and other Australiana

I thought the Opera House looked a bit "veiny", something that you never see in postcards and photos. Turned out that it's because the roofing is covered in what's pretty much bathroom tiles. And the grouting needed cleaning, at that.



The Blue Mountains ...





Meet the natives ...






The dingo looked just like anybody's yellow dog ...

Life's a beach

and Manly...






(pix of me taken by Catswhiskers, with thanks)

You wacky Aussies

... and all the other things for which I didn't have the camera handy ...

... Jai Ho on the airport muzak.

... Wallabies rugby shirts go on 50% discount after Australia gets kicked out of the running for the Rugby World Cup.

... A brown dog standing on the passenger seat of a dusty Holden ute, head stuck out of the wound-down window, ears flapping in the wind.

... street name sign for "Dreamhouse Road", just outside Manly. Ah, happy the residents.

... Kids in school uniforms hitting the beach after they've been let out from school. Why hang out at a mall when there's a beach?

... Stuffed toy kangaroo tied to the rear bumper of a ute going down Campbell Parade, Bondi.

... Wedding photographer yells out to wedding party on church steps to "take off your sunnies" before clicking the shutter.

Not regal enough

Not quite sure what's so queenly about this Tshirt collection. It's neither Freddie Mercury nor Priscilla of the Desert.

9/11

Ten years ago, and I remember it as clear as day. And I'm not American, and live on the other side of the globe.

I was at work. It was shortly past 9pm in Singapore. By that time of the night, I had already finished my work, and I was idly scanning the newswire service. The regular copytaster was off that day. I saw a little newsflash that a plane had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. That first single-line newsflash suggested that it was a light plane.

At that time, nobody had any idea it was a jet. I had thought it was a small plane because some years before, there was a prankster who landed a light craft in Moscow's Red Square, just for the hell of it. And I used to play a game that a friend had on his computer, which was an aircraft flying simulator where you could pick a skyline of whatever city you wanted to soar about in. I used to pick the New York City skyline and made it the object of my game to try and fly my plane between the World Trade Center towers. And I thought that was what happened. Someone probably tried to do that and ended up crashing into the tower.

I told the night editor about the newsflash, and he wearily said to put it as a short one or two paragraph filler in an inside page, which would involve minimum rejigging of pages that had already been done. This was the same man who once famously banned stories of train crashes in his native India because it happened too often to be news.

And then live coverage spluttered on the TV. And crescendoed into an unending torrent. Not just New York, but also the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. There wasn't so much horror when we saw footage of the second plane crashing into the tower as disbelief. It didn't feel real. It felt like we were watching a Hollywood disaster movie. I don't know if it was because news people feel no emotion when covering disasters because you snap into a somewhat detached business-like mode of 'How many dead? How many wounded? Is this picture too gruesome to use in print?'

I think the detachment was the effect of watching a disaster unfold on a screen -- you're wired to think that it's not real, it's a Michael Bay movie, and that after a couple of hours, the lights will come back on and life will become normal again.

It was with that sense of disbelief that I typed an e-mail to a dog e-group I belong to, all dog people and friends, and all American. "What on earth is going on in the US?" And their replies slowly came back, all stunned and shell-shocked as I.

And it didn't help when you keep watching a loop of the second plane crashing into the tower, like it's some kind of instant replay. I remember it got too much for me, so I went out of the newsroom to get away from it and to clear my head. I very probably lit a cigarette at this point. At the carpark, I ran into the copytaster who was on her day off. She got into her car and started driving back to the office as soon as she saw the TV news.

By the end of the night, that one-par filler became the front page, back page and several inside pages. I usually got home at midnight then. That night, I got home at 5am. My father, who usually went to bed at midnight, was still up, and had just turned off the TV. "Horrible, terrible," he said to me as he went upstairs to bed. And he's a man not given to saying very much.

