SarongPartyFrens

It isn’t sweltering but it is definitely muggy and I’m hotter due to clunky looking brownies. I’m at the Blu Jazz Cafe @ 71 Dunlop Street working and was struck by a brilliant idea - or rather a brilliant idea back then. I would bake brownies for J today in celebration of his appearance in this world! Problem number 1: I’m out. Problem number 2: I do not have an oven at home. Problem number 3: I don’t really bake…. but like all problems, they can be solved.

So since I’m more or less a permanent fixture here, I managed to bribe the management with smiles and labour of some sort to use their oven. Sweet! Life is good and this is what I’ll call good karma.

To make these little chocolate heaven, I followed a receipe which took less than 30 min. However the baking was tough - took nearly an hour and the brownie kinda exploded. So J, if you’re reading this, I hope your tastebuds will be overwhelmed by the sweet cocoa and ignore the presentation when you swing by with your friends tonight

Blog Blog Blogs…. those take up most of my free time these days.. have to say that it IS partially due to mini-fame thanks to Mr Miyagi, mrbrown and Cowboy… This is not to say that I’ve never blogged… SarongPartyFrens allowed me the outlet for ravings, musings and whatever ego displays I have. However, I think I would like one for my own - related to my latest adventure: Miss Do Everything @ Hideout.

I’m looking for someone to help me change my website to a wordpress blog or add on a page for that without destroying the design. Now, being absolutely non-technie like, it would have to be somewhat idiot proof for me to update the site. I’ve been advised that the programmer, should you be the one who decides to take the job, should be familiar with CSS and should be web standard compliant. Quite unfortuantely, like everything in my life, I need this urgently. It is absolutely crucial that I get this done by the end of the month and the month being May 2005. Therefore, if you are interested, please email me at hellsbel at gmail dot com

BLOG MAKER FOUND!!!!!!! THANK YOU ALL

Many advanced thanks.

check this out:
http://www.freedomunderground.org/memoryhole/pentagon.php#Main

It’s in the middle of the night or shall I say a few hours before the cock crows and I was about to kncok off. (side track - surfing is addictive) But I thought I would simply just click on the links found on the left before I lay me down to sleep. I found that caustic.soda was offline. I remember him from his rather politcal posts… pity. *shrugs* maybe it was a technical fault. I went on to click on more sites and I found this:

serialdeviant’s blog and followed the link to this post

I think it is self-explanatory. I concur with Serial Deviant and cannot believe how the big guys are coming down on an individual for his personal opinion posted on his personal website. I cannot fucking believe this. I am past eloquence.

I hope that more people will create links to the above and maybe just maybe, someone will take some positive action.

I think that the common taxi driver topics are the Casino and still ranking at number 1 - how many of them would like to move out of here for greener pasture - translating to lower cost of living and higher quality of life. Taking the smaller and more unnoticed news column would be a ban on smoking in all pubs/clubs with a 30 metre radius smoke free zone. Woo Hoo! I’m a non-smoker, I was utterly overjoyed. Yes! I will no longer have to go home with my lunch half-filled or maybe fully filled with smog after a night out.

However, recent events have made me think twice. I’ve just taken over a nice cosy pub - Hideout I was happily arranging for smoke-free nights.. after all, what is the point of owning something if you can’t have it your way right? So comes Thursday night - which is our usual chill, quiet night anyhow. Some friends came to support the event. And as expected, some unknowing regular patrons turned up and was slighly shell-shocked at the policy. It was almost comical to hear my regular, N, asking me if I was joking - she repeated this at least a zillion times. Some left, which was ok - I can’t win them all. However, I had no idea how strongly some felt. It was definitely cold water and something else I can’t describe when some chick said: “What kind of stupid rule is this?! This is so dumb. No smoking in a pub?! I should be able to smoke if I want to” As much as I would have LOVED to say, well, this is MY pub and you can eat &$%, I doubt that it would endear me to my customers,though. Strike 1.

I value staff support and needless to say my smoking staff disagrees and brought up a really good point. Non-smokers would brave cancer to have fun (yeah I’m guilty) and follow their smoker friends to smog land and back but it is definitely isn’t reciprocated. I’m thinking addiction could be one reason but I suspect that smokers lurve their ciggies too much and non-smokers don’t care enough. Strike 2.

