cat and mouse blamed for blackouts".
Hanna-Barbera were unavailable for comment about their stars' misadventures.
May 19, 2008
Full Moon at 300mm
So while I was in the States, I picked up the spectacular 300mm f/2.8 IS lens (which I used for this Key West photo). Shame to have that much glass and not use it... and it's a full moon tonight, so here's a snap of the full moon. Who needs a telescope?
JRE strongly recommends looking at the full-resolution version of this photo, because it's so sharp you could cut yourself: the full-res version is right here.
Obligatory plug: I bought the lens from B&H Photo Video, and the service was impeccable (plus, no sales tax). Highly recommended.
And tell me if it's still raining there in England?
Historical note: JRE landed in Singapore one year ago today.
(Post title lifted from traditional expat-Aussie song One Perfect Day, by Little Heroes.)
The best business idea ever
The new thing in Snohomish County, just north of Seattle: bikini baristas. (Link has pictures.)
JRE enthusiastically approves of this - and anyone who doesn't like it can open up a non-bikini-clad coffee shop to cater to the cranky feminist types.
A thought, though: the weather around Seattle can get pretty chilly in winter, with the average temperature range being 2-8 degrees. Will the "bikini baristas" become "jeans-and-thick-jacket-and-long-undies baristas" for three months of the year?
May 18, 2008
Found by googling "Straits Times Sucks"
My typical Sunday morning involves sitting in one of the cafes on Mohamed Sultan Road, demolishing a coffee and leafing through whatever reading material happens to be lying around. Usually I go to the Book Cafe, which (joy of joys) has The Times, the NYT, and the Sydney Morning Herald in its stacks.
Today, though, I'm at Delicatessen - which has much better coffee (and a truly great ham-and-omelette croissant), but doesn't have international newspapers. And that's how I found myself reading the Sunday edition of the Straits Times, and pondering just how useless a newspaper can be.
The ST is not a joy to read. It's a simulacrum of a newspaper. It has the external phenotypes of a newspaper - paper, ink, occasional smudging on your fingers. But it doesn't print any actual news.
If you leave out the Xinhua-AFP-AP-sourced stories from China and Myanmar, here's today's ST news:
- Page 1: The Government has made seatbelts compulsory on new minibuses;
- Page 2: Miss Singapore Universe has been dropped from TV due to poor ratings;
- Page 3: Selfless mother who saved two kids from runaway truck now in stable condition;
- Page 4: Immigrant workers locked out of their workplace after landlord fails to pay rent;
- Page 6: What do Singaporeans do when they drive? Eating, shaving, kissing... [ed note: this is why I don't own a car]
- Page 17: Foreign Minister George Yeo says "we must respect the autonomy of countries [read: Myanmar] and accept the fact that they know local situations better than foreign people ever can". O RLY?
This article from Imagethief, a blog written by an American PR professional now living in China, does a great job of explaining the ST (and a lot of other newspapers in Asia). He also has some great tales of launching a software company in Singapore, back in the roaring 90s.
Update: I went back and corrected the quote from esteemed Foreign Minister George Yeo (and corrected his name as well, sorry about that, George buddy). Another money quote from Mr. Yeo:
"I don't see how [force-feeding aid to Myanmar] can be done because if we try to do that, it will only make the situation worse and will increase the suffering of the people in Myanmar."
Hmm. Given that only 20% of the survivors have received any aid so far (according to the United Nations, and the NYT article linked above), JRE has to respectfully disagree.
May 17, 2008
JPL Keeps You Entertained All Weekend
The Phoenix spacecraft is due to land on Mars next Sunday. Its mission: to explore strange new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go... wait, no, that's not right, is it? It's "designed to study the history of water and habitability potential in the Martian arctic's ice-rich soil".
The mission's website is here - and if you're in Tucson, they're throwing a party at Mission Control for the landing.
Here's a video from JPL, showing what will happen during the seven-minute descent to Mars. (The 190MB HD version is here.)