The next day, a New York resident in my e-group forwarded an e-mail from the father of one of her students, a first-person account of how he walked down from his office in one of the two towers. Later, when the NYT wire service picked up his story, I recognised his name. Suddenly, picking through news wires wasn't impersonal detachment any more. These were friends of friends. It was a friend's friend who walked down a World Trade Center tower. Over the next 10 years, it would be a friend's nephew who was posted to Iraq. And so the web of connection slowly crept out and grew, and drew us closer than six degrees of separation.

I wasn't supposed to be working tomorrow, Sept 11. I thought I would be spending it at home, watching all the 9/11 programmes, docu-dramas and analyses on TV. There's been an unending row of trailers for them. I was pretty sure that it didn't matter what station I was tuned to, at any given time, some channel would have a 9/11 programme airing.

I wasn't sure that I wanted to watch another loop of that plane flying into the tower. So I was somewhat relieved when a supervisor asked if I could work the Sunday shift because we were short-handed. It would at least get me away from the TV. But it won't get me away from the news wires. Come 9pm, I don't know if I want to be doing what I did 10 years ago.

Now, 10 years on, the lights have come back on. But life was never normal again.

Double take

When I saw Sean Bean in a trailer for Game of Thrones, I stupidly thought for a fleeting moment that there's another instalment of the Lord of the Rings. That split-second hurray moment of yay! more! was rapidly squleched by a rational how-is-that-possible, there-are-no-more-Tolkien-books logic.

Well, you can't blame me. Sean Bean looks exactly the same as Boromir ...


... and whoever he's supposed to be in Game of Thrones.


There's a reason why Thrones writer David Benioff called it "The Sopranos in Middle Earth" (says the ever-helpful Wikipedia).

Saturday night drumming

I don't even know what to call Drum Tao. They are more than taiko drumming -- the performance incorporated dance, musical interludes and even a few comic sketches with the punchline in percussion. I suppose they were sort of like a hybrid Stomp, fused with eastern classical, with more choreography than Madonna, more spectacle than Lady Gaga and more drum solos than Ringo Starr can shake a drumstick at.

No pix -- they were strict about no photography or filming, but their website has got videos. They're very, very good, the full house at the Esplanade Theatre gave them a standing ovation.

Larger than life

OK, I filched the pic off the Net because it's better than what I attempted to take with the cellphone cam. It's a hoarding for an upcoming shopping centre in the heart of Orchard Road. And apparently, it's created some controversy. I personally, don't find it at all objectionable. In fact, I find it quite yummy. :)

Ain't that the truth

Stole the pix off a friend's Facebook profile.

Cos I can.

And cos it's well said.

But does it come in a serif font?

For all you OCD subs!

Festive feasting

Sometimes I wonder why I bother to cook on Hari Raya (Eid) when the neighbours are only going to show me up. :)



Oh yeah. L's birthday was on the same day. Roast lamb with mashed sweet potato and roast zucchini and carrots are a pale comparison to sambal ayam, mutton rendang and sayur lodeh though!



And guess which Doofus Dog head-butted the oven when the lamb was in there roasting?

Doofus dog

You know something's wrong when the house is too quiet and That Dog is nowhere to be found. Rupert wasn't in any of his usual sleeping spots and the only thing that kept down the rising panic as I looked round the house for him was that Queeni didn't seem very perturbed.

I finally found him in the corner of the dressing room. Earlier, we had taken Queeni to the vet for her annual shots, and after we got back, L had left her soft-sided carrier in there, next to a coat-stand. Roop had gone in to sniff at the carrier, had somehow got his head stuck in the carrying strap, and on top of it, had somehow got it twisted round the base of the coat-stand, probably when he tried to wriggle out of it. And there he stood, tied to the coat-stand and waiting quietly for rescue.

At least he didn't bring down the cast iron coat-stand. He did look rather relieved when he was freed. Queeni didn't give a damn, I think she probably thought he was better off tied up in the room.

Curry on

National Cook Curry Day was a week ago, and L was so pleased with the assam fish curry then that he followed it up this weekend with chicken curry.

