I guess Thanksgiving is over and the official start to the holidays have begun. Don’t like the holidays though. This is when I become a grouch all the way till Chinese New Year. Bah.
Still, this is as good a cue as any to post this Christmas greeting. R liked it. Then again, he likes anything Bollywood or that revolves around a coconut tree. (Geddit? Geddit?) He almost tried to get us to watch a Bollywood movie last month. Almost. But he didn’t succeed. Phew.
Fortunately, this clip is about 0.5% of a Bollywood feature. Season’s Greetings.
Ah, Saturday. Ah, breakfast. Two great loves of mine.
First, weekends. What does a Saturday morning feel like? Almost as though there is no such thing as time. No such thing as alarm clocks, for sure. At least for half a morning before hunger pangs get the better of you and you to roll out of bed, to slip your feet into your favourite bedroom slippers and make your way to the kitchen. Where the beauty of breakfast begins.
Time to celebrate the death of the week.
Breakfast. There wasn’t a specific event. Or a special instruction. But I do recall it started in Paris in the winter of 2005 when I was overseas for work. Almost every morning without fail, the exception being the overnighters, I would head down for breakfast. One slice of wholemeal toast, a bit of butter and strawberry jam, a slice of ham, poached sausages, sometimes button mushrooms. If I didn’t have any of those, then two slices of toast. Day after day. I grew so attached to the routine, it continued even after I came back. Wholemeal toast with unsalted butter and less-sweet jam or honey. But more than that, the wonderful ritual of breakfast every morning.
On weekends, breakfast becomes a fabulous affair.
Toast still, but savoured so differently. And once in a while, something different. Pancakes. Waffles. Maybe even a bagel with cream cheese. Eggs benedict or Florentine. Fresh fruit. Sautéed veggies and rice in paprika. (Okay, these are sometimes more brunch than breakfast, but they are definitely a weekend thing.)
Latte, not to go.
On weekends, coffee transforms from additive back to beverage, savoured slowly sip by sip as you chat with friends — over the kitchen counter or at a café or the neighbourhood kopitiam. It could be local kopi brewed in sock or an organic grind steeping in a moka pot over the farmhouse stove. I had a nice breakfast this weekend. Nothing fancy, just toast at a bakery and a cup of tea. The romantic notion I’ve painted says nothing about the queues at said bakery or the running kids and crying babies. But in my quiet corner, with my two slices — I love the sound of the crunch of toast — and the day’s paper, errands undaunting, I was in a world of my own.
Lovely commercial with excellent script (at least I think so; catch the other Lurpak spots from W+K London). Like the spot, Max was up early and fidgety too. Listen out for my favourite part.
My family. My friends. My sweet babboo. People I miss and wish were here but who are well. Though I’ve not used my passport since June and it’s driving me nuts, I’m thankful I’ve sat in the shade of a tree on a warm Sunday afternoon watching the denizens of Central Park “do their thing”, and what a melting pot spectrum of “things” that encompasses. (Next time we do it, we shall remember to bring a copy of the New York Times.) I’m also thankful for swarms of barracuda. And whale sharks (author would like to highlight the plural of the noun). Though I whinge and whine, though I grumble a lot, though I have good days and bad days, I guess I’m thankful I have a job and that I enjoy what I’m doing. I guess what I’m trying to say is when it really comes down to it, I really have a lot to be thankful for. Still.
Thought this was funny. But it’s only once a year that you get to gorge yourself silly on turkey, chestnut stuffing, sweet potato mash and pumpkin pie.
Some days, I like my music the way I like my life. Simple. Work hard, be a good person, do the right thing, take only what you need, recycle.
Every Monday I roll my sleeves up with the hoi polloi. On Wednesday, I rejoice with everyone else that we’ve made to the middle of the week. Pretty much all that is on our mind is doing the best we can at work, earn an honest-as-possible wage and making it to the end of the week. Today, something happened in the office that made me wonder if the powers that be who sit in the proverbial corner office have forgotten what it feels like to be the common man. It was a moment right out of Dilbert. I was so angry. So were many others. Then at past eight in the evening, someone in the next cubicle played this song. At least that mellowed my mood somewhat. Tired. I went home and went to bed.
