Wow, London is awesome:
Where in London can one purchase plutonium? In Covent Garden, at the Helios Homeopathy shop.
[...]"I went to Covent Garden and went into the shop and said, 'Please, may I have some plutonium.' And the lady behind the counter said, 'I shall fetch the chemist.'
They even tell you what ailments can be treated by taking plutonium medicine. Strangely, "lack of death" is not on the list.
More gratuitous 300mm-ery: the gas flares at the Jurong Island oil refineries. (They're six miles away, which is why the image quality's a bit iffy.)
So... which Michael Jackson video to run this weekend?
Youtube is a goldmine of MJ's greatest moments. You could go all the way back to 1983 - his first on-stage moonwalk, at the 25 Years of Motown concert. Or even further back, to a 1972 performance of ABC, or this 1979 Carol Burnett Show sketch. There's Thriller. Or there's the Bad video, directed by Martin Scorsese. Or Scream, the most expensive music video ever. His 1995 MTV Awards performance, featuring Slash on guitar. A live performance of Smooth Criminal, with the "lean" (made possible by patented trick shoes). Black or White (also featuring Slash on guitar). Watch them all.
But here's one that doesn't get enough credit: Remember the Time. Great dance moves, tricky VFX, and Eddie Murphy as an Egyptian pharaoh.
Kith Cafe - the terrific little cafe just down the street from my apartment - has a blog.
(What they don't mention on the blog is that they make the best lattes in Singapore. If you've found yourself wondering where you can get a cafe latte that's not all-latte-no-cafe, this is the place you're after.)
...as seen through a 300mm bazooka-lens. HEY, NEIL ARMSTRONG, WAVE TO THE CAMERA.
Today on iTunes: the USA singles chart, USA albums chart, UK albums chart, and Aussie albums chart.
You've heard this story from a million different websites already. Senator Stephen Conroy, Australia's Minister for It's Not A Truck It's A Series Of Tubes, wants ISPs to block every single website that sells video-games rated higher than MA15+.
You'd think it'd be easier to just introduce an R18+ rating for video games, like every other country in the Western world. (Apparently the only thing stopping them is the South Australian Attorney General. Here he is, and here's his email address; you know what to do.)
But the Senator wants more (emphasis added):
Australia is the only developed country without an R18+ classification for games, meaning any titles that do not meet the MA15+ standard - such as those with excessive violence or sexual content - are simply banned from sale by the Classification Board, unless they are modified to remove the offending content.
So far, this has only applied to local bricks-and-mortar stores selling physical copies of games, but a spokesman for Senator Conroy confirmed that under the filtering plan, it will be extended to downloadable games, flash-based web games and sites which sell physical copies of games that do not meet the MA15+ standard.
I can go to Amazon's intertubes blog site and I can buy these games, all of which are banned in Australia for not meeting the MA15+ standard:
Or I can go to eBay and buy all of those things and worse, and have them shipped to any address in Australia.
So Amazon and eBay are purveyors of naughtiness over the interwebs. They're shamelessly violating Australian law, and They Must Be Stopped
Now, this is a serious question. Is Senator Conroy seriously proposing to block the world's two biggest e-commerce sites from every person in Australia?
Okay, okay. I take it back. I take back what I said two days ago about advertising in Singapore being bland and not "edgy".
Make sure nobody's looking over your shoulder, then hit this link to see Burger King's latest advertising campaign for its "Super Seven Incher" burger. I swear this is a real ad, and it's really running in Singapore. (Here's a high-res version at Copyranter.)
Apparently it was done by a local ad agency for the local franchisee - BK headquarters and their global ad agency, Crispin Porter and Bogusky, are frantically trying to dissociate themselves from the ad. Bravo, anonymous Singaporean ad agency - you've gone beyond "edgy", all the way to "gratuitous shit-stirring".
So, aside from the unsubtle, tasteless, single-entendre imagery, does anyone else think "It'll BLOW your mind away" is the most stilted piece of ad copy ever? Did "It'll BLOW your mind" not fit in the space?
Advertising in Singapore is usually about as edgy as an apple. (It's a sphere, right? No edges? Or do I have to resort to the old spherical cow?) So it's nice to see a business that has a sense of humour.
Their coffee is pretty f**king good, as well.
Google is taking its "indexing all the world's knowledge" mission a bit too seriously. Their newest project: a thirty-year archive of the Weekly World News.
Meep meep meep meep/Meep meep meep meep/Meep meep meep meep meeeeeeeeeep meep-meep...
Tan Kin Lian used to be a powerful guy in Singapore. He was the head of NTUC Income, one of Singapore's biggest insurers. He was a senior member of the PAP, the party that's held a monopoly on power in Singapore since it gained sovereignty. He was a classic Singapore apparatchik.
But he's retired now - and he's writing blog posts comparing Singapore to Animal Farm.
And organising protests.
And speculating about running for office as an opposition member.
And giving Singapore's famously fractious opposition parties some much-needed advice.
This could get interesting.
Paul McCartney wants us to stop eating steak. Here's Bloomberg:
Paul McCartney, the former Beatle and vegetarian pop star, asked fans to go meatless on Mondays to help slow global warming by reducing the amount of gaseous emissions from farm animals.
Maybe this is all an elaborate fart joke?
“If you want to fight climate change, it’s not only about electricity and coal-fired power plants: Agriculture is a huge contributor too and meat consumption is a big problem,” Jan van Aken, a biologist and agriculture campaigner for the Greenpeace environmental group, said today in a telephone interview from Hamburg. It’s “mainly burps” and animal flatulence, he said.
I'm seeing a problem with this. If we stop eating meat for one day a week, won't that mean that there'll be one-sixth more cows out there mooing and farting and burping and generally being enviro-vandals, instead of lying motionless on our dinner plates with a nice red wine sauce?
Instead, we should be eating more steak. Go on, stinky hippies, it's your duty to the planet. Head straight down to your local butcher and order a nice, juicy tenderloin or rib-eye, or a big ol' slab of chuck or brisket for a nice beef stew.
Every cow in the fields is an environmental time bomb, even worse than a big gas-guzzling car. Only you can stop this environmental menace.
(This message was brought to you by PETA: People Eating Tasty Animals.)
No, you're not seeing things - that's $80 SGD for a rockmelon.
My local supermarket has a huge selection of fruit air-freighted from Japan at mind-melting expense - $16 for a single peach, $100 for a kilo of grapes, $20 for four mandarins, etc. etc. etc. - but the rockmelons are probably the most egregious.
