It's All About The Mystery

The population of Cupertino, California reminds me of a five-star hotel in Bangalore. There are a few Asians. There are heaps of Indian software engineers. And there are a small number of caucasian Americans who look like they don't really belong here.

On weekends these Indians take turns bringing their families (or, in the case of my hosts, their college buddies) to The Mystery Spot. The primary attraction of this place is that they have a canteen (isn't the word "canteen" redolent with the smell of the British Raj?) which sells hot Indian food. For $1 you can pop a plate of dal-rice or a besan laddoo. A close second to the canteen in its power to draw in the Indian crowds is the Mystery Spot itself.

This is a tourist attraction crafted with delightful cleverness. The claim is that in this place space is warped and gravity works erratically. Strange forces push at you. Small round objects roll up a slope. Tall people shrink. And there is not a sngle mirror or smoke machine in sight. The enthusiastic tour guides demonstrate these unique phenomena and spin theories of carbon dioxide vents and magnetic field anomalies. The Indian software engineers take it all in silently with keen eyes and furrowed brows. If you strain very hard you can hear their brains humming gently as they try to work out the real secret that makes the magic trick work.

The Mystery Spot is a shining example of the American talent for infusing drama and fun into anything. Domestic air travel is a contrary instance of them sucking all the excitement out of an experience that used to be all about pleasure and adventure. I have remarked before about the bigness of the USA. The distance from Boston to San Francisco is about the same as that from Boston to London, and so the flight takes about the same amount of time. The resemblance ends there.

I don't like being asked to pay for every single bag I want to check in, regardless of weight. I hate undressing for the security checks. The whole ritual of removing my jacket, belt and shoes and then putting them back on is inconvenient and undignified. I'm thinking of buying a velcro traveling suit that I can unfasten with a single sweeping gesture, like one of the male dancers in The Full Monty.

I do like to get my meal served on a tray with each individual item of food clevely pacakaged in its own little receptacle; but on my US Airways flight I had to make do with a "buy your food on board" service. When in mid-flight a shaggy-haired and overweight guy in an indeterminate steel-grey uniform tapped me on the shoulder I was first startled and then baffled. I tried to work out whether he was a steward or a pilot while he made small talk about the t-shirt I was wearing. In my mind I was wondering whether we would not all be better off if he would just go back to flying a plane or selling pretzels to passengers.

I am convinced that the best way to travel in this country is by road. That way you can skid along a coastal highway and stop occasionally to look out over the Pacific. And you can bend down to gape at the seaweed washed up on a rocky beach. Giant, 15-foot stalks of seaweed as thick as a man's arm.

That's the thing that redeems this country for the traveler: they screw up their airlines like noone else but then they make up for it by nonchalantly tossing unique oddities at you when you least expect them. There's always the chance of something new just around the next bend in the road. Now if I could only find the store where they sell those velcro suits...

Point That Bottle Away From Me!

"Here, let me open that. Of course it's easy. I'll just..."
(pop!!!)
 "...Oh my eye! I'm blind!!!!"

How many champagne-swilling morons are there in the US? About 1500. I know that because the American Academy of Opthalmology recently announced that every year one and a half thousand people suffer cork-related eye injuries. You have to wonder about these people. What kind of jackass points a projectile weapon at themselves before pulling the trigger? And just how idle do you have to be to keep count of all these suicidal projectile-pointers?

I'm surprised that none of them have yet made it to the Darwin Awards.

For those who don't know, and can't be bothered to follow the link, the Darwin Awards are a celebration of those who did the human race a favour by removing themselves from the gene pool through sheer spectacular stupidity. Unfortunately for our species, the eye is not a reproductive organ, notwithstanding the fifteen hundred or so people who annually sheepishly confess "I accidentally %@^&ed my own eye with a cork". If it were, then their numbers would have steadily been culled at every Christmas party, every wedding, and at the end of every motor sports event. As it stands, though, they remain monocularly capable of perpetuating the existence of their own kind.

Our only hope is that one day they will all join the NRA and start cleaning their handguns.

Oooh, This Stuff is Tingly!

Phoebe the dog woke up and sniffed the air; something was different about today. She barked quizzically a couple of times, but I pretended to still be asleep in bed. So she got up and skidded downstairs to investigate by herself.

At first everything seemed the same around the house except for the silence, which was smothering.

Then I opened the door and that's when Phoebe saw that the world had changed overnight. The ground had turned crunchy! And it had a new smell, like ice. And it was white! How very strange....

Phoebe rolled over experimentally to see if doing that felt any different from yesterday. And it did, it was pleasantly cooling. As was this powdery stuff that was settling on her coat of hair. Some bits landed on her nose, and that was a bit tickly.

There were certainly a lot of birds around. That was a change too, she hadn't seen any birds for the past several days. A chipmunk flitted behind some trees in the near distance; for an instant Phoebe thought of giving chase but for now this new sensation underfoot was far more interesting.

So she rolled over some more, and then tried running. Even that was not the same. This new stuff on the ground made her skid a little at high speed. The other dogs seemed to be rather nonchalant about what had happened (except for one hyperactive poodle that was running in supersonic circles). Could it be that they had experienced this before?

Well if they had, then this was nothing to worry about. So Phoebe went back to doing what really matters: sniffing at bushes, cracking twigs, and waving her tail at anything that moved. After all, this might be the very first snowfall of her life, but that was not going to distract her from the serious business of being a shaggy dog out for a walk on a Sunday morning.

Laws of Nature

There are some things you can't mess with. Gravity. The ocean. The 10-minute rule.

What's that, you ask? Let me explain by way of example. Pretend it is a day when you need to leave work no later than 5 in the evening. No, lives will not be lost if you don't leave by then, but you do really really want to leave by 5. So, late in the afternoon you're feverishly wrapping up all the little to-do items that you can. It's nearly time to leave now, and you're about to hit the "Send" button on the last email of the day so you can start to pack up. And then it happens. At 10 minutes to 5 your door is darkened by someone who steps in to talk about an issue at work. He says he'll take "a minute"; instead, he stays for sixty.

It's as if someone sent a memo: "Dear colleagues of Mahogany, today he has plans for the evening. It's up to us to ruin them. Will one of you step up and be a jerk? Will one of you walk up to him at precisely 4.50pm and proceed to trap him in a rambling, frustrating, endless discussion about something that no sane person would really care about? You would? Thanks, we knew we could count on you!"

And so the trap is set.

But where there's an ocean, there is a boat. Where there is gravity, there is anti-gravity. (Don't scoff, I know for a fact that there are alien spacecraft interred in Area 51 that are powered by anti-gravity drives). And where there is a 10-minute rule, there is a 30-minute stratagem. From now on, I will plan to leave 30 minutes before the time that I plan to leave.

Let's see how long I can fool the universe.

November Reigns

There's something very comfortable about padding upstairs in my socks, glass of wine in hand, and settling down at my keyboard. I still have the tropical spirit running through my veins (and no, I don't mean rum); but I'm learning to make my peace with the winter.

A good pair of gloves help. I am grateful to them every time I take my dog for a walk in the morning, especially if it is in the subzero conditions we had last weekend. I've been in cold weather before, I've even been in cold weather in Boston before. But this is the first time that I've stepped on a clod of earth, heard it crunch under my feet, and when I picked it up I found that it was half an inch of soil sitting on four inches of perfectly formed ice.

There was more ice on the car windshield on Friday morning. I turned on the de-fogger and watched it melt slowly. I almost wished it wouldn't melt, so that I could keep staring at each perfectly formed crystal, and at the flawless snowflake pattern that stretched right across the glass surface.

We're expecting snow next week. It'll be my first snowfall. When it comes, I intend to go outside and turn my face up to the sky like a walking cliche. After all, cliches exist because they mean something.

It's good to come home from the office, get out of my car, and feel a slap of cold air on my face. It's a welcome reminder that there is a real world and that nature does not bother with protocol.

But most of all I like stepping out on a clear night. I like to look at the stars frosted onto a perfectly black sky. And if the moon is full it turns the trees into mysterious, faintly silvered silhouettes. I still have the tropics running through me, but I can see how a person could get used to this.

Shifting Winds

I have a feeling that something significant is going to happen in America. I get a feeling of forces gathering, of a society that is taking a deep breath before stepping out into a time of change. It’s not any one event that makes me feel that way, it’s more an accumulation of occurrences.

The obvious one is the election of Barack Obama as president. Perhaps my view is coloured by living in Massachusetts, a state so liberal that it was the only state that did not vote for Nixon when he ran for President in 1972. And you have to worry about the weight of expectations on him when 2 out of 3 Americans said in a recent poll that they expect the country to be better off by the end of his term. But I think it’s got to the point that this expectation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In any case, there is more to the gathering storm than the tailwind that propelled Obama on his trajectory to the White House.

There’s the current economic situation and all that that could lead to. It’ll lead to job losses of course, and hardship for many. In just the past few weeks it’s got to the stage where I can see local businesses shutting down around me, and people losing jobs as a result. But there’s more. It feels like the country is poised to change its consumption patterns. A year ago restaurants were advertising the great deals you could get on extra-large portions. That's changed. Today I saw a TGIF ad promoting "the right-sized portion at the right price", and that's only the most recent of the small-portion / low-price ads I've seen on the television.