My parnters are rather vehement on not having smoke-free nights because the majority of the pub crawlers are the ones who DO light up and spend good money on alcohol… It is also observed that ciggies and alcohol go hand in hand and ciggies friendly people do drink more. Hence, I’m outvoted. Strike 3.

I’m out.

Perhaps, one day, when I don’t have to worry too much about economics and I’m some rich ole tai tai, I’ll have my own hideout with my own rules - till then, I take what I can get.

Because you all wanted more…
Because you were all curious about the woman behind the voice
… I had to persuade her to record a new acoustic song…
this one’s her rendition of “angels or devils” by dishwalla
ladies and gentlemen- timz perez with her latest single release…

living room acoustics II

I came across an article that would be kind of a “nice” follow up to Jo’s entry a couple of weeks ago about Wicked Aura…
The Role of Dominant Ethnicity in Racism: Reportage on Chinese Rule in Multi-Racial Singapore

Oops! I Did It Again’ was recorded in April, 1932 in a Chicago studio, most likely Nearlie’s or West and Fourth … The song remained all-but-forgotten until sixty years later when a young Britney Spears sent her interpretation of the Armstrong tune all the way to the top of the charts

Listen and download the track here.

(pssst read the musicians credited at the bottom of that page…:) )

via stereogum

If I am not mistaken the Inn Crowd on Dunlop Street in Little India was the first cool backpackers hostel in Singapore. Since they opened the area has kinda of become a cool place for backpackers to hang out. You can kind of see that business geared towards the backpacker crowd have started sprouting up in the area. The first one of these is Blu Jaz Cafe right next to em. (I wrote about em before.) And shortly after that an Australian styled backpacker pub called Prince of Wales opened up a stones throw away. The pub obviously was counting on the existing traffic that places like the Inn Crowd brought into the area. Shortly after the pub opened the owner decided to also make his establishment into a pub *and* a hostel. I guess that put POW in direct competition with the Inn Crowd.

So a couple of weeks ago this billboard appears on the building . nanee nanee poo poo! the Inn Crowd is a crowded inn! nanee nanee poo poo! ha ha geddit? And how churlish does the “emergency bed” tag sound? Fucking immature. POW wants lure cutomers away from its competition? Hey, that’s business, but they could be doing it by offering a superior product or service or getting good reviews and waiting for word of mouth to do the magic. I am guessing thats how the Inn Crowd gained its popularity. Its still a very very popular place with backpackers and maybe that explain why it’s packed?. Shit. If the Inn Crowd is overflowing with business, it’s seems ripe for some other business to cash in on that. Its not illegal to diss your competitor, I just think its being a bad neighbour and a dick to do it as the way POW did it. I might think differently if the sign was at least witty…

Anyway. I remember visiting the Inn Crowd website a few months ago. In the side column where they suggested activities to do, they encouraged visitors to drink at POW. Now they just replaced the name POW for a cafe called Roots that just opened up. But the description is still about POW! I guess goodwill was a one-sided thing from the Inn Crowd. Revenge is just an electronic “find” and “replace” away!

Anyway. As much as I have dissed on the POW management for the billboard stupidity, they are doing something that I think is very cool. They are becoming a very good venue and platform for small local bands to perform. It might be business decision to do that, but its one that I think is cool. We need more places like that. The place also has a very cool decor too. Laid back and simple. No smoking inside. Get yer own drinks at the bar. Its very Ozzie that way. And they have a decent selection of beer on tap.

(Anyone catch the wit of this posts title?)

For those that don’t know.. People Like Us (PLU) has been a GLBT unregistered organisation that has been around since 1993, with this cause:

PLU’s Mission Statement
“We believe that everyone in Singapore should have a full and equal place in our society regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity, and to this end, we shall work for more informed understanding, the removal of barriers and a fuller integration of sexual minorities with the larger community.”

The Singapore Registrar of Societies rejected their application to be a legal organisation in 1996, 2000 and 2003. So the organisation decided to add the number “3″ to the name- “PLU3″ to remind the world that they have been rejected 3 times.

