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August 29, 2006
Wandering around this morning
Six in the morning near the Fullerton Hotel on the bay. It is still dark out and there are a few people sitting at a restaurant under the bridge. One of them is watching a small tugboat crawling underneath the low overpass across the quay. Someone is standing up with a power hose, washing the underside of the bridge, standing on an A-frame ladder perched on the roof of the tugboat cabin. I get the idea that the bridges are washed once a week in Singapore.
I love Google Earth-- This is approximately where I walked this morning
Standing at an intersection near the capitol building. I’m waiting for the light to change and I notice movement along a stairway on the 16th floor of the Intercontinental hotel. Some business traveler is treading up the stairs, shoulders slumped, pulled forward by a laptop bag.
I’m surprised at how all encompassing vision can be. I imagine, for example, that I was in a world where my vision was limited and where I communicated by smell or hearing or touch or any sense but vision. The world would have only a few million people in it instead of the multiple millions that I see every year.
I’d like to extend the sense of hearing. If I could, I’d put listening posts all over the city. Small cellphones taped to walls near crowded areas. Anyone who wanted to could dial one of the numbers and “see” the area with their ears.
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Haircut in the QB House, underground near the train station. SD$10 and less than 10 minutes, guaranteed. The barbers manage this, it turns, out, by using nothing but clippers. It was the first stall where I’d seen an integrated television. Each customer was able to watch video clips while getting a haircut. This raises some issues though…what if the latest Episode of “Lost” came on the television and I wanted to watch.
I suppose that I could just buy six haircuts.
QB House Haircut Place-- Not my Photo
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I’ve never been a fan of science fiction but the haircut place has made me think of cyborgs. Specifically, I was thinking of a cyborg with an integrated hand vacuum massager unit. After the haircut is finished, the vacuum could suck all of the hair off of your head while the massager unit goes to work on your scalp. Presto—the convergence of two common barbershop tools: the head massager and the cranial vacuum!
I’ll bet that those cyborgs could be dangerous assassins in their spare time, especially if they had integrated scissors and shaving tools. They could kill you in a heartbeat and ...just vacuum up the mess.
Maybe barbershop cybernetics is not the best research area for me. I’d likely et a visit from some futuristic barbershop robot, accompanied by a crazed woman and a 12 year old kid. “Don’t develop the integrated scissors unit” they’d say—and then they’d cut off my arm. This is another personal fear of mine.
Posted by jb at 01:31 AM | Comments (0)
August 28, 2006
Po-Ket by Scooter
One out of every seven point five teenagers in Phuket, Thailand is brutally fast on a motor scooter. I managed to keep up with almost everybody at 80km/h but kids would blow by me on the highway with newer scooters that had better tuning. My own scooter was at least five years old; a cracked out Honda Wave with a thready sounding engine and weak, ghostly brakes. It started vibrating at 60 and couldn’t for the life of it get above 85, even on the long slow downhills that led out of the mountains off the west side of the country. When I let off the gas at 80, the engine would backfire.
The Bike
The scooter led me to divide the day trip to Phuket into three stages: the fun stage between the airport and Ban-Ra-Ngeng, the “my brakes don’t work so well” loop from Ban-Ra-Ngeng to the coast (Patong Beach, Karon Beach, Kata Beach) and back to Phuket town; and the “please just make it back” stage between Phuket town and the north side of the Island, with Nai Yang Beach, and Mai Khao.
Patong Beach
The entire trip covered roughly 100 miles/ 160 km. It took the entire day. At least half of time was spent in the rain, which made it more of an adventure than a vacation. The rain was not noticeable at 40 km/h but by 80 it became electric, crackling against exposed skin, cooling off—I imagine—the sunburn which I’d racked up in the morning.
The Map-- I traced out my approximate route using the polygon tool in Google Maps
I rented the scooter from an auto dealership within walking distance of the airport. It cost, for the day, 150 Baht or about $4. The rental fee established a price index in my head and so I was shocked, for example, to find that a Tequila Sunrise was also 150 baht on Patong beach.