That's just the beginning. Imagine what could happen if the big American car companies do go bankrupt (as many fear they will soon), and credit remains expensive, and so does fuel. Will American decrease their usage of cars? Will we see the demographic momentum reverse direction and move from the suburbs back towards urban centers? If it does, that would be a profound social and cultural change.

And that’s not the only social and cultural change in the offing. Apart from voting for Presidential and Congressional candidates, voters in 3 American states voted against legalizing same-sex marriages. Ironically, that seems to have sparked a tremendous burst of support for a movement in favour of such marriages. The demonstrations across the country in the past week suggest to me that it’s only a matter of time before same-sex marriages are recognized across the country, and it may not be a matter of very much time at that.

So what do a change of Presidency, an economic recession, and a challenge to social norms have to do with each other? Absolutely nothing, except that they are simultaneous in time and place, and therefore they cannot help but affect each other.

This has happened before, and not too long ago. In 1990 it was the Soviet Union which swore in a new head of state, Mikhail Gorbachev. Movements for democracy and independence from the USSR spread like wildfire across Eastern Europe. Saddam Hussein ordered his troops into Kuwait, sparking American intervention. And just like that we saw the end of the cold war and the making of a new world order.

It is, of course, impossible to say that that’s the sort of momentous change that awaits the world now. But there is one thing that I think is clear: we have some exciting times ahead.

The Soul Of A City, Part 2

Singapore houses four million people, but no two of them live in the same city. A city isn’t made of tall buildings; it’s made of the people who live and work and play in them. You might walk among the same buildings as I do. But for every person you know that I don’t, for every person whom you speak to that is a stranger to me, your city is different from mine.

So my experience of revisiting Singapore this week wasn’t really about going back to familiar places, it was about returning to familiar faces.

Stretch the thread of a relationship over a great distance, and it starts to fall slack. It’s a delicate thing, that thread, and easy to neglect. You don't notice the neglect until one day you try to pick it up and discover that it’s lost its suppleness. It’s a sharp and instantaneous realization when that happens. You listen to your conversation turn polite, you recognize the palpable disinterest that’s impossible to hide, and in a flash you realize that you now have one less friend and one more acquaintance.

I was pleased to come away from Singapore without any new acquaintances.

The best friends help you learn something new. This week I found out I can enjoy art even when it is disconcertingly abstract. I discovered the quiet pleasure in sharing an afternoon with a friend and their family, just watching them be a family. And in a single evening I realized that friendships may be born in many ways, but they are shaped and defined by the vulnerabilities we choose to reveal to each other; that you can tell how important someone is to you by how bad you feel because you weren't around to help them; and that it's useful to have a shrinkable head.

I'm back in the US now. But I can feel each taut thread of friendship that pulls gently at me. One end is in Boston, and the other end is in a city that I once lived in.

The Soul Of A City, Part 1

Singapore surprised me. I arrived here a couple of days ago for a short trip, four months after moving away. I expected to fit back into these familiar surroundings like a hand sliding into an old, snug glove. But I didn't. As familiar and comfortable as the city felt, there was something missing, something that made me feel like I was in an old haunt rather than an old home.

That sense of absence faded on Saturday evening while I was at Sentosa Island. I was at the beach, and the sound of the sea gently murmuring against the beach sands temporarily soothed my sense of being there-but-not-quite-there.

The same thing happened on Sunday. During the day I felt like a visitor even as I strolled through the lanes of Holland Village for the thousandth time. In the afternoon I looked out across the grounds opposite City Hall and I could not convince myself that I'd seen them before. But when night fell I was watching a movie at the Botanical Gardens. The screen was set up in the middle of a lotus pond. The light from the projector bounced onto the water in a gentle, reassuring glow. And for a couple of hours I felt once again like I belonged.

That feeling did not last very long. It was gone again this morning as I helped one friend buy a Chairman Mao t-shirt and helped another friend not buy a picture-book of "artistic nudes". But in the afternoon I waited in line for a taxi while the heavens opened up with rain twenty feet away from me. I heard the dull rumble of water falling on the road then, and I remembered it again several hours later.

I remembered that roar again several hours later as I sat in a little garden in my hotel. I heard that roar echoed in the sound of the waterfalls in that garden, and in the lapping of the pond that the waterfall poured into.

That's when I realized how much of my sense of Singapore has to do with water. Whether it's falling in a deluge during a rainstorm, or ebbing and flowing through the tidal rivers, or simply splashing in waterfalls and fountains all across the island, water is as much a part of the experience of Singapore as air. Even the absence of water is part of that experience, inasmuch as that absence reminds me that something's missing.

And now that I understand, now that I've seen the rains and listened to the waterfall, now I feel like I've visited home again.

And That's Really Important Because...?

I don't understand how people can get upset at work, about work. Over the past weeks I've been in numerous business discussions where a remark expressing an opinion would incite a retort that would flare up into an intense argument between colleagues. And all that intensity would be about stuff that sells in supermarkets.

I understand that people's jobs are important to them. I do think that people who can immerse themselves into their work are lucky. Heck, I'll even confess that I often have fun with what I do for a living. (Yes, that statement is deliberately open to interpretation.) But let's be honest here, what we call work is stuff that is so unpleasant that we wouldn't even do it if we weren't paid.

And yet I've found myself sometimes in the same passionate conference-room arguments that, when I look back on them, they bewilder me. My current theory is that we each have a spring of emotional energy inside us. And if it does not find a meaningful outlet like art or helping people, well then it will find a meaningless outlet; such as choosing the most effective design theme for a Powerpoint presentation.

Our office towers are ivory towers and we glide through their corridors like so many fairy-tale princes and princesses: graceful, privileged and clueless. We have the luxury of getting upset about things that don't matter because we have no need to be upset about the things that do, like survival. A few days ago I left office late because an unplanned meeting lasted about an hour longer than it deserved to (the meeting was an hour long). On my way home I stopped at a toll-booth to hand over my dollar and change to a tired-looking man. I'd have been embarrassed for him to know that while he'd been sitting there inhaling exhaust fumes, I had spent my day listening to grown men debate what project name would best inspire the grunts working on it.

There are some things that are obviously worth getting worked up about. War, for instance, or famine, or love. Occasionally even football deserves a shout. But the forecast for next month's department store sales? No thanks, I think I'll save my hormones for a rainy day.

Larger Than Life

Every time I think I'm used to the bigness of America, something new comes and slaps me in the face. This time it's Ohio.

Yesterday we had four hours on the road. Flat fields of corn stretched out endlessly. Every couple of miles a 50-foot tower marked the spot where a McDonald's or Wendy's sat. But none of those prepared me for the sight that awaited me at the end of my journey - Lake Erie.

Standing by its shore, it's very hard to believe that it is in fact a lake. The dull roar of the waves creates a compelling illusion of an ocean, one that's reinforced by the sight of unbroken water stretching out to the distant sky. I thought at first that I could see a low, jagged outline of land on the horizon; but when it shifted in front of me I realized it was just enormous waves silhouetted against the sky.

Lake Erie is so big, I have to admit it is a little bit scary.

So it's fitting that in this landscape of bigness, sits a monument to the one art form that embraces excess like no other.

Visiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was a great thrill. They had lots of supercool memorabilia, much as you'd expect. Michael Jackson's single white glove shared a stage with David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust costume. Elvis' purple cadillac was surrounded by his grotesque jumpsuit, pictures, and a pair of handguns from his collection.

The exhibit that I liked the most was a psychedelically painted Porsche that Janis Joplin once owned; it was an ironical counterpoint to my all-time favourite Joplin lyrics:
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz
My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends

Janis recorded that song on October 1, 1970 in Los Angeles. Ten days later her Porsche was found in the parking lot of her hotel, shortly before she herself was found dead in her room from a heroin overdose.

I think Janis is the one individual who represents everything about rock music, the bad and the good. She was attention-seeking, depressive and self-destructive. She was passionate and as one writer described her, could "sing the chic off any listener".

I can imagine her sitting on the shore of Lake Erie, slightly dishevelled, singing from the belly, in a plaintive voice that would carry above the sound of water foaming on the pebble-strewn beach. I bet she would not have been intimidated by the vastness of the lake.

So here's to Janis. Here's to the big bad world of Rock and Roll. And here's to this crazy landscape that inspires its inhabitants to live life large.

Towards Points West

Baseball caps and hot dogs. Gritty inner-city streets. Suburban lawns. White picket fences. These are among the many images of America that Hollywood has imprinted on the world outside its borders. But perhaps the most evocative one of all is that of a solitary car cruising on a long, empty highway with open country on either side.

So I was absolutely thrilled to set off on my first road trip in the US.

And yesterday was a good day for it. Summer is over, and the trees are starting to wear their autumn colours. I'd seen pictures, of course, but they don't come close to the reality of fall foliage breaking out in the last days of September. It's hard to keep your eyes on the road when on either side of you are vivid swatches of yellows, oranges and scarlet reds. Pretty soon all of New England is going to erupt in a crescendo of colour, and I can't wait to see it in it's full glory.

But after a couple of hours the colour tone of the countryside had changed from burnt orange to cool grey. As the clouds gathered overhead, raindrops fell on the asphalt and were promptly churned up by the traffic around and showered onto the windscreen in front of me. Meanwhile clouds of mist settled on the trees to our left and right like a ghostly quilt.