Recently, a good friend of mine, Eileena became president of the organisation. I was told that some powerful letters were written to our members of parliment. Now, most times, you hear of letters being written and not getting anyone anywhere for anything. I think as Singaporeans, we have been socialized into this apathetic sense of helplessness. Any opinion expressed that is different is seen as terribly extreme. We are quick to call opinions extreme, paranoid or redundant. The word “activist” is almost unheard off. I think sometimes we forget that Lee Kuan Yew himself began as an activist, fighting for the impossible. It turns out, that the letters they wrote in response to Balaji’s statements have somewhat paid off and they are going to have a meeting with the MP this week. The letter addressed concerns of HIV awareness and how many men who have sex with men (MSM) do not consider themselves gay, bi or homosexual.This is a group that Action for Aids has had a hard time reaching out to. You have to wonder if this group of men would even exist if homophobia didn’t.

Here is the link to the letter written to Balaji:
“Singapore has prided itself as a nation that takes a pragmatic approach towards problems facing society. In terms of stigmatized sexual minorities, an admirable move in this respect was the Government’s enactment of legislation recognizing the surgically assigned gender of post-operative Singaporean transgendereds. This pragmatic and reasoned approach alleviated the suffering of a silent segment of Singapore’s population, and showed the way ahead for much of the rest of the world.”

And this was one of the initial responses:

“18 March 2005, 08.12h
To: People Like Us 3
From Lim Boon Heng

Thank you for your note. However, Singapore is a multi-religious society. Many Singaporeans have strong beliefs on what is natural and unnatural, right or wrong.”

I leave you to draw your own opinions from the reply above.

I think, PLU3 has been so tirelessly dedicated to their cause and YES, they do have a political agenda. The reason they have been given all these years for being rejected by the Registrar of Societies is that homosexual behaviour is a criminal act:

“Section 377A (Outrages on Decency): “Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or abets the commission by any male person, of any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be punished with imprisonment for a term which may extend to two years.”

This is a law carried over from the time our British colonial oppresors lived in Singapore. It is said that the law was made to prevent British soldiers from getting it on with each other. PLU3 hopes to decriminalize homosexuality.

(All views expressed are my own. Its only the facts that I got from somewhere else. And the band did not make me write this.)

So a few nights ago I was hanging with some friends and we bumped into members of Wicked Aura. Don’t know who they are? They are Singpore’s only samba band. Go have look at their schedule and show up with your family. It might be a disconcerting when grandma starts shakin her thang to the samba beats. But thats what happens when you can feel the music. The infectious energy of the band is one of their biggest draws.

So back to shooting the shit with the Wicked Aurian. He was talking about their upcoming shows. Shit. I am impressed. They got on the WOMAD tour. (WOMAD is a festival that showcases World Music Arts and D ance. And it is very respected event throughout the world.) Yes and a Singapore band is on the Womad world tour. They are flying the Singapore flag in Spain, UK and Sri Lanka this year. I think they are the only Singapore band of any sort invited to play on this tour.

They seem to have solid plans for the future. I was really happy for them. Looking at their past achievements and their future goals I almost get a glimmer of hope that maybe Arts in Singapore might have hope. But no, not really.

I was told of the difficulties they had in getting money. This is not money to be rockstars. All the international festivals where they perform, they only get token sums of money. It doesn’t cover all the expenses. International flights and accomodation can get expensive. Especially when you have 13 band members. So they have to cover some of the expenses as well as get sponsorships to fund the rest of the expenses. Most of the artists on the womad tours are artists with record labels that cover their expenses or they are artists where their home governments are enthusiatically supporting them. You know, expose their homegrown talents to the world, put the name of their country on the world map blah blah.

Getting money is not easy for anyone. Even I have to work for it. (damn it!) But that wasn’t the least of the problems they faced. Its the atitudes. A unique Singapore band that tours internationally with renowned artists seems ripe for support from the local companies and organisations right? Wrong!

The reasons they were given pissed me off the most. The were obliquely told that they do not truly represent Singapore. They are a bunch of Malay guys and two white people! This was from official organisations whose job it is to sell Singapore overseas as well as by organisations who are supposed to promote the Arts in Singapore*. ( I leave it to you to figure out which those arganisations are.) Hmm lets think of another local musical troupe that gets boatloads of money from the same organisations, the SSO. The amount of official money that pours into them would mean that they representative of Singapore right? There must be Indians and Malays right? Wrong! (I just looked at the line-up.) Wicked Aura are also told Samba isn’t very Singaporean. Mmm.. When the T’ang Quartet rocks out with Shostakovich’s String Quartet No 9 in E flat Major, that must be very Singaporean!