Rotting in front of the TV over the weekend, I was as flabbergasted to learn this rather disturbing piece of news. The people over at the National Toy Hall of Fame should really get their act together. Honestly. *roll eyes*
The Wired article about islands seen from space reminded me of another article I stumbled on. About what sounds like the reverse of what an island is. It took me a while of mucking around the Internet and my bookmarks but I finally found it, it was on my friend’s tumblr site: Blue Holes.
A Blue Hole is a submarine sinkhole or cave. They are steep-walled depressions, roughly circular, under sea level and get their names from the dark blue depths compared to the light blue shallows around them. Also called vertical caves, they are similar to cenotes, but underwater. (They are formed the same way, in limestone-rich terrain where chemical weather cause a cave roof to collapse in.)
One of the most breathtaking Blue Holes is the exquisitely circular Great Blue Hole in Belize, discovered and made famous by Jacques Cousteau, who declared it one of the top ten best dive sites in the world.
It is also believed to be the world’s largest Blue Hole and is part of the Belize Barrier Reef Reserve, a World Heritage Site. It’s a popular dive spot and a typical trip would take a full day with one dive in the Blue Hole, where you could see giant groupers, nurse sharks, reef sharks and maybe even the rare hammerhead, as well as the amazing stalactites and stalagmites that this spot is famous for.
Yes, Blue Holes are a thrill for divers, especially since many lead into caves or have spectacular cave formations. However, they are also incredibly dangerous, as many of them exceed permissible diving depths; the average diver is qualified to go to a depth around 30m, PADI recreational diving limit is 40m, and nitrogen narcosis begins to set in.
The most deadly of them is the Blue Hole located in the Red Sea. Because of the number of diving fatalities that have occurred there, this spot has earned the title “World’s Most Dangerous Dive Site”, as well as the nickname “Diver’s Cemetery”.
Accidents happen so frequently here because many divers try to find a tunnel through the reef wall known as “The Arch” that connects the Blue Hole to open water. However, this tunnel is hard to detect because of its odd angle, causing divers to descent too deep searching for it. The tunnel’s dept is at 52m, already a depth where divers could become narced.
Blue Holes are also dangerous because they are anoxic. Their water circulation is poor and beyond a certain depth, these conditions are unfavorable for marine life, but can support large numbers of bacteria.
The deepest Blue Hole is Dean’s Blue Hole, located in a bay on Long Island, Bahamas. It’s depth is an exceptional 202m; the next deepest Blue Hole is 110m.
Anyway, the article lists the Top 5 Amazing Blue Holes in the world. Read the whole thing here.
It’s been one of those weeks. Came home late one night and thought: “Man, it’s going to be a crazy week. And it’s only Monday.” Only to realise it was Wednesday. And I have to finish all that work by the weekend? Unless some bizarre solar-planetary shift makes Friday last 40 hours, it’s not likely I’ll have a lazy weekend.
Haven’t seen much of the outside world. Have to settle for pictures of the outside world downloaded from the Internet.
But wow. What pictures they are. Galapagos, Hawaii, and still my favourite of all time, Maldives. Active volcanoes. Frozen seas. All looking so serene. All taken from satellites or by astronauts.
Got all of these from a piece form Wired. See more pictures of islands here.
From one British comic to another. The man that started Monday’s night of laughs, actually. I was watching a vintage clip of Rowan Atkinson yesterday that he did with John Cleese when I clicked on the Eddie Izzard related video that started me down the path of laughing to the point of almost asthma. The vintage clip was funny, but I like this one better.
Can’t remember when I first saw stand-up acts. It was on TV for sure. Maybe when I was on holiday overseas as a kid. I recall some really funny ones. And some that were more profanity than comedy. (I didn’t mind the profanity; it’s just that at some point it was profane just for the shock value and the jokes weren’t funny at all.)
Anyway, at the time I saw this, I thought it was brilliant. The amazing part, the whole Atkinson special has some hilarious physical comedy skits à la Mr Bean alongside his monologue sets. Amazing. The man wasn’t just scalpel-sharp in his wit, he was versatile as well. And that was even before I started on Blackadder.
But he’s more than just funny. In a BBC interview with Parkinson about the narrow gap between tragedy and comedy, Atkinson said: ”The darker, more serious the backdrop into which you set your comedy, sometimes the brighter your little sparks of comedy sets out in sharp relief against it.” They were talking about the famous and poignant poppy-filled last scene of Blackadder. Good chap.