By nightfall most people had gone to bed. We'd been accompanied by fellow-strangers through Massachusetts and Connecticut, we'd been part of a throng through New York State. But as we reached into western Pennsylvania, it seemed that everyone else had chosen to retire and renew their journey another day.

Not us.

We stopped at a diner to refuel.

People look different in the Midwest. Out on the East coast they move briskly. They talk fast. There's an energy that spills out of them and impregnates the atmosphere. Sometimes it's only nervous energy. But it's there. And it's infectious.

Hundreds of miles away, far from the coast and its temples of commerce and industry, things are different. People slow down. They seem to amble rather than stride. It's as if their energy has seeped out of them and been vacuumed away.

We still had some distance to cover, and I was not keen to soak in more of the air of apathy at that diner. So we got back into our cruiser and hummed on through the night. Our path was lit by sentinels on either side: reflector poles lined the road to our left and right like an army of torch bearers in endless single file.

We sped on over the Ohio border and deeper into farming country. Eventually we pulled into Akron - birthplace of Alcoholics Anonymous, one-time rubber capital of the world, and our resting place for the night.

13 hours on the road. 5 states. 1,000 kilometers. The journey had just begun.

To be continued...

Long On Stories, Short On The Sides

Right. This is it. The final heavy-shopping weekend before we declare that our new house is finally settled, 10 weeks after we actually moved in. Most people would have made that declaration right after they had set up the toaster and put their shirts away in the closet. But being the sort of OC nut-job that I am, for me it's not over until every last piece is in place.

One of the biggest milestones for me when I move to a new place is finding a place where I can get a haircut. When I moved from the Philippines to Singapore, for 2 years I would continue to get my haircuts from my regular hairdresser during my then-frequent business trips to Manila. But then Salai disappeared and I had to go through the trauma of starting a new relationship.

Yes, I have just confessed to a disturbing level of vanity. And I am sufficiently un-deluded to recognize that it is misplaced vanity. But as I explained to a colleague while asking her to recommend a salon, going to a bad hairdresser is more risky for me than going to a bad doctor. I can recover a lot faster from the flu than I can grow back my hair from a bad haircut. And I'm going to have a beating heart in my chest a lot longer than I will have hair on my head. It's that curse of the 'Y' chromosome.

It's a well-kept secret, but the reason that men have mistreated women since the dawn of history is not because we are power-mad, insecure or just plain jerky. It's because when we discovered male pattern baldness we decided to throw the mother of all tantrums and we simply did not know when to stop.

So anyway, once the colleague had understood how seriously I was taking the issue of my first haircut in the New World, she canvassed her boyfriend and those of her friends and then directed me to Joel.

I don't get it. Why is it that all male hairdressers act gay even if they are not? Are the genes that are responsible for nimble fingers also the ones that make your voice lilty and lispy? Or is it a sort of career expectation, the way all investment bankers must have sharp sideburns and weak chins, or all boxers must have pock-marked faces unless they are named Miguel? At any rate, right after telling me about his weddding plans, Joel saved me from a faux pas by telling me about his fiancee. (As opposed to his fiance.)

It all turned out well, though. I got a very respectable haircut, Joel had his chat with the nice young man from Asia, and while my wallet left lighter than I expected it would, I know I can compensate by going to a back-alley quack the next time I come down with a virus.

Higher Grounds

Many months ago on this blog I confessed my love for good coffee. Alas, said coffee has proven hard to find in Boston. I was reminded of this in the morning at the one decent cafe near my office. I asked for a latte. They said their Espresso machine was broken. And in that instant I could see the rest of my day going down the tubes.

For a coffee-drinking nation the Americans sure do put up with vast amounts of horrendous coffee. And please don't use the S-word. I've not generally been a fan of Starbucks but I will concede that in most parts of the world they will give you a passable cup of the stuff. Not here, though. I've been unhappily amazed at the consistency with which their baristas manage to burn coffee just enough that it is still barely drinkable while tasting vaguely unpleasant. I think they train them for it.

(It does add to the Starbucks experience in Boston that the baristas are incapable of spelling perfectly ordinary names. I once tried giving them my initials and they even got that wrong. I have a colleague named John who is now reduced to calling himself Joe, just to make things easier for them. It's shameful.)

Most places are no better than Starbucks. Somehow Dunkin Donuts has acquired a reputation as the everyman's cofffee shop. It's not very well deserved. Except in the very literal sense that every man (and woman) seems to be in them. I have never seen such long lines for such an ordinary beverage.

I should be fair, and I should admit that several of the coffee shops, including Starbucks, offer very acceptable flavoured roasts. Hazelnut seems to be a particular favourite, and it does drip quite satisfyingly down the tongue. But a flavour like that is good only for an occasional distraction. It is not a substitute for the good, strong, straight coffee that I like to drink every 3 hours.

So after multiple cafe misadventures I decided to not rely on others to make my coffee for me. It was time to go the Do-It-Yourself way. And so I Did It Myself. I bought an elegant little French press. I went to the supermarket, bought some beans and ground them. And then I brewed my first pot of Javana Blue Mountain coffee from Jamaica. The aroma was perfect. Unfortunately aroma was all that the coffee had. It had absolutely no taste at all. For several minutes I experienced extreme sensory dissonance, as my non-plussed tongue tried to work out what my nose was so ecstatic about.

Then I tried brewing a pot of Green Mountain Colombian. This time there was some flavour to the coffee. Which was a pity because I think it would have tasted much better if it had been tasteless.

By this time I was close to despair. I mean, coffee is one of the essential food groups, and I was on the verge of starvation.

And then I found it. The most amazing blend of Indonesian coffee. It's just the kind I like. It has a strong, bold aroma, a sharp almost tangy after-taste, but is not too acidic. It's amazingly drinkable. I know, because the day I brought it home I had 4 cups over breakfast. And the best part is the fragrance of ground coffee that lingers in the air for several seconds after I reseal the bag of grounds.

I am now sated. I have found a coffee that I really enjoy. In fact, I love it so much that I am not at all bothered by the irony of finally finding it in Starbucks. :-)

What's In A Name?

It happened in the supermarket. There, next to the figs and berries, I saw something ugli. No, that was not a typo, and no, I did not make up what's coming next: I had spotted an ugli fruit!

It's a sort of orange the size of a melon. Except that it's not quite an orange, it also resembles a grapefruit. Or a pomelo. Actually, it's really hard to say what it is, except that it is an ugli. And of course with a name like that I simply had to buy it! In fact, it gets better. The fruit comes from Jamaica, where it's name is pronounced "hugly". How adorable is that!?

Life (or at least food) would be more fun if people took the trouble to give interesting names to the things they eat. Take miracle fruit for instance. That is actually very aptly named, because miracle fruit berries confuse your taste buds and make them think that sour foods taste sweet!

But inapt names are even more fun.

The British are pretty good at this game. They created the toad in a hole, in the making of which no amphibians were harmed. They invented the Yorkshire pudding, which is really a pie. And they famously gave us spotted dick, which is a pudding and not, well, you know.

And then closer to home (omigosh, am I calling it home already!?) there are the Rocky Mountain Oysters. Obviously one part of the name has to be inaccurate, either the Rocky Mountains, or the Oysters. As it turns out, this food is not really oysters. Instead it is actually something that in Spain is known as "bulls' eggs". I leave the rest to your imagination.

Another inspired name is the geoduck. Which is not a duck (by now, you knew that was coming). It's really a clam. And it's pronounced "gooey duck". But not because it's gooey, because it isn't. It's name is derived from a word that means "dig deep". If it's any consolation, that actually does make sense, because the geoduck likes to burrow.

But my all-time favourite name is from Japan and belongs to the most refreshing and best tasting sports drink in the whole world. It's just too bad that it's called ...

Pocari Sweat.

Yechh!

Clink!

8 weeks. Or is it half a lifetime?

It's 8 weeks almost to the minute since I got on a plane in Singapore that would take me to my present home in a suburb of Boston. 8 weeks since I said goodbye to the clipped Singaporean accent, the matronly Straits Times newspaper, avuncular taxi drivers, and 24-hour food centres with a constant supply of grilled sting-rays. 8 weeks since I drank Spinelli coffee (I wish someone would teach the guys at Starbucks how to make drinkable latte). 8 weeks and more since I worked off the angst of a working week over Kilkenny beer at Harry's bar.

Do I miss Singapore? Hell, yeah!
Do I regret leaving? No way.
I guess you could say that I'm happy, and at the same time I've been in a constant state of wistfulness for the past 8 weeks.

Did I say 8 weeks? Make that half a lifetime.

Because I am already starting to forget. Forget what it was like to live in an urban jungle. Twice a day now I go across the street and walk my dog in the woods. I'm starting to forget what it was like to have a maid always around to pick up after me. I like the routine at the end of the day: pick up stuff, load the dishwasher, and once a week take out the trash.

I'm frustrated, amused, and intrigued at the way I'm treated by the State. I need to prove once again that I can drive. I need to prove that I can be trusted to have a credit card. Or a cellphone. I need to show that I can be unfazed by the monumental rudeness of the Boston driver. Believe me, they could make Delhi drivers look civilized.

I'm relearning to listen. And I need to, so that I can understand the people among whom I now live. I think that is the best part of all. I'm learning something that I once knew and then forgot: how to slow down my mouth and speed up my ears. How to listen to what's said, strain to hear what's left unsaid, and try extremely hard to hear the nearly inaudible whisper of what is truly meant.