"He's writing a blog."
This week in Pearls Before Swine:
- A classically-trained icecream truck;
- A terrible, terrible pun (and a huge repair bill for that broken fourth wall);
- Pig goes goth; and,
- "Algeebra waste of time".
If you liked those, the Houston Chronicle has the entire Pearls archive online.
(And if you've never heard of Pearls before, here it is on Wikipedia. It's possibly the only strip to have had a labour dispute with its characters.)
May 15, 2008
$340 million for a beer? Could be Singapore
Wow, I didn't think inflation in Zimbabwe was this bad.
Key phrase: "revolutionary Marxist government in Washington"
The London Review of Books (admittedly not a typical source for financial news, more famous for its distinctively weird personals column) has a highly readable article about 'end of the world' credit trades and the makings of the meltdown.
Update: does anyone know where I can get in on that end-of-the-world trade? For twenty thousand bucks a year, sure, I'll take the risk that a revolutionary Marxist gets elected. Heck, even Venezuela hasn't seen the levels of defaults that they're talking about.
May 14, 2008
"Narkoba itu bukan milik saya", Schapelle
Via Dane: an enormous collection of language guides from worldnomads.com.
They have podcast versions, and iPod Notes versions, with all sorts of handy phrases. If only Schapelle Corby had had the Indonesian one - she'd have known how to say "those drugs aren't mine".
Singapore to Anchorage: $2000 return
Seen on the Mythbusters Alaska Special: Hatcher Pass Lodge. Sixty miles from Anchorage, and a thousand miles from anywhere.
In summer: hiking, climbing, biking, rafting, fishing. In winter: cross-country skiing, sledding, snowboarding. And it's only 90 bucks a night.
May 13, 2008
Science is awesome
Not exactly OMG BREAKING NEWS (it's a couple of weeks old), but Schering-Plough has announced an interesting new drug candidate. A drug based on a substance from the bark of the magnolia tree is showing plenty of promise as an anti-clotting agent - that is, it could help prevent heart attacks and ischemic (clotting-type) stroke.
If you only click one link in this post, make it this one: the excellent In The Pipeline blog (previously on JRE) has an insider's look at the development of the drug, which goes by the catchy name SCH 530348.
The WSJ's Health Blog points out that it's only in phase 2 trials at the moment, and success in phase 2 doesn't guarantee success in phase 3. (E.G: torcetrapib, which looked like a blockbuster cholesterol drug for Pfizer, was shot down a couple of years ago in late phase 3. Terminating the project cost hundreds of millions of dollars in wasted R&D - and as much as 100 billion dollars in lost sales.)
The interesting thing about SCH 530348 is that it was originally found while searching for anti-Alzheimers drugs. It didn't do squat for Alzheimers, but it was found to be extremely effective at controlling thrombin, a blood-clotting agent. That sort of high-volume screening of lots of drugs against lots of possible targets has only really been possible in the last decade or two.
Related: a magnolia tree in full bloom. Don't munch on the bark, though.
Food Price Inflation Watch
The enormous rise in world grain prices is leading Afghani farmers to switch from growing opium poppies to growing wheat.
In other news, Amy Winehouse was spotted last night in a club in Soho, trying to snort a Weet-Bix.
May 12, 2008
These cupcakes make me terribly depressed
Am I allowed to say that these sound really really tasty, or is that not a very metal thing to say?
(From the same site: some evil, malevolent chocolate brownies. Plus a handy brownie-making tip!)
Update: lots of people seem to be landing on this page from the abovementioned "black metal cupcakes" page. If that's you, hello and welcome - head over to the front page and have a browse.
Disaster!
Cranky technophobe Doris Lessing (previously on JRE) says that winning the Nobel Prize for Literature was a "bloody disaster".
She says "all I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed".
JRE says "would you like some cheese with that whine?".
May 11, 2008
Even educated fleas do it!