I really shouldn’t have stayed up till half past two. On a Monday night. With the whole week of work still ahead. I was running all morning on kopi gao, and still half not there.
It might be because it was past 2am. It might be because my colleague and I were just earlier on Monday speaking, no, attempting to speak, Spanish and such, babbling incoherently for five minutes. “Dove è la biblioteca?” “Où est la bibliothèque?” ”Donde esta la biblioteca?” “No, gracias. Soy alérgico a los crustáceos.” Useful to know if you happen to be in Rome/Paris/Barcelona or almost anywhere in South America. Not so useful if you’d like directions to the Coloseum/Champs-Élysées/Machu Picchu, and not the public library. (Was ist das? Nein Deutsche sprache? – Apparently so. No sprechen sie Deutsche.)
If you’ve ever taken a foreign language class. If you’ve ever travelled in a country that doesn’t speak English. You may not understand every word said, but you might still find it funny. Me, I laughed so hard I couldn’t stop crying and by the end of it couldn’t breathe and had started wheezing. Heh.
Water! There’s water! On the moon. Yay. Before you know it, humans will be up there in droves setting up colonies. Big corporations will be building processing plant (processing what, it doesn’t matter, people don’t really need a reason to conquer and destroy). Mall of the Moon with open, complete with Happy Moon Meals and The Gap Moon Collection. Someone will build a golf course. Survivor Mare Serenitatus will be filmed. Does this news conjure up images like this in your mind? It’s actually nothing new in science fiction, the colonies and processing plants in space. And neither is the fear of mankind’s exploitation. Only now we’ve got the first bit of proof. This could be the beginning of the end. Whee.
(Okay, I’m kidding. But only partly.)
One small step for discovery, one big step for science fiction.
Don’t forget to tell your kids Hitler isn’t a German football coach. Don’t forget to tell them the golden arches of McDonald’s are not a symbol of Remembrance Day. Don’t forget to tell them Auschwitz is not a theme park.
It commemorates the ending of hostilities in World War I which took effect at the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, but on this day, today, we remember all members of the armed forces who were killed during war.
Here’s one of the nice clips I remember from my childhood. Before computer animation. When cartoons were cartoons, even if it had an insight and lesson in them.
It was created by American cartoonist, animator, composer, musician and singer Bud Luckey, who, together with Don Hadley, did a lot of the Sesame Street animated episodes. Until I read his biography, I never knew the man existed. And yet he’s done so many things that didn’t just shape my growing up, but shaped and pioneered the animation industry too.
He currently works in Pixar (he was their fifth artist/animator). John Lasseter, who credits Bud with the creation and design of the star of Toy Story, Woody, calls him “one of the true unsung heroes of animation.”
The memory is still vivid. Every Saturday my mum would run her errands, then take me to my grandparent’s home for lunch. I would sit at my favourite stool in my grandfather’s living room — my grandfather’s home was the only place I was allowed to eat a meal not at the dining table — in front of the television with my bowl of noodles; I love noodles and Saturday was special because it was noodle day too (I ate rice at home every day).
Then at exactly 1pm, broadcast transmission would begin. And the first show would be Sesame Street.
Mundane though this might sound, this was my happy place. An event I looked forward to with great anticipation, especially after a tough week in kindergarten.
At five, I wished my teacher would serve cookies that looked like the ones Cookie Monster had. I bugged my parents about things like why can’t our home have a metal trash can, like Oscar’s. Living in the city, I wondered why our flat couldn’t have a stoop. At five, Bert and Ernie weren’t puppets — they were friends I hadn’t met yet, because they lived on Sesame Street in New York, and I lived here.
Years later, even after I had outgrown Big Bird, I was still singing the Sesame Street theme song. One year I sang it to my best friend after every exam paper while we waited for the invigilators to collect our manuscripts.
I remember when Mr Hooper died. I remember when Snuffleupagus stopped being an imaginary friend. I remember that it was a big event when Big Bird went to China. I think splitting Bert and Ernie into two rooms was silly; they were roommates and best friends and that was all. Then again, I’m no child psychologist. (And I think I turned out okay, but not everyone may share that opinion.)