This is fun! And it's only been 8 weeks!

Or has it been half a lifetime?

Either way, here's to anniversaries!

Have You Hugged Your Sofa Today?

I wonder if there is something dysfunctional about being comforted by furniture. All the stuff that we had shipped over from Singapore finally arrived a couple of days ago. Most of it is now set up where we want it in our new house. And with that, to borrow a tired but true cliche, the house has become a home.

Our neighbour's seven-year-old daughter had come over earlier today to pay her daily visit. She surveyed the living room and announced "Your stuff looks really different." And so it does. The crappy faux country muddy brown junk that we had rented for the past month is finally gone. In it's place is a suite of furniture in an eclectic style that can best be described as Ikea meets Indonesia. That sounds schizophrenic, but it's a combination that looks pretty good to my eyes.

So now as I type this sitting at my dining table, I can intermittently look up at my television set and see where Hugh Grant is at in his reluctant journey to fatherhood.

It's a night for romantic comedy and we've come to the climax of a Hugh Grant movie marathon with Nine Months. Of all his movies this must be his lamest in every possible way. But despite it's mediocrity it is a great caricature of the Hugh Grant school of acting - mildly eccentric, harmlessly amusing, and as comfortable as an old couch. Which is why, as bad as the movie is, I can always watch it once again. I mean, given a choice between loading the dishwasher and watching Nine Months for the seventh time, I'd choose Nine Months any day.

I think that says something. I think it shows that when you want a bit of mood-elevation, a dose of something familiar is exactly what you need.

And that's precisely why I am so pleased to have my furniture with me again. It's great to be able to relax at the end of the day, surrounded by familiar everyday objects.

It's ... comforting.

Does He Want Fries With That?

What does one athlete's 10,000-calorie diet have to do with the US Presidential election? Absolutely nothing, and for that I am deeply thankful.

For the past week Michael-mania has swept like wildfire across the American media landscape. The airwaves are saturated with descriptions of Michael Phelps, his exploits in the Olympic swimming pool, and his meals. I can now tell you how many fried-egg sandwiches he eats for breakfast (three), how many sugar-coated slices of French toast follow the sandwiches (also three) and how many ham-and-cheese sandwiches he eats for lunch (only two; he is human after all). This is neither entertaining nor edifying.

But it is a welcome relief from non-stop discussion of the American presidential election. Or more precisely, it is a welcome relief from discussion of the election that is not about the candidates. A few days ago I heard a venomous tirade against Mrs. Obama that left me bewildered. I cannot understand why it matters whether she is a likeable person. Or why her skill in managing the media is relevant. Probably the only people who really care how well Mrs. Candidate deals with the media are the media themselves. But it is all to easy for a self-important radio show host to act as if the President's economic policy is less important than his family's ability to create snappy soundbites for lifestyle and feature reporters.

So I consider it very fortunate that the media coverage of Phelps's quest for 8 gold medals has outshouted the trash that often passes for political commentary.

I'm also thankful for Nastia Liukin. I grew up believing the Olympics serve one primary purpose. That purpose is to reveal every four years a supremely elegant Eastern European gymnast who makes everyone gasp in amazement. And while Nastia's passport is American, everyone knows that in 1988 her father won an Olympic gold medal with the Soviet Union's mens' gymnastics team. Now Valery Liukin and his wife Anna (also a former gymnast who represented the Soviet Union) are proudly celebrating Nastia's stunning performances in Beijing. I was about to declare that she crushed her competition on her way to the women's all-round gold. But it would be more accurate to say that she delicately ground them under her twinkle toes. I wish I could have looked forward to seeing her again at the next Olympics in four years, but that's too much to wish for. After all, by then she will be 22 years old, a veteran among her teenage competitors.

But maybe it is not too much to hope for. Oksana Chusovitina would certainly think so. After all she is 33 years old. Sixteen years ago she, like Valery, won an Olympic gold medal while representing the Soviet Union. Since then she has had a child, become a German citizen and is now twice as old as most of her competitors. And yet she placed a respectable 9th in the all-round championship last night, and is still in the hunt for a gold medal next week. I know I'll be rooting for her to be one of the most improbable Olympic champions ever.

But even she is not in the same class as Hiroshi Hoketsu. This week he rode in the Olympic equestrian event for the second time in his life. The first time was in 1964. Yes, that was 44 years ago. He is one of perhaps fourteen people in the world who have had a career longer than Mick Jagger, and he's managed it without acquiring Jaggeresque furrows all around his face. Alas, he did not make it to the podium. But I think his was one of the rare cases where the phrase "winning is not everything" is more than just a cliche.

I'm reveling in my immersion in familiar sports again, and in the sheer variety of the human drama playing out in Beijing's Olympic venues. I have another week or so to enjoy it. After that, it's back to talk-show hell!

Here Comes The Sun

What a glorious Saturday it's been! It all started with the weather...

The past few days have been miserably cold and rainy in Boston. This is supposed to be high summer, but that's hard to believe when the thermometer tells you it's 16 degrees centigrade outside. So when the rain looked like holding off for a while this morning, we made a dash for DeCordova sculpture park. And what a good idea that turned out to be!

When a wealthy merchant named Julian de Cordova died in 1945, his will stated that his estate should be used to create a public museum of art. The trustees duly built a museum in his mansion. But they did not stop there. They turned the grounds of the estate into a giant outdoor museum and filled it with large outdoor sculptures and installation art.

By the time we got there, the sun was out and it was a perfect summer day, exactly the sort that we had not seen for a week and more. It was the ideal setting for two adults, a toddler and a dog to satiate their artistic appetites. We'd amble past a couple of bronzes, then stretch out under a tree for a break, then nod appreciatively at a set-piece constructed of wire-frames and thousands of pine-cones, then stop under yet another tree to nibble at a sandwich. Quite a far cry from your stereotypical "Museum Of Contemporary Art & Sculpture".

And then there was the unexpected bonus when the cashier at the museum cafe jealously asked where I'd gotten the Andy Warhol t-shirt that I was wearing. "I've been looking for one for ages", she said, "I even looked for it at the Warhol museum in Pittsburgh but they were out of stock." With intense glee and a nonchalant look I told her. "Oh, I got this for free at an exhibition in Singapore."

By then I knew that this was one of those days where everything goes like a dream. I went to a toy store and found exactly what I was looking for: action figures of Yoda and R2D2 from Star Wars and Blackout from Transformers. I went to the neighbourhood wine shop and got some great deals on New Zealand wines. (Oddly enough, whenever I miss Singapore, Kiwi wines always seem to cheer me up).

And then there were the Olympics. Finally I got to watch sports that I actually understand. Trust me, I've tried very hard to watch baseball, but (a) it's hard work and (b) every time I've watched the Red Sox they've lost. So it's with an intense combination of relief and pleasure that I've been watching volleyball, handball, and most of all I've been lapping up the gymnastics.

Somehow gymnastics have always been the centrepiece event of the Olympics for me. The've always had the most drama, because the top countries always seemed to have some sort of political tensions playing in the background. But more importantly, it blows my mind to watch the combination of strength, control and precision that Olympic gymnasts bring to bear. And then there is the tension when a gymnast stretches their routine to go for the spectacular: will they pull it off and get the extra thousandths of a point that will lead to a medal? Or will they overreach and fail completely?

And just to put the finishing touches on it all, I had my first taste of decent Chinese food in weeks.

Oh yes, this is the Saturday that I've longed for.

As Fast As The Speed Of Thought

Night falls early here. At least, that's how it seems. Soon after dusk, the street outside our door feels empty. There are no more joggers, no children rattling along on their tricycles, and no dogs out for a stroll. It's a warm, pleasant sort of emptiness, though. The kids are not on their cycles because they're being tucked into bed by the now-absent joggers while their dogs look on benevolently. They'll all be out again tomorrow, hopefully after a night of sweet dreams.

There's a curious self-contradicting nature to time here. On the surface, it seems to flow with a refreshing languor. I can feel its torpidity when I'm out with my dog for an evening walk. She takes her time, savouring each moment from within that moment. I watch her from the sidelines, and that draws me into the moment with her. The clock stops ticking when that happens.

But then we return home and the clock screeches back into gear. Now the thick, staid stream of time transforms into a raging torrent. As simply as that, life enters the fast lane again.

We're neither relaxed not rushed. Neither busy nor idle. Neither fully content, nor terribly concerned. Or perhaps it is better to say that we are all of them. It's an intensely rich sensorial experience. I wonder if you can only handle it by being a little dazed a lot of the time. Perhaps without that the senses will simply overload.

Or perhaps this is just fevered late-night mental static from someone who'd like to imagine mystery in everything.

Stateside Sisyphus

Who am I kidding? It's tough living here in the US of A.

Everything I wrote in my earlier posts is still true. Our surroundings are still way prettier than we can believe. Our neighbours are still incredibly nice, and strangers are still unaccountably friendly. We've had spells of miserable cold rain, but we've also had plenty of glorious sunshine on endlessly long summer days.

So what's the problem? Life, I guess, and what it takes to live it.

After the office-work and house-work have been seen to, there is little time and less energy left over for anything else at the end of a day. My long silences on this blog are eloquently mute testimony to that. I knew that living here would take some work, but so far it has been just a little bit more than I was prepared for.