(I think that the SSO and the T’ang quartet are worthy of every bit of support they get. I give a lot of respect to people pursue their passion. And they are cool too.)

*They do receive some $$ support from some of these organisations. But the support is tiny. They would have trouble going to JB to perform with the money they reveive from them.

He recounted how they almost could not confirm the international WOMAD dates because they couldn’t raise airfare. A senior person in WOMAD was cheesed off with the local organisations and got them in touch with a foreign embassy and airline which decided to support and make their tour happen. I guess our Embassy and Airline are too poor to support them.

The organisations that are not supporting them now will be the ones that will proudly co-opt Wicked Aura once they become popular. They will also trumpet how they supported the band throughout its history. Fucking lamers. Sim Wong Hoo and the EDB come to mind. Now he is a poster child for EDB and its efforts at helping local companies. But the reality is that Mr Sim hates them. They shooed him out the door and told him his idea sucked when he sought their help when he had a crazy idea of making soundcards for computers. Only after he made his billions did they offer to help and also used him for their image.

A few things piss me off about the whole thing. First and foremost the *racism*. (How can a bunch of mats do Singapore proud?) The fact that people can’t see a good thing and support it amazes me. And these are people whose jobs it is to identify these things. Do I really want people who are blind to talent run these organisations? They also mentioned that they get paid like local amatuers to play at events in Singapore. The same event will also have mediocre foreign bands that cost the organisers insane amounts of money. Guess who gets the crowd up and jumping?

But Wicked Aura is still in good spirits. They love the music. They love getting a crowd worked up. They don’t mind the scarifices they make for their passion. (Although they wish it could be easier. ) They still have their day jobs to pay the bills and fund their passion.

All so that they get your grandmas booty shakin.

I have been refraining from writing about the statements made by Dr Balaji Sadasivan. I think it’s because I’ve been so fired up and angered.

In december, when I was home, I remember walking through the streets with my ipod headphones stuck in my ears. I was using sony headphones… you know, the latest kind that blocks off all noise so that the music makes crystal clear vibrations gainst your ear drums? Yeah those… imagine the technology used to develop such a product… … for a brief moment I felt a familiar innertia… it was a subconscious sense of disillusionment that has surfaced only to be repressed over the years… repressed with apathy or feelings of inauthentic choicelessness… Singapore boasts of its highly industrialized quality of life… sony headphones, PDA phones, digital cameras combined with ‘Asian democracy’… we live in a world of Macdonalds, powerbooks and PDAs… yet we put up with constraints, censorship and political ideology from the dark ages. “Oh but if not for these constraints our economy would fall… oh hail the great Lee dynasty… oh our great stable government… our ‘readiness’, our ‘cleanliness’….” … give up your voice, your spontaneity, your brain… for the sake of uhm… sony headphones and clean airconditioned shopping…

What’s the price of industrialization…?

Dr Balaji Sadasvan’s statements were clearly his own unresearched based opinion based on homophobic attitudes. I hardly see the need to even debate his statements… … HIV=Bapoks=parties=drugs=anus=penis=increase in no. of HIV cases in Singapore… I’m so tired of such reductionistic thought being hammered (via the straits times) as ‘moral asian values’… ASIAN? I do not know of any Asian philosophy that has such reductionistic discourses… I do not know of any Asian philosophy that postulates ignorance, hatred or discrimination…

Could it be that the whole AIDS epidemic is a wider and more complex global issue…? Could it be that one single yearly GLBT celebration like the Nation party would NOT be entirely responsible for all the new HIV infections in Singapore??????? What an ignorant, homphobic, irresponsible statement to make!!!!!

Oh and by the way… weren’t you the ones who ordered us to halt all safer sex packet distributions at the Nation party in 2004? I was there with the condoms, the gloves… ready to distribute them…. and you told us to pack up and leave…. you said that we were promoting sexual behaviour!!!!

If you visted Chaplins, Hard Rock Cafe or any other place that was cool in the 90s you must heard these songs. 99 Red Balloons by Nena or Give Me Hope Joanna by Eddy Grant.