On the shelf

Just back from a caffeine run. That's like 10 bags of Carrefour coffee behind the two big boxes of Marks and Spencer extra strong tea bags. Everything else on the shelf are dog treats and dog biscuits. We're all set.

Going green

There are now potted plants all over the office. Big, leafy plants two to three feet tall, placed in corners, at the end of cubicle rows, in between filing units.

I found out from the administrators that these plants were rented. I didn't know you could rent plants. The rental includes watering once weekly and a topping up of the hydroponic feed.

They are part of some workplace health initiative the organisation is undertaking, and my particular office is getting the first go at the plants, to sort of test drive the outcome. The biggest boss emailed that we were picked because we had the highest MC rate.

I honestly don't know how the plants are going to cut down on the sick rate. I think people are falling sick because they are overworked, and we are overworked because we are short staffed. New hires might solve things better than new plants. But I guess plants are much cheaper to rent than people.

Also, I remember from biology classes that while plants absorb carbon dioxide and give out oxygen from photosynthesis in the day, the reverse happens at night.

You wanna bet that the sick rate among the night crew will only get worse? Now, among other things, we have to fight for oxygen.

Starting young

There was a bit of commotion on the landing outside our front door yesterday afternoon (and the dogs joined in happily). Turned out that the six-year-old boy down the corridor had staged a run-by toy-throwing at the three-year-old boy across the landing. Yes, he ran past the open door of the flat, and threw a small stuffed pink dinosaur inside, freaking out the younger boy.

Now, a day later, the three-year-old's mother said he won't step on the bits of the floor where the toy bounced and landed. The toy is now sitting in the basket of his dad's bicycle, which is left outside the front door. The boy insisted on placing it there yesterday. Today, he seems anxious that the toy be removed and returned to "abang down there" (brother down the corridor). His mother explained that he feels the need to right things. A concerned L patted the boy on the head. The boy then scrubbed away at it. His father explained that he does that when he is touched, and will then run to the bathroom to wash his hands.

OCD sure starts early.

So does toy terrorism.

Weekend in front of the TV

Only the Brits will consider making a TV programme that retraces the journeys of a long dead poet -- The Scandalous Adventures of Lord Byron. And only a Singapore girl whose name came from Byron and who was mad about the Romantics when she was much younger will watch it. Rupert Everett as the narrator was the icing on the cake. The bonus is when he strips down to his skivvies and tries to swim the Hellespont. Even if he didn't cross it (a Russian tanker got in the way of this Leander), I think he out-Byroned Byron on that.

Impulse buy

Sort of. I was looking for something to wear in the office when the aircon gets chilly at night when the room empties out. I was thinking of a fleece hoodie. And then I saw this. Cut and styled like a leather jacket, but it's denim. Certainly light enough to wear here. And at 70% off. What's not to like?

It's criminal

Went to Borders to get a book today. And found them selling cookware. And photo frames and gee-gaws, all stacked aptly under "crime".

Headbanger

Loopy Roopy's idea of getting into anything -- including closed doors and baby gates -- is to head butt his way through. Well, That Dog has twice banged headfirst into the oven door. The oven being hot, in use and containing a roasting chicken.

Communal watching

I'm too young to remember when TV was new. But I'm told by my mum that back in the days when only one neighbour had a TV set, every one would gather in his house to watch. Well, this is Gen Y's version. One kid with a PC with a DVD player. What's more enterprising here is that they plugged it into an electrical outlet at the communal deck. I guess when the town council planned the deck for communal sharing, they didn't expect the outlets to be used this way.

Goodbye Mr P

Vic Prooth was my Shakespeare teacher when I was in junior college. Those first lessons, we didn't know what to make of the English expatriate teacher striding in the front of the classroom roaring like King Lear, which he was teaching us.