M1 are the third cellular provider in Singapore (next to Singtel and Starhub), and apparently their HSDPA mobile broadband has the same bandwidth problems that Starhub's cable does. But they've come up with a terrifically novel solution, documented by Singaporean blog life@anchorvale.
I'd love to have been sitting in on the M1 meeting where they came up with this idea. "Customers don't like throttling... so instead... let's inject javascript into every web page to compress and blur all of the images! That'll save stacks of bandwidth!"
And from a followup post, they're apparently doing it "to improve the user's experience while surfing". (Funnily, Starhub use the same excuse.)
M1's slogan "You Deserve Better" has never rung so true. Wow, I miss iiNet.
(Posted via Singtel's free islandwide Wireless@SG service, which is having major, major bandwidth troubles at the moment. You get what you pay for, I guess.)
May 10, 2008
P.S. Bacon Is Life
Continuing this evening's anti-vegetablist theme: possibly the most hilarious Post-It exchange ever.
(From Passive Aggressive Notes, via Ace of Spades HQ.)
Thou Shalt Not Dishonour Thy Meat By Ordering Well Done
The website for Prime Society, a steak-a-riffic restaurant in the trendy Dempsey Road district. JRE approves.
JRE Keeps You Entertained All Weekend
A preview of the new Futurama movie, The Beast With A Billion Backs. (Don't worry, it'll be in colour when it's done!)
May 8, 2008
How will Kevin Rudd entertain himself now?
The famous Scores strip clubs in Manhattan are being shut down, after a spate of prostitution incidents at the Scores West branch. (Note - the Prime Minister of Australia used to frequent Scores East, which is a different branch of the same chain. No prostitution there, as far as we know.)
Unfortunately, the New York Post has already done the "thanks for the mammaries" gag.
May 6, 2008
You have to build your own projector...
...out of a torch, two paperclips, and a go-kart motor if you want to watch it.
Yup, there's a MacGyver movie in the works.
Related: what's more alarming - that there's such a thing as the Minnesota Mullet Contest, or that it was won this year by a three-year-old kid?
Also related: courtesy of Wikipedia, here's a whole bunch of mullets!
May 5, 2008
Or maybe I'm imagining things?
News: Idiot kid wrecks his dad's Ferrari, has to make The Call
Newsier: TV crew from Channel Nine films idiot kid making The Call
Newsiest: Idiot kid makes The Call on an upside-down iPhone.
If you don't believe me, look closely at the photo in the Age's article.
Update: Whoa - deja vu!
Josh's House of Gadgets is open for business!
For sale:
- 15" Macbook Pro, 2.33 Ghz, 2GB RAM, 120GB hard disk;
- 30" Apple Cinema Display, 2560x1600 resolution, works great with aforementioned Macbook Pro.
Auctions close next Monday at 8:30pm and 8:15pm SG time, respectively. Bid early, bid often.
I could be an advertising copywriter
The new 404kW, 280km/h Porsche Cayenne Turbo S.
Because you can't fit three kids and a dog in a 911 GT3.
May 4, 2008
"MicroHoo" would've been a lousy company name anyway
Microsoft bid $33, Yahoo's best offer was $37, and so the merger is off.
Yahoo strikes me as a bit greedy. Their stock closed at $19.18 the day before the merger was announced (have a look at the chart here), so Microsoft's $31/share takeover offer amounted to a sixty-one percent takeover premium. That's big by any standard (a normal premium is anywhere from 20% to 40%), but Yahoo were holding out for a 90% premium - and that's just insane.
Yahoo closed yesterday at $28.67, up nearly 7% on the back of rampant speculation that Microsoft would raise its bid. I'll be very surprised if Yahoo ends much above $20 at the close of business on Monday. Call it $23... that's my tip anyway.
Update: next week will be a tough week for Yahoo, says TechCrunch.
