I think I may have just found my favourite sentence of the month, in a Guardian Online article about keeping a journal and blogging. The article is here, and the sentence is by Jennifer Lee:
Then I began blogging when I moved to Paris in October to start clown school.
Fantastic. I love Paris, and who secretly wouldn’t like to go to clown school if they could? But to go to clown school in Paris… How wonderful!
This is an interesting curiosity – according to the Western Mail, an old demo tape from the sixties, forgotten for decades at the bottom of a tea chest stored in a London recording studio, may feature Jimi Hendrix playing the Welsh National Anthem. Cool!
Listen to the track here (it’s an embedded .swf file, and will autoplay once the page has loaded).
I got a phone call from an unfamiliar number a couple of days ago, just as I was about to go into an important meeting. It turned out to be from a company I had applied to for a teaching post during my job search earlier this year. They were wondering: would I be interested in a post teaching business studies… in Mongolia?
Hehehe. I didn’t have to think to hard. Quite apart from the fact that I’m working, I wouldn’t fancy Mongolia. Too many people have told me about their trips there, and about the bitter cold most of the year, and the dreadful, dreadful food… Still, for a moment, I did think of one of my favourite films, Urga, and of the steppes – and it’s still an ambition of mine (one I’ve had for a long time) to sleep in a yurt far out on the steppes, away from any civilization.
That will have to wait for another time, though; I’ll take a holiday there sometime. For now, I’m staying in the tropics! If nothing else, though, it shows that sometimes companies really do keep your records on file…
A Chinese friend of mine was in town earlier this week. She’s originally from Dalian, but is now based in Beijing – in Wudaokou, to be exact. She can be pretty direct in her views sometimes; the first time I showed her around Singapore, I took her to the Long Bar at Raffles Hotel. There’s a tradition there of eating peanuts with your drinks and throwing the shells on the floor; I suppose this must go back to the colonial days. Anyway, I explained this to her and she just snorted in amazement. “What’s so special about that? I can do that anywhere I like, in China”. True, true.
Anyway, on this occasion, I’d asked her to bring me some of the new T-shirts from Lush. She did, so I’m now the proud owner of probably the only “88 Wudaokou Warriors” shirts in Singapore! Apparently, they’re so popular that she had to place an order for them – good thing I asked in plenty of time. She said she’d been speaking with one of the Chinese staff at Lush, and they couldn’t understand why the laowai were so keen on the shirts. “I would never wear a shirt advertising Wudaokou”, she said, “It must be something to do with foreigner culture”. Most Beijingers still regard Wudaokou as remote countryside, so I know where she’s coming from – but yes, it is ’something to do with foreigner culture’. We all go to that part of town to learn Chinese, as I did in 2004, or on exchange, as with my stint at Tsinghua University in 2005, and Lush is a haven. They play great music, they have free wifi (when it works), and the people are really interesting. You get all sorts there – truly, people from all over the world, and the multinational teams for their famous pub quiz nights are always full of interesting characters. I had great times there, so I’m glad to keep a little bit of that spirit alive by wearing their t-shirt in the tropics!
I’ve just received an SMS: a very nice piece of ASCII art, depicting a Christmas tree and stars, accompanied by a sweet message:
“Christmas is near and its coming
be MERRY…
… be HAPPY
HAVE A WONDERFUL CHRISTMAS and NEW YEAR!”
Nice. The thing is, I have no idea who it’s from – the number doesn’t belong to anyone in my contact list. I feel in a (very small) dilemma: should I respond, to say thanks but who are you? Should I worry that it came to the wrong number, and that someone who should have received it will think that someone cares just that little bit less than they really do? And that phrase: “and its coming…” Does this mean that it’s really just advertising, with followup messages for my information and convenience still to come, and further colonisation by commerce of a religious festival…
Maybe I should just take it as a random act of goodwill and accept it without worrying about who sent it 
An interesting article from Canada: scientists have developed a cure for diabetes in mice. Apparently, it’s a complete breakthrough – it works by suppressing nerve functions in the pancreas, and means that diabetes is actually an auto-immune disease. It seems this was really almost a chance discovery, and this route to a cure had never been considered before. Human trials are next, but wow, what a possibility – a complete cure for diabetes!
It’s only a couple of weeks since I wondered what was going on with all these new commercial spaceports popping up all over the place. Today, via Slashdot, I see yet another. This article in USA Today describes the first launch from yet another spaceport on the east coast of the US. This really does seem to be bandwagon-jumping: the rocket was built with “two stages made from decommissioned Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles and two stages from Pegasus rockets” – not exactly X-craft cutting edge.
Furthermore, “the Virginia Commercial Space Flight Authority, a state agency, built the commercial launch pad in 1998 on land leased from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility to try to help bring jobs to the economically depressed Eastern Shore region. Maryland later joined the venture“.
So there we are – spaceports are the new Disneyland, with the optional added attraction of taking part in your own flaming, meteoric descent from a great height if it turns out the developer was trying to do things on the cheap – which I have a horrible feeling is likely to happen. There just seem to be too many of these places being developed in the US, and I’m very sceptical that there will be enough of a market to keep them all going.
Let me emphasise that I’m only talking about the spaceports being developed in the US. Singapore’s spaceport is being built by cutting-edge spaceflight developers, I have complete faith that Singapore’s efficiency and project management skills will ensure it’s done right, and it’s still (AFAIK) the only Asian spaceport, meaning that I think there will be enough of a regional market. I definitely think it’s way cool that we’re going to have a spaceport in the Garden City…
