Aug 24, 2010

17:55 to go, Singapore: Takeoff. Singapore shrouded in low cloud, as per usual. 17:45 to go, Johor Bahru: seatbelt sign off. Bust out my half-finished copy of The Rational Optimist. 15:15, Thailand: take a break from reading. Matt Ridley was a terrible bank manager, but he’s a brilliant science writer. Good to see he’s decided to stick to his doctrine of specialization and trade. 15:14: leaf through inflight duty-free catalog. What on earth is a Lancome Duo Virtuose Precious Cells and why does it sound like something pilfered from a Genentech lab?

Sep 11, 2007

Presented without comment, via Boing Boing and Reuters: _A protest action by a group of Singaporeans with Japanese anime figurines such as the 5-inch tall Ultraman, robots and monsters with placards met some real-life police in the city-state._ A handful of fans of Japanese anime had turned up at a Singapore public park on August 25th with armfuls of the toys to protest against a clampdown on Internet downloading of anime material by Singapore animation distributor Odex.

May 19, 2007

It’s almost done. Three weeks, five sets of going-away drinks, two eBay auctions, twelve boxes, and six articles of checked baggage later, I’m sitting in Melbourne airport waiting for my flight. Here is an appropriate picture of a cat, with a grammatically incorrect caption. Apparently it’s what all the cool kids are doing these days. If you thought that was interesting, here’s an academic deconstruction of the above, with the funniest caption you’ll see all day.