I feel oppressed by the feeling that the my day is merely assembled from a sequence of tasks that need to be completed. Every morning I wake up feeling that I have a fraction less energy than I did the morning before. I'm tempted to make a to-do list to help me get things under control again. And I'm not making that list because I'm afraid that once it starts, it will keep getting longer. I'm scared I'll keep adding things to that list faster than I can check them off.

I've found it impossible to fully relax. I seem to have a constant semi-conscious scan running on my memory banks, trying to recall what 'useful things' I should be doing. As a result I have not truly goofed off in weeks. That does not mean I have been in constant motion; on the contrary it means I have often been paralyzed into inactivity, intimidated by all the things that I'm supposed to do that still stand undone.

Yes this is a whinge. I usually find a way to end these whinges with an upbeat memo to myself. This time I don't have the heart for it.

Behind The Veil

I knew that just because I'd been consuming American pop culture for years, that did not mean I should expect America to seem familiar when I actually got here. Still, I keep getting surprised by the things that surprise me.

I'm still getting used to the wholesomeness of suburbia. The weather is simply flawless. At least it's flawless by my standards; I've heard locals describe it as humid but coming from tropical Singapore that really does not wash. At any rate, it's all too easy to spend an entire evening in the park watching kids play, watching people walk their dogs, watching jet planes silently leave vapour trails high in the sky, watching the moon rise in a crystal clear summer sky. And people are nice here. I don't know how to put it any more expressively. They're just ... neighbourly. And being a bit of a grouch myself, that takes some getting used to!

There are other surprises. I always thought of the US as Political Correctness Central, but I'm amazed at how rude radio talk shows can be. The Presidential elections are a constant backdrop to everything here, and the radio hosts are openly insulting about whichever candidate they do not support. For instance one talk show host insists on refering to Barack Obama as YoBama (the emphasis is his, not mine). I thought I had a thick skin, but even I cringe at some of the remarks I get to hear.

An English colleague who's lived in America for years had an interesting comment to make. "America is more diverse than Europe," he said. "In Europe they all speak different languages but the people are the same. Over here they speak the same language but they're totally different from one place to the next." It's going to be interesting to discover the truth of that observation.

Where Noone Knows My Name

We all have them. The songs that mark certain chapters of our lives, like musical bookmarks. My first ever crush on a girl was set to the music of Dreams by Van Halen. When Sammy Hagar screamed "We'll get higher and higher, straight up we'll climb", he could have been describing my state of euphoria. Later, during my somewhat bipolar years in college, the Doors' provided the soundtrack with Roadhouse Blues. As they pointed out, "The future's uncertain and the end is always near." More recently, as I prepared to leave Singapore, the song that played repeatedly in my head was Leaving On A Jet Plane.

I'm leaving on a jet plane. Don't know when I'll be back again.
Oh babe, I hate to go
- John Denver

Years ago I read Dune because it was a terribly fashionable science fiction epic. I discovered it was also terribly boring. But somewhere in its ponderous prose was a passage I have never forgotten...
"Thufir, what're you thinking?" Paul asked. Hawat looked at the boy. "I was thinking we'll all be out of here soon and likely never see the place again." "Does that make you sad?" "Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place."

And that's exactly how I feel about leaving Singapore. Even more so after the frequently overwhelming farewells of the last couple of weeks. What were they like? There were some gruffly spoken goodbyes. Some stiff-upper-lipped nods among the guys, because that's just what guys do. Some hugs. A few tears. Many pictures. A couple of beers. A couple more beers. One karaoke night. Lots of amazing presents, the sort you only get from people who really know you.

And one theme song

It's called Boston. I was introduced to it by a friend who told me I'd find it fits my situation perfectly. She was right.

I think I'll go to Boston
I think I'll start a new life
I think I'll start it over
Where noone knows my name
- Augustana

We knew we'd arrived in a new place when we landed at Newark and saw some boys practicing headspins to the sound of music only they could hear. We're truly going to start a new life tomorrow, when we move into our house. I've been a city rat all my life. Now I'm about to get my first taste of suburbia.

But that's the whole point of moving here: to shake up the life we were living. To change things around and make them fresh and new and exciting again. Exciting is not always pleasant. But then the only thing that's always pleasant is a coma.

I'd rather be awake.

Travelers' Tales

When you travel with someone you create your own story. When you travel alone it gives you a chance to listen to the stories of others.

I heard Tom's story at a bar called 1/2 Man 1/2 Noodle. Tom is a freelance computer programer. He came from San Francisco to Vietnam four years ago to get away from George Bush's America. He says he might go back home if Barack Obama becomes president. I don't think he will. He's too comfortable living with the Vietnamese girl he married. He's too comfortable telling me how the bar we're in got its name: "The owner named it after a British cult band called Half Man Half Biscuit. They became unpopular in the eighties; they were never popular. As to how the band got its name, that I couldn't tell you." Tom is too comfortable living half American half native to go anywhere, I conclude.

Curtis did not come here to get away from anything. His advertising job brought him here. But once he got here he liked the place enough that he changed employers so he could stay on. Now he explains to me his belief that each advertising agency has a different character. His view is that they continue to channel the persona of their sometimes long-dead founders. As the conversation rapidly becomes morbid I turn my attention to Miss Hien.

Hien had no need to escape to Hanoi - she was born here. The escape that she does seek has come to her in the form of an Australian engineer. Six months ago he arrived in the country to help set up its power infrastructure. Now Hien hopes to wed him so that when he goes back home he'll take her along.

And so the stories twirl around me in an erratic choreography. A young Czech explains to a bored German how he once nearly got arrested for riding a motorcycle without a helmet. A cheery young student tells me how he came from his village to Hanoi to study economics, and how he dreams of earning enough money so he can travel to China. The proprietor of the Hue Cafe serves me exquisite Vietnamese coffee and tells me I look like his mathematics teacher. I wonder if his teacher has purple hair.

The time I've spent in Hanoi has been an utterly absorbing interlude. Now I'm ready to go back home and resume my own story.

Of Sidewalks and Serenity

There is a state of mental calmness that once you attain it, it helps you transcend all your anxieties. I entered this state today on the streets of Hanoi. For long minutes I stood on a sidewalk watching a torrent of scooters, motorcycles and bicycles. I was waiting for the traffic to abate for just a few seconds so that I could cross the road. It didn't. After a while I sank into the moment and my legs started ambling across the road of their own accord.

And just as if we were sharing a single collective consciousness, the traffic gently opened up a gap just large enough to surround me. I floated accross it like a bubble drifting on the surface of a pond. When I made it to the other side without so much as a brush with the tide of two-wheelers, I knew that I had fully phase-shifted into my Vietnam vacation.

A little later I was leaning back into a tiny plastic chair. I was on one corner of an intersection; I could see other travelers similarly settled in on the other street corners. A nice old lady poured me a 25cent glass of beer out of a keg through a slighltly dubious little plastic hose. She poured another one for the old Vietnamese gentleman sitting in the chair next to mine. We sipped our beers very slowly in a lazy silence. I came out of my reverie intermittently to take pictures of the world as it passed by us.

After a while the heat of the afternoon had abated a little. I stirred myself to saunter back to my hotel. I think I like it here.

In Praise of Paulistas

It’s always interesting to go to a country for the very first time and form an impression of how the people there think and feel about their lives. I’ve just come away from a short trip to Sao Paulo in Brazil with a deep respect for the people I met there. I’m not sure I’ve been to any other place where they seem so content with what they have. Not complacent, because they clearly have aspirations to better their lot. But those aspirations don’t get in the way of appreciating what they have today.

Simon works in a stockroom in a cable company. In his own words, a big part of his job is moving boxes around. He wants to save some money and go back to school to learn technical skills so he can move on in his career. I’d have thought that his attitude to his current job would be tolerant at best. Not a bit of it. “I love my job”, he said, and by gosh he meant it. He even makes a point of getting to work half an hour early, even thought it’s a 90 minute commute for him and he needs to change buses twice just to get there. But he still hits his job with gusto everyday. Simon lives in a small house with his parents, who are separated but still live together, and with his sister. It seems like an awkward arrangement, yet they seem to be genuinely happy to be with each other.

34-year-old Alex revealed the secret to us. “The best place in the world is my home”, he told us, “it’s with my family that I remember who I am and I renew myself”. He told us without a trace of bitterness that after a 3-year marriage that ended in divorce he has put all his energy into his businesses. He talked about these businesses with pride, and with excitement for his dreams of making them even bigger. But the point where his face truly lit up was when he told us about his five siblings who live within shouting distance, his niece who has recovered from serious illness, and the joyful chaos when they all got together for Mothers’ Day a few days ago.

I’ve been places where people are content with what they have, and I’ve been places where they are excited about what they will accomplish in the future, and I’ve been places where people talk with passion about how their lives are centered on their families. But it’s only in Brazil that I’ve heard people talk about all three meshed together so perfectly that regardless of their present condition they are full of happiness and hope.

As Sandra told me half an hour before I took a taxi to the airport: “In Brazil we have a saying, it will all be okay in the end. And if it is not okay, that only means that you haven’t yet come to the end.”

I’ve never heard more beautiful words to live by.