Notes:
I found out that the brakes on the bike were not up to par as soon as I hit the rolling mountains outside Patong Beach. These were really steep (over 20% grade) hills with sharp turns in either direction and the terrain, more than the road signs dictated traffic speed. At the same time, I felt the need to keep up with the local kids who, while not exactly racing, were passing me at the start. I decided to open up the throttle a bit on one straight downhill only to hit a turn and watch the brakes weaken out just at the apex. I had that sinking feeling that you get right before kissing a lorry and I swung slowly, sickeningly from the far left lane out into oncoming traffic on the right. Pumping the right hand brake (does this work? I don’t know), I lurched the bike back to the left side as the first pickup truck crested the turn below me to meet the first minivan racing up on me from behind.
It is easy to take wrong turns on the coast. Just before Kata Noi, I missed a turn and ended up at the base of a long mixed cement track/ dirt trail that wound off into the hills. Pickup trucks stopped at the bottom and several men were waiting out the rain at a roadside shack. I decided to take the track, which turned into a dirt road, which turned into a muddy ravine filled road with sharp climbs and drops. I was forced into first gear to get up the hills and several of the downhills required that I walk the bike down, straddling the scooter while holding onto the brakes. At the end of the track there was one final descent into a sketchy jungle camp. Just a few pickups and a cement block compound. Phuket is a tourist island so this was probably a tourist spot of some sort but I decided not to hang around on the thin curve of beach. Instead, I turned the bike around and pushed it painfully in 1st gear back along the mountain bike path maybe 2km to the road. On the way out I passed another group of people trying to extend the ramp into the muck. They waved but more in the “look at the crazy guy” sense than in the “hey, I’m glad to see you” sense.
Kata Noi
The highway into Phuket town—the biggest urban area in Phuket— was under repair when I passed through. The Thai method of highway repair seems to involve scattering tons of loose asphalt over a dirt base. Cars and bikes then grind the loose asphalt into place. Since it was raining, much of the dirt underneath the asphalt has turned to mud. Cars and bikes slowed to a crawl as they were forced to navigate an off-road course. I’d already had some experience turning the scooter into a trials bike that morning and I put it to good use by careening by bike, cars, and gravel trucks at 40-50 km/h even as they were gingerly navigating water filled potholes. As in Boston, the real problem lay not with the slow drivers but the indecisive ones.
The waiter looked at me like I was weird when I ordered a Tequila sunrise at 9:30 in the morning. Maybe it was the coffee chaser.
There are Buddhist temples and shrines all over the place. I need to go back and get more photos but it was rainign and most were visible from the highway at points where I did not really want to stop for pictures.
There was one sculpture along the beach, though. In Katong.
Posted by jb at 01:59 AM | Comments (0)
August 26, 2006
Are these scooter things a good idea?
I have this fear. It is occasional but somewhat embarrassing. It only occurs when I see items that differ but have the same name. Today, for example, I walked out of a bookstore and alongside a jewelry store called Poisson Rouge. In English, this would be RedFish, the name of a chain restaurant in Chicago. For a second, I thought about diners eating big plates of jewelry, crunching their way through necklaces and earrings and suffering cold bangles and bracelets for dessert. The old, familiar fear that the world would suddenly be alphabetized caught up with me again.
What happens is we are suddenly re-indexed? What happens if humans finish naming things (this is one of the traditional duties that we have) and suddenly a voice from the heavens goes “great…you did great work here…okay, let’s put this stuff in alphabetical order?” Depending on the level of filing, I might get filed by last name, which would put me far too close to every one of the sculptures in Gunther von Hagens "Bodyworlds" exhibit. Suddenly my extended family is packed close against and endless field of plasticized arms and legs. That is only the best scenario. A worse scenario has all of the ankles in the world getting filed together. The worst of all scenarios has the world decomposing into fundamental particles and then getting sorted accordingly. We may find out whether this last scenario is at all reasonable. We will probably have characterized the last of the fundamental particles in the next 100 years.
I was supposed to take the bus north from Singapore to Malacca this morning but I ended up staying out late last night and then oversleeping and this led me to miss every available bus into Malaysia. I inquired about Kuala Lumpur but really had no desire to go to KL and besides the buses on the return route were packed. I ended up booking a tiger air flight to Thailand and plan to spend the day exploring Phucket by scooter. It is the rainy season so this may or may not be a good idea.