The show is well known for basing its design on research. From its inception, the programme was designed with educational advisers, researchers and television producers collaborating as partners. In its laboratory-oriented research to test if what they produced held children’s attention, they discovered that preschoolers are more sophisticated television viewers than originally thought.
In any case, Sesame Street proved to be a visionary. As author Malcolm Gladwell said, “Sesame Street was built around a single breakthrough insight: that if you can hold the attention of children, you can educate them.”
And the attention of children was assumed to be short. Ask my mum and she’ll attest to that — when I was a baby and the part that literally made me stop what I was doing and watch was the commercial break. Short spurts of bright colours, interesting sound and/or music, and lots of movement. A veritable sensory treat.
Today, there are so many new characters. I’m not familiar with them, they’re alien and uninteresting to me. But I figure they are better for the kids, since the crew behind the show are, I assume, super child experts. I’m just glad for most parts I hail from the era of B.E. (Before Elmo, when he was still baby monster and definitely before Elmo’s World).
I’ll stick to my Ernie sitting on my dashboard.
Anyway, Sesame Street just turned 40 years young this week and made the headlines. Even cooler, they made Google’s doodle logos. In fact, they are apparently so cool this week, they got more clicks and eyeballs than the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.
Almost as proof of how ahead of the times it was, 16 years before the launch of the search engine-and-verb, Sesame Street was already using Google.
As for “A la peanut butter sandwiches!”, it comes from the bumbling Amazing Mumford.
I didn’t like the character. I thought he sucked as a magician and wasn’t charming at all (unlike The Count). And yet he still had one of the most memorable lines in the show. I think there’s a life lesson in there somewhere.
Trust Sesame Street’s education to extend beyond just ABC’s.
I thought the first version was awesome. With the second one, it may be more of the same, but entertaining and feel good still, and maybe it’s me, but I think it’s awesome too. Then again, I love outer space. I love the stars at night. I love Deadliest Catch. I love big and small sharks. I love those Taiko drums. I love Mythbusters and the in-jokes. I don’t think I love doing those dirty jobs (mine’s dirty enough, heh) but it’s fun watching them. I love roller coasters and thrill rides. I love the Big Bang and the LHC. I love the whole world, so many things to see. I wish I was out there and not at my desk writing about it. Hee.
In this corner, weighing in at a whopping 9kg and still growing, the one in the stripey (vertical, but it’s not helping) romper with the accentuating baseball bottom, cute as a button especially when he tries to talk gibberish, six months and already breaking his mother’s back (her doctor had to advise her to change his baby carrier), is the bouncing baby Caleb. Some call him “The Michelin Baby”, others “The Pork Knuckle”.
Whatever name he goes by, he is built solid as a planet (that’s an understatement), with his own gravitational field to boot (you should see how females are naturally pulled to him). He’s also a regular in the office every Friday evening, and when he visits, everyone has a serious session in weights training and gurgling and cooing.
Ideas. It all comes down to an idea. A concept. An original or a fresh one, if possible.
It could be a big idea to reposition a brand; Ponds gained newfound credibility as an expert in women’s skincare with the creation of Ponds Institute, purportedly an idea from the strategic brains of its agency.
It could be an advertising idea, like throwing thousands of multicoloured balls down a slope in San Francisco to create an image (pun not intended) for a brand of TV sets.
It could be a PR idea, like raising awareness for a beach/island destination by running a recruitment ad for the best job in the world.
It could be an idealistic idea: get New Yorkers to pay $1 for a glass of tap water one day of the year when they eat out, which they do practically every day of the year.
Or it could be an all-in-a-day’s-work idea for a brand or product, for a print campaign, a billboard, a contest on social media, or any of the countless forms of media out there.
Or it could just be…
An idea.
One that’s floating around like a goldfish in a bowl inside your brain. Aimless. But you hope one day you could give it life. And that’s how all these side projects are born.
There’s a design agency here that has its offices in the basement of a shophouse, and a design shop on the first floor selling imported hard-to-find music, avant garde fashion, as well as design items from locals as well as overseas designers.
Some other agencies also support non-work ideas, whether a photography hobby-turned-coffee table-book or a short film or a music project or just design ideas.