Music makes the people come together
The most favored ensemble, determined from a rating by participants of their favorite instruments in combination, comprises a moderately sized group (three to ten instruments) consisting of guitar, piano, saxophone, bass, drums, violin, cello, synthesizer, with low male and female vocals singing in rock/r&b style. [...] , the combination of these qualities ... will result in a musical work that will be unavoidably and uncontrollably “liked” by 72 plus or minus 12% (standard deviation; Kolmogorov-Smirnov statistic) of listeners.
You can listen to this one here, but you've probably already heard it ten times today on any top 40 station.
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, [...] An operatic soprano raps and sings atonal music, advertising jingles, political slogans, and “elevator” music, and a children's choir sings jingles and holiday songs. [...] it can be shown that if there is no covariance—someone who dislikes bagpipes is as likely to hate elevator music as someone who despises the organ, for example—fewer than 200 individuals of the world's total population would enjoy this piece.
If you like operatic sopranos rapping about cowboys, you can listen to this one here. (The tuba bass line is actually kinda awesome.)
Some background, and lots of music wankery, here and here and here.
May 3, 2008
Taking government intervention a step too far
The New York Times profiles the Singaporean government's efforts to prop up the birthrate. The funniest part of many funny parts:
In 1991, for example, when the government began offering cash bonuses to couples with more than two children, [the Straits Times] printed tips for having sex in the back seat of a car, including directions to some of the “darkest, most secluded and most romantic spots” for parking.
It suggested covering the windows with newspapers for privacy.
And don't kick the gearstick out of neutral.
JRE Keeps You Titillated All Weekend
Earlier this month, Starhub (the monopoly Singaporean cable TV provider, and notorious internet throttler) was fined SGD 10,000 for screening a lesbian kiss. The Media Development Authority imposed the fine after the MTV Mandarin channel screened an advertisement for the song Silly Child, by Taiwanese pop star Olivia Yan. Quoth the MDA:
Within the commercial, romanticised scenes of two girls kissing were shown and it portrayed the relationship as acceptable. This is in breach of the TV advertising guidelines, which disallows advertisements that condone homosexuality.
The question that nobody's asking: if ten thousand Singaporean dudes kicked in a dollar each, would MTV screen the lesbian-a-riffic video of t.A.T.u's All The Things She Said?
Now, in the interest of providing comprehensive coverage of this important issue, here's the video in question.
But who will Jeremy Clarkson make fun of now?
Car-hater and newt-lover Ken Livingstone has lost the mayoralty of London; the new mayor is Boris Johnson, of the Conservative party, who wasn't very good when he was the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car.
Here he is, hosting Have I Got News For You back in 2003.
Part two is here; part three is here. Enjoy.
(Jeremy Clarkson apparently hosted an episode back in 2002 - I'll see if I can dig that one up.)
Where can I sign up?
From Boing Boing (emphasis added):
Today on Boing Boing tv, Xeni visits TechShop, an open-access public workshop that's kind of like a health club with heavy machinery and sparks instead of treadmills. Tinkerers, inventors, and hackers pay a membership fee, and in turn receive access to professionally-maintained gear, workshops, mentors, and a community of like-minded makers.
Unfortunately there's only one TechShop at the moment, and it's (of course) in Silicon Valley. They have all the fun.
May 2, 2008
"Felony wedgification"?
Or, what constitutes breaking news in North Platte, Nebraska:
At 8:16 p.m. on April 22, a North Platte police patrolman was dispatched by the 911 Center to a North Platte home in the 200 block of William Avenue on the complaint of a wedgie.
[...]
The police spokesman said they are ever vigilant and on the lookout for wedgies here.
“You might get away with that in Lincoln or Omaha,” the spokesman said. “But we’re not going to allow wedgies in North Platte.”
It's like someone at the North Platte Bulletin was deliberately trying for the front page of Fark.