The Ancient Home

Here I am, sitting in Johannesburg, and I think to myself "Wow, I really am in Africa!"

The view from the flight was not what I expected. The city looked almost European, with wide, modern highways and several large clusters of townhouses. It was only on the outskirts, in the farmlands, that the sub-tropical Africa of National Geographic was recognizable. Out there it looked as if someone had carelessly daubed a few faint smears of faded green over a dull brown grass-scape.

At the airport the first thing that struck me was how cheerful everyone looked. I have to say, there is nothing quite as beautiful as a smiling African. Their faces seem to glow with a rich inner radiance that I wish I could share.

Joburg was unfortunately just a transit stop for me. So I did not even get to set foot on the soil of the mother continent. I just sat with my nose pressed to the airport window where I could see out beyond the tarmac and the small twin-engined aircraft parked in the outdoor lot behind the main runways.

The land stretched out flat and brown until on the horizon I could just see the hazy outlines of the highveld. And in my mind I could imagine looking beyond the ridged highlands, soaring over mysterious tropical miles, swooping through the Great Rift Valley, all the way to Luxor and Alexandria.

I wish I could have gotten out and headed out into those grasslands of legend. Where Mother Nature and human nature have met each other in their rawest form for millenia.

I'll be back one day. I know I will.

I Want My, I Want My MTV(.com)

This sentence is an act of dissent. It is a thumbs down against a couple of rather sanctimonious geeks in Canada who do not want me to use my computer today. For that matter they want me to eschew the use of any communication device other than two cans and a string. Apparently if I do as they say then I will be more in touch with humanity and with mother nature. As if that would be a good thing.

Where I sit, nature is hot, humid and inhospitable. I know that in about six months I will be on my knees begging for this weather. But right now I'll just bond with my air conditioner, thanks very much. As for humanity, the less said the better. No, scratch that; perhaps something is worth saying. About messieurs Rajekar and Bystrov for instance, the brains (if that is the right word) behind Shutdown Day.

Rajekar and Bystrov are IT professionals. Last year they discovered that they were spending too much time on their computers. So they invented a day on which misfits like them could unplug for 24 hours. As if it was not bad enough that Hallmark has given us Mothers' Day, Fathers' Day, 2nd Cousin Twice-Removed Day and Let's All Read The Newspaper With One Eye Shut Day, we now also have Shutdown Day. A day on which geeks will nail themselves to the inside of a padded cell and go cold turkey for 24 hours without a computer, television, digital thermometer or any other electronic gadget.

The whole idea that technology cuts us off from other people is totally wrong-headed. I'm sure anyone who reads this blog needs no convincing that the Internet helps us maintain relationships and sometimes build new ones. No, it's not the pointlessness of Shutdown Day that irritates me, it's the presumption.

It's the idea that if a couple of people use computers as a way to hide themselves from having to communicate with real people then that must be what everyone else does too. It's the thought that the world needs rescuing from some sort of dark, machine-worshipping slavery to the mighty microchip. It's the whole born-again attitude: now that I have been saved, it is my duty and my right to save you too, whether you like it or not.

Well here's some news for you, M/s Rakjekar and Bystrov. It's not your duty. And it certainly is not your right. Why don't you go ahead and pry yourselves away from your keyboards with a crowbar. I'll just keep on chatting with my friend who lives on the other side of the world. And we'll meet again tomorrow, when you are 24 hours older, and the rest of the world is wiser.

3014 Down, 2000 More To Go

There is something very character-building about hand-indexing five thousand songs. Having laboured over this task in fits and starts over the past couple of weeks, I can confidently say that I am now a better person. More patient. More meticulous. More thin. OK, not more thin, but all the rest is true.

When my hard drive crashed and died, I lost all the songs on it. I retrieved them from my iPod onto a new drive, but iTunes refused to associate the songs on the iPod with the same songs in the hard drive. So what's the problem, you ask? The problem was that I was about one third of the way into listening to and assigning ratings to every single one of the five thousand songs in my library. If I was now unable to match the records in the hard drive with the songs on the iPod, I would lose over a hundred hours worth of song ratings. There is no way that someone with an obsessive-compulsive streak like me could bear such a loss. So the only choice left to me was to match each song to its MP3 file manually.

(I could explain why I was so keen to have all the songs rated, but it won't make me sound any less crazy so I won't bother.)

After indexing about five hundred songs I realized that this could be an informative experience. For instance...

I noticed that by far the funniest song titles belong to the Ramones. In 1974, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey Ramone played their first concert. They did not really have the same name; they just thought it would be amusing to pretend to be brothers. With that same whimsical sense of humour they went on to record songs like "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "I Just Want To Have Something To Do", "The KKK Took My Baby Away", and my favourite: "I Wanna Be Sedated".

On the other hand Pink Floyd are the masters of the weird song title. After "Pigs On The Wing" and "Take Up Thy Stethoscope And Walk" you think you've seen it all. Then you come across " Careful With That Axe, Eugene" and you think the limit of eccentricity has been reached. Then you spot "Several Species Of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict". I'm convinced that the band used to generate song titles by picking words at random from a dictionary and squeezing a preposition or two in the middle just to make a complete phrase.

Be that as it may, one can only entertain oneself with song titles for so long. It came to a point in the indexing process that I began to wonder whether I had lost my mind. Was the effort I was putting into it worthwhile? If I decided to just give up on the ratings, would it really be so bad?

Then, just as I was about to lose my religion, my faith came back to me in the form of jet lag-induced insomnia. I spent six hours in a late-night marathon of keyboard-bashing. I knocked the whole darned library into shape and order emerged out of the chaos on my hard drive. Beautiful order, rising like Aphrodite from the foam.

With a silent (lest I wake the neighbourhood) roar of triumph I clutched my iPod to my chest, did a little victory lap around my chair, and fell into a deep victorious sleep such as only the righteous can enjoy.

Now all I need to do is listen to all the as-yet-unrated songs and rate them. It should only take me another couple of hundred hours or so to finish that task.

Anyone got a straitjacket to spare?

Through The Looking Glass

I love dogs of all sizes, from giant Great Danes and St. Bernards down to little bitty Dachscunds. But if an animal can be cradled in the palm of one hand, I cannot consider it a dog anymore. Anything that small is either a hamster or a guinea pig. A dog is an animal that really should be visible to the naked eye.

Laura (real name kept secret to protect my safety) does not think so. She's a 200-kilo realtor with a 2-kilo dog. I'm not kidding; Duchess, her Yorkshire Terrier, rides around in a litte pouch suspended over her mistress' ample tummy. Together they look like a strange species of marsupial, a cross between a Kangaroo and a fur mitten.

We met them while viewing houses in Boston. They lived up to every caricature of a large woman with a pet the size of her fist. In a loud falsetto voice Laura told us about Yorkie party she was taking Duchess to. There would be about 30 of these creatures milling about like possessed furballs. And the only way to identify individual animals would be by their jewelry. Duchess' birthday was coming up later in the week. And for that grande soiree she would be prepared with nine (yes, nine) different dresses. Heaven only knows what mountains will be moved when Duchess has her "sweet sixteenth" birthday party.

Fortunately all the other people we met in Boston last week were sane. And we were really lucky that we had Sally (real name hidden to protect her from the embarassing revelation about to follow) to take us around. We loved that she shared our interest in food from different countries. That was not obvious at first, when Sally extolled her town Newton for being more tolerant than neighbouring Wellesley. The Wellesley town council would allow only Starbucks to open a coffee shop. Newton, on the other hand, was willing to admit Dunkin' Donuts as well so that its residents would have access to different kinds of coffee. (To her credit, Sally went on to talk intelligently about middle-eastern, Indian, Thai and Chinese food, all of which are also available in Newton.)

All in all it's been an interesting week. For the first time I got a good look at suburban America and it was beautiful. We drove through towns with charming wooden houses separated by wide tracts of forested land. Inside every town there were extravagant stretches of playgrounds and parkland, interspersed with lovely lakes and ponds. Winter was turning to spring in a wash of bright green. Not the deep, glossy tropical green of Singapore but a lighter, crisper, more temperate shade of green. And over the long weekend it seemed as if everyone was out running or cycling or at least out walking with their kids and dogs.

It wasn't all smooth and pretty for us. It took us half an hour to change terminals at JFK airport, which made us think wistfully of the efficient and passenger-friendly airports in Asia. The practice of tipping had me in a perpetual state of bewilderment. I'll probably need night classes to figure out whom to tip and how much. But that's all part of the normal friction of moving to another country with a whole other culture.

For now I'm just pleased that at the end of our week-long scouting trip we came back to Singapore feeling positive about Boston. There's plenty to look forward to when we move there in a couple of months. And in the meantime, we'll continue to soak up tropicana, Singapore style.

Man vs Machine

Here I am, at 9am on a Sunday morning in Boston. The weather outside is fine, which in April means that it's a toasty 10C outside and there is no sign of rain or snow. I'm wide awake and have been for about four hours. And already I've been outwitted by a washing machine.

Earlier this morning I'd gone to the hotel laundromat to wash some clothes. I had duly loaded the machine, closed the lid, inserted my coins, and rammed in the coin loader/machine starter. And then I and the machine stared at each other in dead, calm silence. I soon tired of trying to outstare a white metal object. So I asked a passing employee to help. With a pleasant smile (that screamed "You daft furriner") she sweetly pulled the loader/starter back out and presto, the machine started running.