Every time I see people bopping happily and singing out to these songs I wonder have they really listened to the words? They are both great tunes with an uplifting happy melody, but the subject matter is very very dark. One day I was listening to the eddy grant song on headphones and made out the lyrics. Oh my…

99 Red Balloons - The imagery evoked by toys, red balloons, summer skies and children at play is so happy and gay! It makes you want to be a kid again! What happens in the song though is World War 3. Nuclear Armageddon. The world is destroyed. Yes. These kids buy these red baloons (99 of em!) and release them one by one into the sky, how prettily the float away! But the military thinks its an invasion and launches a war! This song was released in 1983 by a West German singer called Nena. It was originally sung in german. This was at the height of the Cold War and Germany was split in two. And people lived in constant fear of missiles from across the wall.

99 dreams I have had.
In every one a red balloon.
It’s all over and I’m standing pretty.
In this dust that was a city.
If I could find a souvenier.
Just to prove the world was here.
And here is a red balloon
I think of you and let it go

Give Me Hope Joanna- This one irks me more. Like Joanna is some hot chick and the line “hope, Fore the morning come” is some allusion to getting some sex before the night is over. NO NO NO. Joanna is the White South African Government that ran Johannesberg. The hope that he wants is that Jo’anna would stop killing his people. Its a song about Apartheid. Not so happy is it?

Well Jo’anna she runs a country
She runs in Durban and the Transvaal
She makes a few of her people happy, oh
She don’t care about the rest at all
She’s got a system they call apartheid
It keeps a brother in a subjection
But maybe pressure will make Jo’anna see
How everybody could a live as one

In the Name of Love by U2 is about Martin Luther King. When Bono sings/asks “What more in the name of love ” he is talking about MLK getting killed because of his love for humanity.

Early morning, April 4
Shot rings out in the Memphis sky
Free at last, they took your life
They could not take your pride

MLK has writen some of the most beautiful and powerful speeches. Check some of his quotes.

Anyway. I enjoy these songs. I enjoy them more knowing that were not frivolous ditties. Hope you do too. And remember its not punani you are hoping from Jo’anna.

As you can see this site has been painlessly upgraded to the latest ultra cool version of Wordpress. Which means that the look of this site is also being worked on. Don’t mind the constant change of the site…

James Seng my favourite local geek* writes about how things were…

…
Anyway, Maynard is an old friend and there is an interesting story of how we met more 10 years ago. Back then, I was working at the first and only ISP in Singapore and one fine day, we discovered an intruder in our system. My boss blew up and did the obvious thing - nope, he didn’t call the police - he gave him a job. “If he is good enough to break into our system, I want to hire him!” Dr Tan said.

…(Today)The laws are also less tolerant of people who just want to poke around, learn how things works and have little fun.
…

I agree with him. The laws are in place tend to discourage technical creativity. If the intrusion happened today, the first instinct of any boss would be to call the cops. In an age where opening an piece of equipment that you own and tinkering with it is deemed illegal, its no surprise these attitudes prevail.

An example is the X-Box. Opening it and soldering a chip inside is illegal. (Yes you can play pirated games by doing that, but you can also install linux, put in a bigger harddrive and anything else a fertile mind thinks of.) By sending out the message that technology is only to be used as the manufacturers see fit and anything that isn’t specifically permitted is probably illegal, a generation will be raised playing with their toys according to instructions. (PS. The same law that makes modding a x-box illegal also makes it illegal to circumvent the region encoding on the DVD players. Wait till they start enforcing that.)

Where is the fun in that?

* I find it weird that ‘geek’ now means someone who has an iPod, the latest tricked out 3Gphone and a flashy tech toy. I think wikipedia has a good definition.”A geek is a person who is fascinated, perhaps obsessively, by technology and imagination.”

(I agree we need laws to stop some of the bad hats who wreak havoc on the net.)

I have been meaning to write about emergent technologies and trends on the internet for a while. It would have been a gush piece on technorati, flickr, Delicious, RSS readers and folksonomies.