I’m glad that I am working out here. Travel is causing a bit of an existential crisis. The crisis began when I was encouraged to go up to KL and pick up some bootleg DVDs. I realized that that moment that my travel activities were likely to be dominated by eating, schmoozing, and buying stuff and then I realized that I spent my time in the states doing exactly the same thing. My life in Singapore could in fact be almost exactly like my life in Boston and there seemed to be something useless and depressing about roughing it for the sake of roughing it and that I’d had enough religious tourism with Judaism and that cultural voyeurism has its benefits but that I should not pretend that it was anything but and that I was not going to see anything really new that would pull myself out of my own suffocating little world and, and, and… aieeee!
So I’ve decided to be far more boring but much more happy and to spend my time looking for exactly those things that interest me, which happen to be nice places to sit. I decided to go to Malacca because it is a small city by the ocean that has some of the oldest and most variegated architecture in Malaysia and it sounded like a boring place where I could find something to drink and a nice place to sit and finish Murakami’s account of the Sarin gas attack in Toyko. Now I'm hoping to find a beach chair, a nice stretch of coastline, and some shade.
In other news, I’ve found a television cartoon series that made me think of Linnea after maybe three minutes of watching at one of the plasma television displays in the Seyu shopping center (Singapore has shopping centers like Boston has squares- they are absolutely everywhere). I went home and looked it up. It is called R.O.D., which stands for “Read or Die.” Here is a wikipedia excerpt:
The premise is that the British Empire (supported by the British Library and the superpower-endowed agents of its "Special Operations Division") has remained the major world power through the 20th century and into the 21st century. The novels chart the career of agent Yomiko Readman as she fights various book-related criminal organizations; the original video animation tells the story of a major incident in which clones of major historical figures threaten to wipe out civilization, the British Library being central to both the creation and the resolution of the crisis; R.O.D the TV continues the story five years later, after Britain's fall from power.
As far as I can tell from watching the store television, very little reading goes on. Instead, the bad guys fight with water guns and the good guys fight with monsters made out paper. The paper appears to come from library books (perish, as my grandma would say, the thought!) but it may also come from some parallel universe made entirely out of Strathmore 20lb bond 8 and one half by 11 sheets of whatnot. I cannot vouch for the quality of the series but they all spoke in these faint British voices and seemed terribly concerned about specific library books which may or may not have been stolen.
Posted by jb at 08:24 AM | Comments (1)
August 23, 2006
Um...Tesco?
Paper towel rolls are shorter in Singapore. Door moldings are also tucked in rather than sitting out on the face of the frame. There are two passcard points and two keyed entries, all separate, between the sidewalk and my third floor office/apartment. The first passcard limits access through the front door and the second limits access to the elevator. Key locks one and two are set first at a small (five foot by five foot) garden entrance to the apartment and then at the doors to the apartment itself.
The apartment is right next to Bugis center, one of the main shopping areas in Singapore. I walk outside and right into a sidewalk length of small coffee, sandwich, and pastry shops. This line continues unbroken to the right at the end of my block, forming part of a foursquare circuit that rests shoulder to shoulder with Chinatown at the far end of the next street down. If I turn left and then right and walk across the street I can enter the Bugis center mall, three floors of small shops supported at the very bottom by a big Japanese grocery store.
I love grocery stores. I don’t buy much since I tend to eat at food stalls and hawker stands but I like looking at new products. Each product is a solution to some problem. Many are solutions to problems that had not occurred to me. I see it as a cultural conversation. Some new technology comes out or some cultural shift takes place, brining a slew of benefits and problems. Other supporting products are developed to answer new problems. Each product in the aisle says “Do you have this problem? Then how about this answer!”
Let me try to think of an example on the fly. Indian food seems to have become dominant in London, while coffee has replaced tea as the drink of choice and fewer people smoke. All of these dietary shifts conjoin to create digestive stress. Consciously or unconsciously, British consumers are responding to this digestive stress by seeking food that benefits the digestive bacteria in the gut. When I stopped in London, I left Heathrow and went directly to Hammersmith where I looked into a Tesco supermarket. Probiotic foods were everywhere. Emmi has several new yogurt drinks, BASF is producing a new probiotic gum, and dairy-based foods are dominating the shelves. There are even several clear probiotic drinks.