May 1, 2008
This is a test, this is only a test
I've previously raved about Google Reader in this space, but also ranted that the "Shared Items" widget didn't work. Well, it's working now - look to the right and you'll see my five most recent shared items.
(Like it? Start up your own shared-items box with Google Reader, then publish your shared items feed to Facebook with FeedHeads.)
Ouch. That's gonna be a big repair bill
In case you're not getting enough awesome in your diet: this is what it looks like when one galaxy crashes through the middle of another.
They've been taking lessons from Taiwan
From the front page of today's Pravda:
The first sitting of Malaysia's new Parliament turned into a three-ring circus yesterday. Trading insults, opposition MP Karpal Singh called Barisan Nasional MP Bung Mokhtar Radin "Bigfoot", only to be called "Big Monkey" in return. [...] Complaining that Parliament is not a circus, the information minister said he is reconsidering live TV coverage of the proceedings.
If anything, they should be screening more of this, not less. It'd be more entertaining than Big Brother (and it'd probably rate higher as well).
Related: the Taiwanese parliament is the spiritual home of in-chamber shenanigans.
Also related: aren't his fifteen minutes up yet?
April 28, 2008
More ill-advised than buying Countrywide?
Bank of America couldn't have chosen a worse day to splash their brand all over an SF Giants game. As Scott Adams (yes, that Scott Adams) explains:
Yesterday I went to a Giants baseball game. It was Little League Day, so there were about ten thousand young boys running wild in the stands. It was also free bat day, courtesy Bank of America.
I will pause while you digest this concept.
Related: if you don't like the new Dilbert website layout, give this a try.
April 27, 2008
Sky is blue, water is wet, astrology is wrong
The excellent (and enjoyably science-y) Pharyngula blog reports on an interesting study.
Researchers picked out thousands of pairs of people born within five minutes of each other - who, if astrology is correct, should have very similar personalities and life outcomes.
Bet you can't guess what they found.
(Side note from the article: newspaper astrologers apparently make millions from this stuff. Wow, am I in the wrong business or what?)
And Singapore to Tokyo is only $450 round-trip...
April 26, 2008
Why not just wear a t-shirt that says "I'm A Rich Idiot"?
JRE has previously covered expensive watches, and generally approves of them.
But a $300,000 watch that doesn't tell time? Seriously, what the hell?
The same company also makes a watch that you can't even wear, and this sublime piece of WTF-ery:
A world first: the Romain Jerome counter provides golfers with the possibility of displaying their score at any time along the course!
I'm not sure whether this is a perfect example of targeted marketing to the ultra-wealthy (which I'm not smart enough or rich enough to understand), or the cleverest anti-capitalist satire ever.
JRE Can't Even Keep Itself Entertained All Weekend
JRE Keeps You Entertained All Weekend will not be available this weekend, because I can't get any YouTube videos to play.
This is probably somehow related to Starhub and their lousy international throttling. (Previously on JRE - also here.) Amusingly, Starhub shut down their forums a few months ago - and those forums used to be the hub for bitching and moaning about said problem. Gee. What a coincidence.
JRE: Ahead of the trend
The WSJ reports that glasses are now "in" - even for people with 20/20 vision.
So does that mean I'm a fashion trendsetter?
April 22, 2008
Where's me pint?!... oh, wait, it's in Tuvalu.
Yet another symptom of food price inflation: rice rationing has been imposed in the Phil... wait, California?!
Side note: more expensive rice will mean more expensive sake... and more expensive beer. EVERYBODY PANIC - or don't, 'cause The Sun has found the cheapest beer in the world!
If you're looking for a cheap beer, you'll like this website. (If you're a real Aussie who needs a parma with your beer, you'll like this website.)
Anchors Aweigh
Light reading: The Destroyermen, a blog written by crewmen aboard the USS Russell.
April 21, 2008
Right Now (hey!)
RIGHT NOW... a Reuters sub-editor is probably being fired for writing this headline.
Right now is as good a time as any for Van Halen.
