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the penguin dance
One of the genuinely nice things about Farah Adibah is that she’s very amiable towards other kids. She’ll play with them, without any sense of jealousy or selfishness, and she never hesitates to share her toys. Her grandfather says she’ll make a great diplomat.
All of which bodes well when the other two arrive at the end of the year.
“Tummy, baby. No. Mummy baby. Tummy. Adik. Farah kakak, daddy up boom.”
Blog recommendation: The Head Heeb
An exceedingly well written blog dealing with political matters I’d like to recommend is The Head Heeb. Written by Jonathan Edelstein, a Jewish American lawyer, it doesn’t deal with the issues you might expect, and one reason why I like it is because he follows developments in two regions that rarely get any air time or print space in traditional media: Africa and the Pacific Islands. I haven’t read it in awhile, but I recently added its feed to my Google Reader. Recent posts include the growth of Islam in Melanasia, intellectual property rights with regards to coffee in Ethiopia and Sudanese refugees taking asylum in Israel. While posts are often lengthy, they’re also intelligent and well-written and well worth reading for anybody who gives a damn.
Robots in the sky
Reviews of both the animated and the live action movies at UsDudes.
Technorati Tags: transformers
I’m not a friendster, I’m not a star
I came across an article awhile back with a map showing the popularity of different social networking sites across different geographic regions, and part of the tagline was “And guess who’s still using Friendster?”
Part of why a lot of people jumped ship to Myspace a few years back was that Friendster was absurdly slow at one point, and offered little in the way of personal page customisation, which Myspace had in spades. Unfortunately, as not everybody has an eye for design a lot of Myspace pages end up looking like overly cluttered messes. Myspace also tends to have an overabundance of fake pages meant to redirect users to porn/spam sites.
Friendster’s moved on a lot in the past two years though, incorporating bits of the best parts of Myspace (the ability to feature audio/video, some degree of page customisation) and I think if it had been like this two years ago it wouldn’t have lost the ground it did. I think the pluses of Myspace are that at this point it’s a far better marketing tool (far more bands and musicians have Myspace pages as compared with other sites, for example) and it’s much easier to find people you don’t know but might have similar interests to,although Myspace can be almost as slow as Friendster a couple of years ago.
I’ve debated getting accounts for things like last.fm or imeem but in all honesty I’m not actually all that interested in finding new music to listen to these days. I’m getting old like that.
Back to the matter of where Friendster reigns. I knew without looking what the answer was of course, being on Friendster myself but the map naturally showed Friendster being the dominant social networking site in South East Asia… and nowhere else on Earth.
Which of course makes Friendster the Michael Learns to Rock of social networking sites.
Me on Friendster/ Myspace
the consequences of turning twenty-five
Having secondary school kids call you uncle.
the good the bad and the queen
There’s something ridiculously charming about a little boy seated in a stroller waving at the night sky and shouting “Hi God!!!” repeatedly.
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Turning the bend on Avenue 5 I encountered a row of cars parked in front of the mosque, and found myself desperately trying to change lanes while traffic was rushing by. It’s difficult to explain in words but lives were endangered I think.
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I’ve been obsessed with Meg White recently.
meg white 01 - DSC_0131a
Originally uploaded by funkytreetown.
Life and Debt
With all the recent talk about Special Economic Zones (SEZs) recently I thought it fitting that this turned up on Google Video. I watched it about four years or so back during the Singapore Film Festival Under the Radar; a showcase of documentaries showing the underbelly of labour abuses. Life and Debt is a documentary on the SEZs in Jamaica, and the reason why they’re becoming increasingly popular is because these zones are allowed to circumvent laws and regulations that might apply elsewhere in the country. I don’t think I’m anti-capitalist in any fashion, but I’ve never subscribed to the notion of so-called free market economics as a cure-all for economic woes. It’s a shame that the interests of people are often sidelined in the name of profit. Life and Debt is 80 minutes long, so you might want to let it load before watching it.
Life and Debt at VideoSift
Life and Debt official site
