Saturday night out

Went to the SSO -- only because there was the holy triumvirate of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven on the programme. Couldn't go wrong with any of that.

It was billed as a gala night, so there were none of the usual ticketing concessions. However, $50 bought me a ticket in the fourth row (as opposed to $300 for a seat in the second balcony for THE Berlin Phil -- yes, still harping on that) -- I was so close to the musicians that when a second violinist used his bow to stab down a flyaway page of music, I could hear the thwack as it hit the sheet.

Haydn was Symphony No 44; Mozart was the Prague symphony and Beethoven was his allegedly only violin concerto, with guest violinist Renaud Capucon, but I hadn't heard of him. Liked the Beethoven and Mozart anyway, but I don't know whose version of Prague I've been listening to, thought last night's version didn't have an arresting enough opening.

Facebook ate my brain

It's a deadly combination of social media and newly acquired cable TV -- the cable company (one out of the two here) gave us free access to all their 100+ channels as new subscribers (don't you love competition). It's not a free lunch but a marketing ploy (see, some bits of the brain still works, FB didn't eat it all. Yet). They probably wanted to hook us onto all the channels available so that we'll take them all. Or they probably hope that we forget to opt out after the free access period is over and then bill us for 100+ channels instead of the few dozen or so that come with the package we've taken on.

Anyway, with 100+ channels and getting on FB, I have not read a book in the past two weeks. I'm deeply ashamed. The bookmark left in the volume by my bed hasn't moved in a while. The only reading that I've done is The Economist, and that's because I have a subscription. If I don't finish the current issue, another one will show up on Friday and I don't want them to pile up.

Must. Turn. The. Mac. And. The. TV. Off.

Bye bye, boys

These are Spike and Zoey, a pair of Italian greyhound brothers who live with a friend in Tokyo. I'm fond of them because I first visited Tokyo when they were newly acquired, and slept in the guest room which also served as the dogs' room. So they were a big part of my first Japan experience. That was more than 10 years ago.

Spike died a couple of years ago. Zoey died yesterday. He was getting on in years, but seemed fine. Then he went to bed and never woke up. It is somehow comforting to know that he was a good boy to the end, didn't put anyone through that last trip to the vet, and that he went peacefully in his sleep, on his own bed.

But he will still be missed.

Geographical eats

There's a new(ish) stall at the food court that sells laksa. All sorts of laksa, actually, from around the region: Singapore laksa (of course), Penang laksa, Johor laksa, Kelantan laksa, Sarawak laksa and Myanmar laksa.

Other than Penang laksa, which is popular enough, I'd never even heard of the others. Though I was well educated -- and well fed -- on Sarawak laksa by a Sarawak-born wife of an editor I used to work with. I didn't even know that the Malaysian states all had their own varieties of laksa. I will have to go back and eat my way through the archipelago.

Out of solidarity for Aung San Suu Kyi, I ordered the Myanmar laksa. It was prepared and served by a cook from China. Only in Singapore.

The Myanmar laksa had a broth that was almost scary in its livid yellowness. It was creamy with coconut milk, cut by the tang of freshly squeezed lime on top. No picture. Am not food blogger enough to take pix of things before I put them in my mouth. Just take my word that it was yummy.

Facebook follies and a blast from the past

So I finally got on Facebook. And instantly slid down the slippery slope of perdition. I didn't poke people that much, really. But I swore a lot while trying to navigate round an unfriendly interface and trying to find the "hide" buttons that were hidden. Purposely, I daresay. And then a comment that I posted in response to a friend showed up in another friend's wall, puzzling friend #2 greatly while leaving friend #1 thinking that I was ignoring him. It was enough to make me "unfriend" Facebook. There. I've said the word. Unfriend. I'm deeply ashamed. Every fibre of the professional sub-editor in me is quivering with righteous indignation and demanding that I return all Headline of the Year awards.

The plus side of Facebook is that it didn't take long for an old school friend to find me. And then she got all nostalgic, and ended up posting on her wall, a picture of our old school gang, taken during someone's wedding. I don't even remember the occasion, but it was a calculated guess seeing that one person in the group is in a wedding gown.


The trip back to the 80s was another shock. I'd forgotten that I never used to cut my hair then. And that we wore blouses with big white bibs for collars. OMG, looking at the photo was like stepping into a time warp. I was part of The Breakfast Club.