I was soon to find out that Mr P's bark was worse than his bite. And that he did more than just teach in the classroom. He also taught in the canteen, sitting down with students who needed extra hours after class to wrestle with the intricacies of Elizabethan English. And he didn't just teach the set A level texts either. He spent time reading to us from other literature greats. I never understood the Milton, but I loved the sound of it. I told him that, years later, when I was grappling with Milton in university. He said then he had done his job. It would be like children picking up on nursery rhymes -- it's all sound, cadence and rhythm before the meaning. And if I had picked that up, then there's hope that I would understand Milton.

Mr P made me cry. Lots of times. Once in class, when he enacted Laurence Olivier's version of Lear carrying the body of Cordelia -- how one could say "never" five times over and make it sound different each time while increasingly driving it home that Cordelia had well and truly snuffed it. Once outside of class during those extra-curricular readings he held in the canteen, it was the last scene from Cyrano de Bergerac. When I asked to borrow his copy of the play so that I could read the whole thing, he had his entire copy photostated so that I could have my own copy to keep, copyright laws be damned. Another time, he lent me a copy of Oscar Wilde's The Happy Prince -- I read it on the bus home from school, and wept all the way home.

Mr P taught me more than English Literature. He had a subscription ticket to the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, and he used to talk quite a bit about the concerts he attended. I had a passing interest because of a classical music background from piano lessons since young. But the piano lessons only made the subject dreary. It wasn't until Mr P started playing music and making me cassettes from his records, and later on CDs, that I realised this classical stuff wasn't just Associated Board set exam pieces and scales. That this Mozart stuff was really nice and not at all boring.

Over the years after I left school, he became a friend. But he has stayed as a teacher too. His last lesson to me was during the elections in Singapore earlier this year. He was interested in the country's political scene and if things had changed since he left Singapore. I had written that I would probably spoil my vote because I didn't want to vote for the ruling party but there was no credible opposition in my ward. He said that he had spoilt his vote for years, and always with a quote from Romeo and Juliet: "A pox on both your houses." And so that was what I wrote too. It seemed more refined than scrawling all over the ballot paper. And that was the last email exchange I had with him. He was a teacher to the very last.

It had occurred to me that I should end this with a quote from Shakespeare. It would be fitting somehow. But the only one that I can think of is Hamlet's "good night sweet prince, may flights of angels send thee to thy rest". But I don't think Mr P would have much truck with cherubim and seraphim.

I don't know where atheists go when they die. And Mr P used to positively revel in being a heathen. I'm sure that where ever he is, there'll be good music. And lots of good books.

Farewell, Vic. You will be missed.

Wish we could say the same

I sighed when I saw the cover of the current issue of The Economist. Not too long ago was the Aids memorial where I met with old friends, and thought of even older friends. Of those of us still attending the memorial faithfully every year, almost every one had dropped out of volunteering. Now, we just attend the memorial as an audience member instead of a volunteer. "Every one I used to do this for has died," said one of the ex-volunteers.

It was the saddest thing that I've ever heard.

I wish we in Singapore could say the same of the sentiments expressed by The Economist. The latest data from the Ministry of Health shows that in 2010, the number of people reported with Aids in Singapore dipped slightly. But two were perinatal. Those could have been avoided.

The fight goes on.

A week of gifts

Almost everyday now, for the past few weeks, I came home to find a stuffed toy (the dogs') on my side of the bed, sometimes under my pillow, sometimes tucked behind the bolster.

I think it was most probably Queeni who did it -- she's the one that will carry a toy in her mouth and move it about. Rupert just shakes them and drops them when he's done. I'd like to think that she left me a present everyday because she missed me while I was at work. But I think she was really just leaving a toy to bag a space for herself on the bed for later in the night when we retire.







I took these pictures over the past week. The one time I forgot to close the bedroom door when I was taking a picture, guess who got into the frame and claimed the toy for himself.

Yummy yummy peri peri

I'm not food blogger enough to take pictures of my meals before I start tucking in. But I didn't expect my order to come on a sizzling hot plate. I had to wait for it to stop spitting at me before I could start eating. So while waiting, I took a picture of it. Peri peri chicken with pasta in tomato sauce and mushrooms. At the food court next to the office. Yummy.