It's history repeating itself. Years ago I visited a friend who had just moved to Bangkok. He was facing a crisis because he'd run out of clean clothes and didn't know how to operate his washing machine. The Thai user manual did not help. The building staff were a little better. We phoned them and said "Please repair washing machine" using every syntax and accent we could think of. Eventually we managed to transmit the word "repair". Then followed a Siamese version of Twenty Questions in which we successively denied damaging air conditioners, toasters, televisions, refrigerators and assorted other appliances. Eventually a technician came up to investigate and in about seven seconds had the washer up and running. In the process we learned that you have to turn the starter knob, and then pull it out.

So within 36 hours of leaving Singapore I have learned two valuable life lessons. The first, of course, is about the intricacies of operating washing machines in alien nations. The second is about the incompatibility between toddlers and laung-haul flights.

Imagine a three-year-old boy. Imagine getting him into a plane at 11 in the morning, wide awake and full of beans. Imagine keeping him there for the duration of an 18-hour flight. If you're imagining a small, roughly cylindrical object ricocheting off the walls of a flight cabin, you've got the right image.

In hindsight it was rather funny. I, my wife, and our Monster were seated at the back of the cabin. The Monster invented a sport which consisted of giggling all the way to the front, then hopping all the way to the back. Along the route he would stop at randomly chosen fellow passengers, look them closely in the eye, and then giggle some more. They were obviously unprepared for such childish attention; at this point it's worth mentioning that every one of them was a tired-looking businessperson.

After about 10 hours of alternating the mile-high hopscotch with lusty renditions of "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star", we had gotten to know the cabin crew rather well. They were great - they went a long way to take care of us. Maybe they thought it was a neat way to get back at excessively demanding business passengers. Or maybe it was just the exceptional dedication to service that Singapore Airlines instils. Either way, they took fantastic care of us, bless their sarong-clad souls.

And now we're here in the promised land, with a week of house-hunting ahead of us. The weather forecast promises sunny skies. Let's hope that's an omen.

Caught In A Mosh ... Forever

A giant panda from hell plays speed metal guitar and laments mankind's extermination of other animal species. If you think that's bizarre, wait till you find out that he (she?) is called Death Panda.

I'm not making this up.



The guitarist is Marty Friedman, formerly of Megadeth. The vocalists are from Akihabara48, an all-girl Japanese group.

This could only happen in Japan.

At this point you're probably wondering why I know this. It's because I recently watched the loudest movie ever. Sam Dunn is an anthropologist and a heavymetal fan. He did what any such person would do - he made a documentary called "Global Metal" about heaymetal music around the world. And watching it made me feel like a teenager again. It took me back to when I was 14 years old and there was a new boy in school. He had just moved to Delhi from Cyprus, and he passed around a tape with music like I had never heard before. It was loud and it was rude and it could only be listened to at maximum volume.

Soon afterwards I heard of a band called Metallica, and how they had titled their first album "Kill 'Em All" in a nose-thumbing reference to record company executives who blocked the original title: "Metal Up Your Ass". Then, in quick succession, I discovered Iron Maiden, Slayer, Anthrax and a host of other bands with evil names, twin guitars, double-bass drums, and buckets of attitude.

My parents (and probably my neighbours) waited for me to grow out of it. But the thing is, once you're into metal, I don't think you can ever get out. As one of Dunn's interviewees in another documentary put it, "Metal fans love it forever. Noone goes 'Yeah I was really big into Slayer ... one summer.'"

The popular stereotype is that metal fans are long-haired drug-toking satan-worshipping anarchists who are incapable of fitting into civilized society. And while that is completely true, it totally misses the point. Which is that they are hearing-impaired long-haired ... anarchists.

Sometimes that stereotype can get quite hilarious. Years ago, when music was still sold on vinyl records, Iron Maiden went on tour in America. They inadvisedly scheduled a concert somewhere in the bible belt. A local preacher decided to crusade against their diabolical influence by organizing a bonfire to burn their albums. His devout followers duly bought a lot of records (somehow believing that this would be a bad thing for the band) and chucked them in the flames. All seemed to be well until someone realized that the plastic would release vapours. Evil, Satan-worshipping vapours. Panic struck and the crowd disappeared hastily to escape the fumes from Hell. Days later when the band arrived in town to perforate some eardrums, the only people who showed up to scream and point at them were their fans.

Coming back to Global Metal, I was blown away by some of the vignettes. There was the fan from Iran who somehow managed to keep up with his favourite music while living in a country where music CDs are illegal. There was the guy in Dubai who wore a traditional dishdasha like the ones in the picture below while being interviewed.


With a sheepish grin he reminisced about playing in his school band. and doing a cover of Jimi Hendrix's classic Purple Haze. He had worn just such a dishdasha on stage - except that it was all black.

There was the rather pudgy and incongruously named Sahil "Demonstealer"Makhija, lead singer in a band in Bombay. And the absolutely hilariously named band Bhayanak Maut. That's comic-book Hindi for "grisly death"; the humour in the name is sadly untranslatable.

There was a guy from Israeli band Salem recalling the time they sang about the holocaust. That sparked a debate in the national parliament about whether it was appropriate for a metal band to sing about such a serious topic. There was Max Cavalera from Brazilian pioneers Sepultura describing their first time in Jakarta. The fans, mostly students, got excited and rushed the stage to get closer to their idols. The police were already on edge because of political activism in Indonesia's universities so they panicked. They beat the kids down with batons. Then they forced 20,000 kids to sit down on the ground and watch a show by one of the loudest, fastest, most energetic bands ever.

And the absolute best part of the movie for me was X-Japan. In the late 1980s they started creating what would eventually be known as Visual Kei, a sub-culture that fused their musical style with extravagant make-up and fashion.


Don't be fooled by the posing and pouting. These guy kick ass and they kick it very very hard. They make the American glam metal bands of the 1990s look like a bunch of wusses; check out their videos on Youtube and you'll know what I mean.

So there you have it - giant Japanese pandas, Indian "demonstealer"s, and kosher headbangers, the world of heavymetal has it all. Is it any wonder we don't feel the need for civilized society?

A Soupcon of Soup Cans

The first time I heard of artist Andy Warhol, I thought he was the ultimate pretender.

He once described how he got the idea for a particular series of paintings: "I'd asked around 10 or 15 people for suggestions. Finally one lady friend asked me the right question, 'Well, what do you love most?' That's how I started painting money."

And so he went on to paint dollar signs in various shapes and colours. And when he wasn't painting dollar signs, he was painting cans of Campbell's Soup. 32 different flavours of Campbell's Soup. I really didn't get it. They said he made 'Pop Art', which sounded suspiciously like a polite way of saying that his work was kitsch, not art.

But I have resolved to live life large. So when I found out that an exhibition of Warhol prints was running in Singapore, and that there was no admission fee, I had to go. I'm so glad that I did!

The thing that I had never appreciated before was that through his art Warhol was telling the story of his times. It wasn't Pop Art in the sense that it was lowest-common-denominator product, packaged to sell millions of copies like a New Kids On The Block album. On the contrary, it was art that observed popular culture. A great example is his portrait of James Dean, or rather his portrait of a Japanese poster for the James Dean movie Rebel Without A Cause.

Here's the original poster for the movie (I could not find a Japanese one, but this gives a good idea of what it would have been like).


And here's what Warhol did with it; I love the way he stylized the portrait to make James Dean look even more sullen and aggressive than in the photograph.



Warhol did not just observe, he also commented.

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were American communists. They were sentenced to death by electrocution in 1951 for passing military secrets to the Soviet Union. Julius was strapped to the chair first, and he died quickly. Ethel was not so lucky. She recieved a charge of electricity for 57 seconds but at the end of it she was still alive. Two more charges were passed before she was pronounced dead. Eyewitnesses said that by then smoke was rising from her head.

Warhol made 10 prints based on a press photograph of the death chamber. Individually, each image is intensely haunting.

And when you see all of them displayed side-by-side, the effect is profoundly disturbing.

There were a hundred Warhol prints exhibited and I loved almost every one. I did draw the line at a poster titled How To Tell If You're Having A Heart Attack. It was exactly what it sounds like and incredibly dull. But that was a rare exception in a collection of sheer genius.

So I am now officially a fan of Andy Warhol. I'm a proud purveyor of Pop Art. And my farewell tour of Singapore is off to a flying start!

It Begins Now

I spent all of Friday in a blue funk and I could not understand why. At first I thought it was because I had started the day by pissing off people from 8 in the morning; but I'm way too thick-skinned, and probably too misanthropic, for that to bother me for long. Still, I spent all day feeling sorry for myself for the most trivial reasons (and probably pissing of manymore people in the process). Then, late in the evening, it dawned on me what had happened.

A couple of months ago, my company decided to move me to a new assignment in Boston (Massachusetts, not Lincolnshire, in case I have any British readers). I've had time to get used to the idea, but in truth it seemed far off in the future because the actual date of my move had not been fixed. That changed on Friday when my new boss made it clear that by the end of June, I would either be in Boston, or I would be in deep doodoo.

So now there is a date. And it's less than three months away. And it feels like it's tomorrow. I have twelve weeks or less before I pack my bags and leave on a jet plane. I know what you are thinking: "Twelve weeks is a long time, so stop whinging you snivelling infant". You're missing the point. There is a clock and it is counting down. I can almost hear the ticking. It used to count in months, now it's in weeks and soon there will only be days left.