Probiotic foods are actually the second round in a conversation about digestion. The first round was based on medicine and focused on pills and tablets and mixes. Apparently consumers had already ingested too many pills. They wanted to get away from feeling that pills and vitamins were needed to smother the flames of an unhealthy diet.
This new round of the conversation said “How about we give you something focused on digestive health and strong bones while you stop worrying so much about milkfat and begin eating dairy again.” So far consumers seem to have said yes. Now food producers are providing probiotics in a hundred different forms, from small actimel bottles to big jugs of kefir, gums and gels. Someday, someone will make probiotic dairy creamer and everyone will be happy.
Posted by jb at 08:54 PM | Comments (6)
August 19, 2006
Powdered cereal and Papercraft
I’ve taken to recycling the milk from my cereal by dumping it into my coffee. The milk is sweet and the cereal adds a new tone I guess and I’m thinking that someone needs to buy cereal in batch and powder it. Cereal powder could be the American version of spiced Indian Tea. After all, who doesn’t like the taste of sugary cereal milk. Caffeinated, powdered cereal. Dump it in your milk, heat and serve. What could be better. Maybe powdered cereal with diphenhydramine for bed time.
We are now at the point where it should be possible to re-engineer comfort foods to deliver medical benefits. At least one company (CocoaVia) makes chocolate bars with plant sterols that are supposed to be good for controlling cholesterol. Other solutions could include pizza for ulcers, chicken parmesan for rabies, and mac & cheese for hepatitis. I like the concept. It could all be sold as part of the “Eat Comfort Food Or Die” campaign. I would also use the “Extra comfort” and “Just what Mom ordered” taglines.
One of the great benefits of micro-electromechanical machines (MEMS) is the potential to make devices that can be safely digested without causing undue distress. Researchers can now make ultra small capsules with integrated pressure sensors and rfid chips. I look forward to the day when the pressure sensor/ rfid combination respnds to pressure from our teeth (when eating) and sends a signal to a transdermal medication delivery unit. If we were practical, the delivery unit would dispense an appetite suppressant. We are not practical. I suspect that we will be given very small doses of oxycontin every time we eat ice cream. Maybe I am just thinking of this because of my back. It’s true, however, that networked food will move the eating experience from the palate to the plate to the patch.
One of the housemates gets catalogs from PaperSource . If I could, I’d buy stock in this company (it is not publicly traded). The company, which specializes in stationery, arts & crafts paper and imported paper may in a position to see the effects of the boom in papercraft. We’ve reached a time when papercraft may replace vinyl toys as the medium of choice for the expressive but purchase oriented consumers in the 20-40 age range.
This trend has been building for a while. The knitting crowd always mixed with the KidRobot crowd at the fringes. Now, in accordance with the law of hidden knowledge (two items being otherwise equal, consumers given the choice of purchasing either item will choose the item that allows them to act as a maven/connector) papercraft should beat out vinyl.
For my part, I’m not so interested in papercraft toys but I could be interested in papercraft jewelry. This could include rigid necklaces that allow the purchaser to insert paper or it could include necklaces, earrings and bracelets made entirely from paper. This will appeal to the Athropologie crowd, all of whom are moving away from the last outposts Abercrombie & Fitch land (Positioning: A&F is anthropolgie mixed with rich, college jocks plus a touch of BoBo-adapted organic farming culture) to become obsessed with higher end, more delicate items with cleaner lines.
Vinyl toys will attempt to make a comeback by incorporating other features, such as stamp surfaces that will appeal to the papercraft crowd but desire flows one way in this case.
Back to bed, I think.
8:23 AM
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Drove over the auto repair shop (Streetwise Auto Repair on Putnam Ave in Somerville) to get the car fixed. The car had managed to jam one wheel into a deep pothole at the end of a long curvy hill and this pretty much destroyed the tire and rim, something that I did not notice until about a week later when the can began to wobble as I drove it.