For example, Wieden+Kennedy’s “Big Little Ideas”. One I like is the Happy Sack by creative team, Tom Seymour and Dave Bruno.
The team worked closely with the Worldwide Co. and Suck UK to transform the concepts into fully viable commercial products. W+K then licensed the ideas to manufacturers and distributors in return for a percentage royalty.
Happy Sack and other W+K products under this range are on sale at boutique gift stores and chain stores like Paperchase and Urban Outfitters, and even the Museum of Modern Art (New York) gift store.
It’s not made up of stock, newsreel or propaganda footage from the war that authorities approved and that audiences have been accustomed to seeing, but footage taken by those who witnessed the war first-hand.
Footage that was deemed “unfit” for civilian eyes. Provocative and sometimes disturbing. Footage captured by amateur filmmakers of the exodus of thousands as the French evacuated Paris in June 1940. Footage of the British sifting through rubble left by the Blitz. Even footage of the hardships faced by Nazi soldiers as they slogged through the mud and snow of Soviet Russia on their way to Moscow.
This and other “top secret” footage of the war’s destruction was stashed away and forgotten. But thanks to the efforts of a few, private collectors and archivists, these forgotten films have been rediscovered and restored.
Made up entirely of 35mm, 16mm and 8mm films, now declassified and sometimes colourised, and rendered in HD, the footage has been made into a six-part documentary. About half of the footage has never been seen before.
The story is told from the different sides.
Excerpts from letters or journals feature both Allied and Axis soldiers, as well as civilians from France to Berlin. I didn’t find script loaded, but you could tell who the bad guys were. And of the atrocity and carnage and death, it is shown alongside footage of fierce battles, unedited and unhidden. The film is only marginally censored.
This 10-minute clip shows some of Allied battles, including Normandy. Watch the clip and it tells the views of the victims of war, like the stories of Jews who were herded into the Warsaw Ghetto; observers of war, like Ernest Hemingway, who was a war correspondent in the Normandy attack, and John Houston, who was stationed in Italy. It also mentions the bombardment and shelling that pounds the coast but completely misses the beach codenamed Omaha, resulting in D-Day.
This one features more of the Axis and the Wermacht, including Auschwitz.
National Geographic Channel is showing a rerun of the series right now.
I caught the first episode, The Aggression.
Germany, 1939. Hitler, with USSR as his ally, invades Poland. The first canon shot of the second world war is fired on Danzig, Poland (which had split Germany up after the First World War to give Poland access to the sea).
The British and the French declare war — France is still mostly a rural country and watching them march their troops to the German border by foot and on horseback is tragic — while the US remains neutral, its isolationist voice later heard in America First. The Sitzkrieg, the “sitting war”, begins, also known as the Phoney War in Britain, the drôle de guerre, “the funy war”, in France.
And ghettos for the Jews appear in Poland; the Jews still feel confident, unaware of the starvation and extermination they will later suffer. The war is going well for Hitler and he doesn’t know what to do with them, even considering shipping them to Madagascar. It isn’t until later when the war starts go bad that things take a turn for absolute hatred and cruelty.
I think the Japanese will make their first appearance in the second episode, when Hitler turns his attention to the Eastern Campaign. (So I know what I’ll be doing next Monday night.)
The series is a good overview of the many parties, players and theatres of the Second World War. Sure, there are a lot more facts and details it doesn’t cover, but it’s a start to ignite interest in the budding historians in us. I think it’s a great tool for students. And when the DVD comes out, I would want one.
In the last episode I caught last week, at the end of the series, a tribute was made to the countless, often nameless, cameramen who were lying prostrate on the ground right there besides the soldiers, unarmed save for their cameras.
They captured for posterity the ravages and cruelty of the world war. One wonders if we’ve learnt anything from it.
Random exchange last Friday, over a small half-hour-and-it’s-out retail event on-ground poster:
AE: “Which is your favourite line?”
Me: “The one the client approves! Yay!”
In contrast was the small but last minute announcement ad on Monday which was supposed to be simple but where we argued with a manager about the difference between chest-thumping and tongue-in-cheek, and my art director offered a fist-in-face. (She was kidding. She’s more likely to stab the manager with a pencil than risk breaking her nails.) (In the end, the manager realised he had misread the brief. Wonderful.)