This entry languished in my drafts folder for a while. But then a few things happened that made me edit this piece this way.
Straits Times Online decided to charge for online access. (If I knew who made that call I would laugh in the decision maker’s face.) Today I read Mr Brown’s article for Todayonline. I also came across olorin @ Singaporeangle. He mentions how he used the Tecnocrati Search for bloggers views on the St subscription plan. I was reminded how I had used the same thing to find a complete transcript of the Jamie Han Vs MM Lee exchange. (The ST version was edited oh-so-slightly.)

No more Straits Times online? But still want to know whats going on in .sg?

Try a Singapore Search on Google News.
That gives you news reports from accredited news agencies that are relevant to Singapore. And you can sort them by relevance or date posted. It works pretty well when you combine key words too. ( for example Singapore+Finance or Singapore+Crime. ) And it throws up some interesting stories about Singapore from international news agencies, stories that for some reason or other never make it into ST. (Maybe its censorship, maybe its because the editors deem the story unnewsworthy.)
I found these today. A followup on Nick Leeson and the directors at the Baring’s . Financial Times looks at Ong Keng Sen’s Insomnia which is on stage in London now.

Notice the lack of links from Google News to Singapore’s premier newspaper. I guess the world will have to read about Singapore news from some other news organisation. If William Safire was still writing in the NYT about how much he hated Singapore and MM Lee, the counter-arguments that ST writes would neither show up on a news search nor would interested readers be able to look at the ST website. Maybe the free tabloid Today would rise up to the challenge.

2) Do a Technorati Tag Search for Singapore.

The blog entries that it comes up with, vary in content from opinion pieces (kinda like Op-ed pages) or personal stories ( The Life section in ST). I have read enough of Andy Ho to be bored with his style and enough of Sumiko Tan to know all she does is whine. The Technorati search is quite varied in its results. Some are good some are not. But that applies to everything not just blogs.

Technorati is a search engine for blogs and discussion sites. It gets updated in real time. As soon as someone posts new content on their blog, Technorati gets pinged and updates its database. Doing a tag search for Singapore is looking for posts that people deemed relevant enough to self-categorise under Singapore. Doing regular search brings up results where the seach terms have been mentioned. A search on Jamie Han brings up what people think about him in the blog world.

And the results page also brings up photos from flickr that people tagged as Singapore. Its amazing how something familiar looks through someone else’s lens.

You also get recent bookmarks on del.icio.us that people tag as pertaining to Singapore.

I find news about Singapore, opinion pieces about Singapore, personal stories from Singapore and beautiful photos from Singapore. All of this for free with just a few clicks. What can $120 a year for ST give me?

I started reading the Straits Times when I was 6 or 7. By ageI 9, I would almost always be reading the newspaper while sitting on the porcelain throne. (I endured many beatings for getting the newspaper wet.)

This continued till NS happened, then college in the US. Hello NYT!

When I moved back to my parents’ place after a few years, I resumed getting the Straits Times wet. (The beatings weren’t so bad then.) Shortly later I moved out. No more ST delivered every morning.

But Hello 802.11b and the internet! How awesome is the distance from the shitter to the shelf! I have the perfect toilet set up for downloading news and poop!

This morning while I was ‘emptying my cache’, I read on Mr Brown that ST wants to charge for online access!

Even when it was free, STonline was never my primary source of news. I did read now and then though. Futhermore I read the dead tree version only on occasions when I was at my ‘rents.

Goodbye ST. If I run into you in public maybe I will catch up on the news, but you will never share my mornings again…

If I didnt drive. I would be drunk. If I was drunk maybe I would enjoy the music. If I wasn’t blogging maybe I would be picking up hot hoochie mamas.

I can’t believe how rude people are to bartenders giving out free drinks. (Ladies drink free on Wednesdays at China Jump. Men get an hour’s worth of free drinks too.) Tipping bartenders who give out free drinks should be a karmic rule.

So this hot hot tequila girl comes up to me. She tried to get me to buy a shot of tequila for $10. I said no and that I had to drive. She thinks for a bit. And the she says how about buying *her* a shot of tequila. Hmmm. I said no. I also asked her what I would get out of buying her a drink. (Its a miniscule chance but, hey!) She says that she would drink with me! I reminded her that I had to drive. She tried to get me to buy her a drink thrice more. I said no yet again. Hardsells like this bug me and as hot as she was I was not going to give in, it stopped being about drinking and driving and became aboout me not letting her win.

Excuse me while I pretend to enjoy Destiny’s Child.