Don't it turn my brown eyes red

These are Big and Small, an imaginatively named pair of stuffed dogs (the big one is Big, the small one is Small), who are err, pets to our pets. I don't know what possessed us to think along the lines that our dogs would like to have their own dogs when we bought them. Queeni likes to carry Small around in her mouth, and Rupert likes to feel macho by shaking Big, twice his size. Which means that Big and Small got a little stinky with dog saliva.

So L put Big in the wash with some other toys. Small escaped the wash because he was hidden by somedog behind the sofa. And into the wash went some bleach, partly because there was a predominantly white toy that had gone predominantly brown.

Big emerged from the wash with scary blood-shot eyes, the bleach having turned its brown eyes red. I find it scary to look at, but Rupert doesn't seem to notice the difference and is back to being macho with Big. Or maybe he feels even more macho now, to shake up Vampire Dog.

Touche

Somebody made her own pineapple tarts. She said I could post the pix of creations here with a "don't laugh" warning, seeing that this blog is on a pineapple tart roll. Seriously, nobody's laughing. I think they're awesome. Especially when she did everything from scratch, the pastry and the jam filling (which took six hours). The tarts look beautiful. I bet they taste yummy too.

Gongxi facai

I don't know if this was somebody's whimsical Chinese New Year display by the roadside, or it's if an offering/plea to Cai Shen (God of Fortune) -- given the ingot and the playing card (lucky No 8).

Fatt! anyway.

Pineapple tarts, round 2

Sorry, Somebody. Another neighbour, another jar of pineapple tarts. However, these are store bought and factory made. And nothing to shout about. Don't really like them in the pigs-in-a-blanket shape. The home-made ones still win for taste and aesthetics.

Glint in the eye

This pix is for the benefit of somebody, so that she needn't look at a pineapple tart everytime she drops by here. :)
Gongxi facai.

Ready for Chinese New Year

The house has been spring cleaned -- everything horizontal and capable of gathering dust has been wiped down, the floors vacuumed and mopped, the curtains and sofa covers changed, the dogs bathed and the fridge stuffed with fish, prawns and tons of veggies for the Reunion Dinner.


Time for a nice cup of tea with the season's first pineapple tart, a home-baked gift from the Malay neighbour down the corridor. Stands to reason that only in Singapore would my must-have Chinese New Year classic come from a Malay neighbour.

The pix is for the benefit of R (evil grin) -- you gotta appreciate the artistry of this tart. Not the usual filling slapped on a round of pastry thing, but it's made to look like a little lotus flower (artfully arranged by a tea cup with a lotus motif), with the petals holding the filling in place. Almost too pretty to eat, but quite delicious, really.

There's always space for one more

One of my friends has switched to an e-reader because her bookshelves were overflowing. That came to mind after I finished the new-ish Discworld romp (not technically new because I waited a year for the paperback edition so that it could match the other Terry Prachett paperbacks on my shelf) and tried to find a space for it.

So yes, I can understand why people switch to e-books. But no, I don't think I will anytime soon. It's not just missing the old school feeling of turning an actual page. An e-book doesn't give me the satisfaction of putting it away on a shelf of "matching" books, and the delight of adding yet another book to an overcrowded shelf. I suppose it has something to do with hoarding. You get this delicious feeling of having expanded the collection that grew slowly over the years, one book a year (or however fast Prachett is writing -- long may he live).

Ain't that the truth

Seems to me the world would have been a better place had we spent all the money on eradicating this WMD than the non-existent ones in Iraq.

He's back, all is forgiven

I got tickets to Melvyn Tan's recital without even knowing what he was going to play. But I figured that one couldn't go wrong with his repertoire of Beethoven, Mozart and Debussy. Turns out the programme was heavy on Chopin -- possibly a hangover of the bicentennial last year -- but that's OK too.

I figured that if an ex-Singaporean took such pains and so long to finally stage a concert here, then the least I can do is to go to it. Tan was the Singapore-born emigre who stirred up public controversy when he returned five few years ago and was hauled up for evading national service (two years of military service compulsory for all male citizens). Tan had left the country at a young age and never returned to serve NS. When he did come back -- to see an ageing mother -- he was above 40 and no longer eligible for NS. More importantly, he had given up his citizenship in 1978. Still, he got the book thrown at him and was fined. It was a tremendous media circus, which gave rise to some rather voiceful public opinions. Most people (at least, those who told the media so) felt he deserved the fine. Some pointed out there's also a jail term for evading NS. A letter to the press opined that there is no justification at all for NS absconders to be allowed to return at all. I suppose that last person wasn't at the concert last night. I personally think it was a huge case of the Singaporean dog in a manger ethos -- as I have suffered (2 years of NS), so must everybody else.