I have so much unfinished business! So many things I had planned to see in Asia this year! I spent last Christmas planning my travel in 2008 to Laos, Vietnam, Tibet and Australia and now I don't know when (if?) I'll get to go. There are so many people to say goodbye to, and some of those people deserve really looong goodbyes.

(And there are so many places I still haven't eaten at in Singapore!)

I could go on and on and on but ... that way lies despair. So I won't go there.

Now that I know what's been biting me, I'm going to bite back. I'm going to make the next twelve weeks count and I'm going to start today. Twelve weeks from now when I sit by an airplane window and take a last, parting look at skyscrapers sprouting out of a carpet of tropical foliage, I'll still be sad; but I'll also be satisfied. Because twelve weeks from now I'm going to look back and say to myself "Dude, you really went out in style!"

Looking With Your Feet

I'm convinced that the best way to really see a city is to walk through it. And it is even better if you're lost. I learned this a few years ago in Glasgow. On the way to a local museum I took a wrong turn and before I knew it I was at the entrance to an enormous park full of men and women in tartans. They were there for the World Highland Games. I spent the next couple of hours wandering through the grounds, between swirling bagpipers, twirling dancers, and enormous men practicing to throw large pine logs. Six years later I can remember the sights and the sounds as if I'd been there this morning.

Ever since then I've made a point of discovering cities on foot. It helps me see more, and it also helps me understand more. On one of my trips to Bangkok I decided to walk to where I was staying, instead of taking a taxi. On the way I spotted a gorgeous pagoda. It was a particularly fine monument, and I turned aside to take a closer look. When I got there, I realized that while it was grand enough to have been another imposing reminder of Thailand's golden age of empire, it was no ancient relic. On the contrary, it was a brand new temple that the current King had just finished building. Suddenly I had a new-found appreciation for the importance of Buddhism to everyday life in Thailand.

Occasionally you do get to see a holdover from an ancient time. For example, if you feel thirsty while walking down Stonegate in York, you can nip into the Punch Bowl for beer. And if one of your ancestors had been walking that same street three hundred years ago, he might have done the same. After all, the Punch Bowl has been dated back to 1675. On the other hand, going walkabout can also introduce you to more recent history. Like the time I stumbled across The Red Piano cafe in Siem Riep, where Angelina Jolie and her crew hung out while shooting for the first Tomb Raider movie.

The point of this reflection is that very soon I will move out of Singapore. I'm surprised and embarrassed to admit that I've lived in this city for seven years and made scant effort to see the city where I live. Very soon after moving here I fell into a comfortably familiar routine, the sort where you go from point A to point B without really seeing anything in between.

So now I've resolved to change that. For the next 2 or 3 months I'm going to act like a tourist. I'll see the sights and take the pictures and most importantly I'll walk the streets of the city I've taken for granted for so long.

Stay tuned, because I'm sure I will see something utterly unexpected.

Going Down In History

I'm trapped.

It all started in December 2006. That was the last time I went to India for a holiday. On the rare occasions that I holiday in India, I like to fill up my time and my suitcase by shopping for books. That is the one thing that is still much cheaper there.

I'm also a bit obsessive about "collecting the full set" of anything. I'm a sucker for boxed sets, the full trilogy in one package, that sort of stuff.

So if you put these two impulses together, and then place me in front of a book called The New Penguin History of The World, I turn into putty. Very silly putty.

A historian named J. M. Roberts set out to write the enire history of the human race, from the time before there even was a human race, all the way up to the present day. Before he passed away in 2003 he took the story as far as America's war on terror, and Nature's newly uncovered war on mankind via global warming. Such staggering ambition deserves to be rewarded. I snapped up the book without a second thought.

The cover blurbs described the book as "A stupendous achievement.." and "A work of outstanding breadth...". But they left out the fact that it is stupendously boring. Here's a sentence picked out completely at random: "Political democracy developed faster than social, on the other hand, even if the universal male suffrage already long-established in the United States would not be introduced until 1918; the democratization of English politics was already past the point of reversibility by 1870."

That was from the 782nd of 1184 pages of unrelentingly turgid prose.

And I cannot stop reading.

You see, I've trapped myself inside this paperbacked prison. I started reading the book three or four times, and each time I gave up within the first fifty pages of multiply-nested subordinate clauses. Eventually I started thinking of the book as a living adversary that was determined to prove I'm too stupid to read it. It was disturblingly like the feelings of clumsiness and inadequacy that dogged me through high school.

"This", I told the fat snob sitting on my bedside table, "is now personal. I will defeat you". No I didn't. I'm not yet deranged enough to talk to books; only enough to feel intimidated by them.

So I made one more attempt and this time forced myself through the polysyllabic sludge with bloody-minded determination. I was an invincible hero forcing my way through dense enemy ranks. I was a fearless explorer trudging through an arid, oppressive desert. I was a moth wading through molasses, and about equally elegant.

But more successful.

I have now bludgeoned my way through six hundred pages, and just about passed the halfway mark. I'm winning my struggle against my inanimate adversary and it's doing me no good. In one of history's more savoury moments, the Greek king Pyrrhus commented on his own losses after winning a battle: "Another such victory over the Romans and we are undone". I can empathize.

Finishing the book will probably destroy my surviving brain cells, and leave me a gibbering idiot who is unaccountably knowledgeable about seventeenth century European power struggles. Finishing the book will probably take me another year; evry time I open it and start reading, I fall asleep within ten pages. Even so have I made my way to this present pass, reading three pages a night before passing out with my nose pressed into the binding.

It's in front of me now, just lying there inertly. As if I don't know that in a matter or hours it'll be in my hands again, gnawing away at the edges of my consciousness.

I swear to you, the next book I read will be a graphic novel.

Not Akademia, But Academia Nonetheless

Usually if people pay attention to what I'm saying at 930pm on a Friday, it's because they've been drinking. Last Friday was an exception. At least, I hope it was. Because if it wasn't, then I spent a couple of hours giving a guest lecture to a class of drunk graduate students.

Not that it would bother me terribly if that was the case. I was there just so I could say that I once taught at a university. Whether anyone actually learned anything was really quite incidental.

Earlier this week I'd had an encounter with a rather more accomplished set of teachers. The Singapore National Museum had an exhibition of Greek sculptures on loan from the Louvre, including portraits of Aristotle, Plato and Socrates.

Two and half thousand years ago Aristotle lectured on philosophy as he walked through the gardens of his school, the Lyceum. His students followed him as he walked, which is why they were called the peripatetics. I, of course, could not take that sort of risk. If I tried to deliver a traveling talk through the walkways of Nanyang Technological University, I'm certain the class would melt away in search of more pleasant occupations. So I did my rambling verbally instead, within the confines of a rather stark and antiseptic classroom.

Instead of Aristotle, I took inspiration from Plato. That was partly because Plato was rather less choleric looking than Aristotle. (Either that or his sculptor was more adept at flattery. Plato is the one on the right below.)


But more importantly, Plato had a healthy respect for both abstract and applied science. He advocated the study of number theory by philosophers, and of arithmetic by businessmen and military commanders who "must learn the art of numbers or he will not know how to array his troops". So after my professor friend had talked through the theory of evaluating marketing campaigns, I described some real world examples from my professional expreience.

Plato himself was a student of Socrates, who had a rather fun approach to teaching philosphy. He would discourse in a symposium. Our modern-day symposia are drab affairs in stuffy conference rooms with uncomfortable chairs and bad coffee. But in ancient Greece a symposium was a drinking party. Gentlemen of leisure and refinement would gather in a room, stretch out on couches, and talk long into the night on love, ethics and the nature of truth.

Since then standards for drinking party conversation have fallen a little. Last night, for instance, I was at a St. Patrick's Day celebration where the talk centered on rugby, cellphones, and the excellentness of the meat pies. And that was before someone hooked up the karaoke microphone.

Plato's school was at Akademia, a sacred grove dedicated to Athena. She is one of the most interesting characters in any mythology. I find it fascinating that she is the goddess of both wisdom and of victory in war. That seems like an odd combination at first. But it does make sense because in pretty much every instance where she favours someone in a battle, she does so by showing them how to win against great odds through the use of stratagems and ruses. The most famous example is the wooden horse that she told the Greeks to build so that they could defeat Troy.

I've had a soft spot for Athena since I was an undergraduate student. Back then the odds of me ever graduating were very grim. I decided I needed a patron deity, and I picked Athena. I figured that if she could get Odysseus out of the pickle he'd landed in by upsetting the sea-god Poseidon, then extracting me from the academic quicksand I was thrashing in would be a piece of cake. I loved driving my friends crazy by insisting on pouring libations to her in every party. "The first drink belongs to Athena", I'd proclaim and pour a little on the floor. We were all penniless students, and the look of horror on my friends' faces at this wasteage was priceless.

It worked. I did eventually graduate by the skin of my teeth. And if any of my professors in college knew that I had been turned loose on a class of graduate students, they would certainly keel over in shock.

I guess the moral of this story is that you should never depend on a university to educate you - you never know what half-baked idiot they might set to take your classes! It's much wiser to place your fate in the hands of a Greek goddess. ;-)