The repair shop was closed (this means a busy Monday morning) but it was nice to get back into the car and drive around. Fall hits early in Boston and while the leaves are not changing color, the sky is getting overcast and I noticed some gardens falling into disrepair.
It would be nice if the gardens could be slowly repurposed for Halloween. Leave some of the vegetables rotting on the stalk. Put in a last round of corn and then leave it so that it rustles and rattles. Run a power source and multimedia set into the garden so that it emits spooky noises when people walk too close. Start a social meme warning kids about the garden. Start sending vaguely threatening garden-themed text messages through an internet services while using a ghost proxy. Instill some real fear in the neighborhood. Topiary would help.
I always wonder that topiary themes are so classic. It appears that there are a finite number of acceptable forms. It also appears that there is very little kinetic topiary. That strikes me as a shame. Not that it should be impossible to make articulated frames that are motor powered for movement. It’s just that nobody does it.
I would like to see a topiary rube Goldberg machine. Even better, I’d like to see a garden-based rube Goldberg machine. It would be extremely complex but also very slow. I would include steps such as “When this water wears through this rock, it will channel itself into this here dormant field, driving earthworms up to the surface. As soon as a bird flies down to eat the worms it will land on this stick, which will pop open a window and start whatever seedlings have been placed in the bed this year.
It is possible view many of the strange events in our lives as the outcome of a decentralized Rube Goldberg machine, which operates behind the scenes, complicating and resolving endless mechanical and interpersonal relationships until something big and weird interupts breakfast.
(10:15 AM)
Posted by jb at 08:23 AM | Comments (7)
August 17, 2006
Storm Shadow
The concept of “one of those days” is universally recognized. If there were an Audubon guide to days, the entry for “one of those” would be prominent. It would be odd if this term covered the only universal human experience.
Woke up two days ago, went to the kitchen and promptly spent half an hour crawling back to my room. A sadist apparently got me in the lumbar vertebrae with a screwdriver. He just jammed it into one of the spinous processes and twisted. Now I know what my ceilings look like.
This is bad because I’m supposed to fly to Singapore on Monday. Prior to the flight I am supposed to put everything that I own into storage. It would be easier if I could reach down and pick something/ anything up off of the floor but I can’t. I can bend over and paw at it but the effect is like one of those “select your prize” glassbox crane machines that is never able to get the stuffed animal. I’m also running out of quarters.
The flight to Singapore involves a 12 hour layover in London, at Heathrow. The security measures have reportedly eased over the last week but I’ve received conflicting advice about leaving the airport and touring London before returning in the evening. It would be nice to see a museum or a gallery or run around acting like a chav until I’m taken down by the flying squad. On the other hand, it will take forever to get back through security with my collection of Franklin Mint Gi-Joe Commemorative Plates. I’m really only worried about the "Snake Eyes", "Storm Shadow" (both of whom are ninjas) and "Spirit Iron Knife" plates. Spirit Iron Knife is a bit of a Native American Miami Vice character: Miami Vice because of the clothes, Native American because of the headband and face paint. He also carries a compound bow. If I were him, I might feel a bit shafted. His friend Heavy Duty gets a plasma cannon. “Yeah, just wait up guys... I see that you have been unable to take down Cobra Commander’s monstrous killer robot with your plasma cannon… Thankfully I have this compound bow”
To this day, I’m not sure why GI Joe went through a ninja phase—I always saw the ninja figurines as the ones that you could place in a dark corner and ignore. That way, when one of your friends has your character surrounded and is on his way to deliver a mind numbing beat down you could remind him about the ninjas who were still lurking around the periphery of the room. “Where are they?” he'd say. You'd look around but you would have forgotten where you placed them. “They are…watching,” you'd say, “…watching… and waiting…” When he is asleep that night you would plan to sneak into his house and stab him in the head with Storm Shadow’s sword. You never would. His mom wouldn't allow you in after 10pm.
Maybe I’m biased. I see ninjas as the stenographers of the espionage world. Strangely, they look much more scary on commemorative plates.
Posted by jb at 08:04 AM | Comments (0)