Now back for his first public performance (there was a private one last year) in the land of his birth, Tan was lauded as a son of Singapore, with a comment in the programme notes going as far as saying that he is "without a doubt the best pianist that Singapore has ever produced". Which is only accurate in as far as he was produced, ie born, in Singapore. But what did Singapore have to do with his success as a concert pianist?
Aside from his first piano teacher in his childhood -- and we all had one of those -- he probably owes his success to his parents who had the foresight to recognise his potential as a pianist, the gumption to acknowledge that he could make a living from the arts (especially 20 years ago), and -- more importantly -- the means to send him overseas for training.

There were more young children than usual in the concert hall. And there were a good many students in school uniform, it was a school day after all. Probably piano students, all. Which probably also means there must have been quite a few piano teachers in the audience too. I wonder what mine would have made of Tan's posture. He slouched between movements, hunched as he played, his spine curving more and more as he progressed through the piece until he ended it, nose almost at the keyboard. The piano teacher I had as a child used to stand behind me, and knee me in the small of my back to make me sit up straight.

But oh, the recital was wonderful. Lyrical, technical mastery. He gave three encores to a standing ovation from almost the entire hall, which even THE Berlin Phil didn't get. The second encore was a finger exercise (Czerny? Scarlatti?) that I remember having to hammer out endlessly. I never would have thought that it could make a recital piece, and such a sweet, charming one too.

Paving a path to heaven

The grass in the field next to the train station is a bit patchy, which was why it got water-logged during the recent monsoon rains. As soon as the sun came out and the mud dried a bit, the works department labourers came and planted more grass in the bald areas, and used some stones and rocks to level up water-logged bits.

And that was when I realised that one of the stones wasn't just a stone. It was a headstone. For (as far as I can make out) Lea Caron Langdon who died in May 1961, aged 7 months.

There's got to be a Singaporean epithet in this. Such as one of those homilies that the labour movement keeps espousing about reinventing oneself, relearning a new skill set so as to find re-employment, etc. Guess finding new work in a new sector doesn't just apply to laid off workers but also to headstones of exhumed graves.

RIP, Baby Langdon.

Short and sweet

Every now and then comes a book so brilliant yet so simple that you could have written it yourself. If only you thought of doing it first. Which is why it's so galling that the writers who beat you two it are two 19-year-old students.

Twitteratureis great literature as told on Twitter. Beat's Cole's Notes.

Emma -- The only way to take care of Knightley is to marry him.

Pride & Prejudice -- I suppose I love Darcy now, after all this.

Wuthering Heights -- Catherine has married the twattling tool across the street.

King Lear -- Nix that. Cordelia dead.

Medea -- Jason very unhappy I murdered the children.

Oedipus -- MILF

Romeo & Juliet -- @Montague, @Capulet: Can't we all just get along?

The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oops. Grew old all at once.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight -- You think if you cut off someone's head, he'll die, but not in Camelot.

Lady Chatterley's Lover -- I'm def preggers with his baby.

The Tempest (the last bit) -- STAGE DIVE!!! Catch me, please?

Picture this

Went through some text-heavy tomes over Christmas (Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion -- both excellent) so decided to do some light reading over the New Year instead.

There's something delightful about picture books -- whether they're children's books or history of art books -- that can captivate you for hours. And I even had a theme -- I found in the library two picture books on dogs. One's a children's book on a confused dopey dog who wonders if he's a black dog with white spots or a white dog with black spots; the other an art book tracing artwork of dogs through the ages.


So New Year was spent leafing through pictures of dogs, and it's even more satisfying doing so in the company of two sleeping dogs snuggled up. I can't think of a better way to start the year.

Happy 2011 everyone.

It was a very good year

Nine months into my 46th year (and what a year it's been), and now The Economist tells me that the good stuff really begins now.

Well, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, all!

Thicker than the phone book

I finally got my hands on the new Jonathan Franzen and can't wait to start on it. But I can't slip it into my work bag and read it on the train ride to the office, not when it's thicker than the Yellow Pages. I thought the whole point of paperbacks is that they are portable.

Not your usual bored games

I did not expect to see Scrabble and Monopoly on the supermarket shelves. What fun, two classic board games in edible form. And Belgian chocolate too! The only problem with this is it's literally game over after just one play.