Sponsoring inovation

Just come across the Unreasonable Institute, a site which helps people develop ideas and technology which will benefit the developing world. The clever part is that they need to raise some sponsorship from the world to help them do it. This essentially lets people vote on which innovations should be helped...

Just sponsored a guy trying to make a very cheap PCR machine, the LavaAmp.

Latest Impulse buy...

Ok, admittedly not strictly an impulse buy as I've been coveting them for months... but having recently become solvent again I decided a small treat was in order... soooo I now have possibly the strangest sports shoes yet. Which is saying something as my current Arnis shoes are of the 'if Nike made shoes for ninjas' style.

So I found a place in Chinatown Point which sells them (and another in Velocity in Novena).


The shoes are FiveFingers made by Vibram (who make excellent soles for walking boots). The design principle is that you're essentially going bare foot, which I'm pretty much used to after two years of wearing nothing but flip-flops. So they have a protective sole then a pretty thin breathable/anti-bacterial fabric top. I opted for the KSO variety (keep stuff out) which are a bit less minimalist, but less likely to fill with sand etc. The colours vary between mildly benign and fugly... so I chose a relatively calm pair.

My first impression was 'damn, I feel like a frickin' ninja, I want to run up walls'. (remembered gravity, resisted the temptation).

I spend the afternoon wandering around exploring the railway track near my house (its ok to play on the railway tracks when there are only 2 trains a day). Took some pictures and generally explored.

Apart from the odd strange (crazy Ang-moh) look from people I really like them. They are amazingly comfortable as you are essentially walking around barefoot. I found I was much more aware of the ground and noticed the gravel I was walking on more (but not unpleasantly). Like Nike free and other minimalist shoes the company recommend you only wear them for a few hours at a time to start with, to allow your feet to strengthen. But I didn't have any great problem/discomfort/pain after.

At some point, when I'm feeling a bit braver I'm going to start trying to learn to run bare-foot, which takes a bit more time but is much better for knees and joints etc.... will see how it goes. Will also try them for Arnis at some point, as they have an excellent feeling of control and grip.

Happy Happy Joy Joy!

A whole box of monks...

Just been to see 'Sutra' at the Esplenade theatre. It featured dance and martial arts by Shaolin Monks, who where stunningly athletic and graceful. The choreography by Belgian dancer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was incredibly imaginative. What made it for me (and part of the reason I went) was the design by Antony Gormley, who I really like. The stage was completely empty except for 20 plain wooden boxes (about monk size, open on one side). During the show the monks, moved, flipped stacked and stood on these (often with a monk inside). The sheer number of combinations they produced with this was stunning and made it a beautiful show.... I really hope they make a DVD of this....

Along came the cleaning ninjas

This looks like sooo much fun.... if they'd told me about this at school, I'd be a window cleaner now.

It's kind of funny because they weren't just cleaning the windows, they were trying to do the whole building (or the bits they could reach), so we now have clean stripes down the walls....

on my 'to read' list....

No, you probably won't appreciate it, but what the hell.... looks like a fun book, it is apparently the original with a few insertions to the text to add zombie fun....

Departures...

Saw a great movie just before I left Sing Sing. Okuribito (Departures) won an Oscar for best foreign film this year. Its a really beautiful film about a guy who moves back to his home town and answers a misprinted job advert and lands a job as a Nokanshi, someone who prepares the body and puts it into a coffin (in front of the family). The beauty of the film is just how elegantly and sensitively they convey the profession. I was entranced by the elaborate ritual every time it was performed. The acting is superb and the observations on how the younger generation of Japanese are moving away from the country and its traditions is well done.

Whole bunch-a-movies...

13.5 hour flight, video on demand, desire not to sleep, limited tolerance for serious films. Watched:
1. Shin ge jeon (Divine Weapon)- Korean historical film, armies, gunpowder, romance
2. Body of Lies - not bad spy/war on terror movie
3. Max Payne - half baked action movie based on a much better (old) computer game
4. Yojimbo (The Bodyguard) - Fun Kurosawa movie, all swords and samuris...
5. City of Ember - Beautiful kids movie, full of cool machienry and design
6. Pilot episode of 'Burn Notice' - Excellent comedy tv series. Kind of like Nip/Tuck but with a spy stuck in Miami...

Think I've exhausted most of the trivial films on the way here, might have to watch some serious ones on the way back... damn

Working class colonialism...

Finally managed to haul my ass to Colbar this weekend. Its kind of an English bar... kind of. Its stuck completely in the middle of nowhere, off Portsdown Road. The whole road is full of black and white houses and feels very colonial and sleepy. The 'bar' is more of a shed serving English Ales and simple food, mainly English (fish and chips, bangers and mash) but also some chinese and india food. V.cheap food. An impressive array of Fullers beers (I'd never heard of Old Bob until now). Kind of cool to be sitting around rickety tables drinking ale on a tropical evening...

clocking in...

This is sooo sooo cool...
(its a clock)
(from here)

Places I'd love to inhabit...

This place looks wonderful, would probably make a great secret headquarters.....
(more pictures here)

The tedious case of Benjamin Button...

Against my better judgement I went to see The Curious case of Benjamin Button last night. My initial feeling was 'that's 3 hours of my life I'm not getting back'....

ok, I'm sure that technically it was very very clever... Brad looks very old, Brad looks a bit younger, Brad looks like Brad, Brad looks like a teenager etc....

I'm assuming that the fools who reviewed the movie were so amazed by what can be done with makeup and computers that they forgot that the movie was tedious and THREE HOURS LONG.

Ok, so Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swindon were both pretty good. But the whole film still felt like Forrest Gump... a 3 hour long Forrest Gump....which occasionally wanted to be Amelie. (and failed pretty badly).

It didn't help that while Brad did try acting pretty well, the writers had decided that not only did Benjamin curiosuly get younger instead of older but that he was also dumber than Forrest... leaving Brad alternating between looking at people charmingly and slowly drawling a line of romantic pseudo-philosophy.

And seriously, it was three hours long, and felt like four.... By the time BB was a teenager I just wanted him to dye. Especially as the story was intercut with his wife+daughter many years later (tragically being hit by huricane Katrina). I guess this kind of hit a nerve because the need to have flashbacks to the present was what really pissed me off about 'Saving Private Ryan' and 'Schnindlers List'. Admitidly this time it added a whole extra (if very predictably) layer to the movie (he is, unsurprisingly, her father).

Movie critics should be drowned in their own popcorn and I want my money back....

Had a geeky macho moment at the Cu Chi tunnels. So many different guns, so much fun to be had...
(come on... when do you ever get to do this in real life)

M60 machine gun (Weapon of the American oppressor)












AK47 (weapon of the righteous freedom fighters)














The aftermath (no I didn't shoot all of these)

Wow...

(thanks Owen)

Obamaday

I like this tribute to the obama-mantra..... (via BB)

Impulse

I decided (a while ago now) to try and do something kind of creative in my spare time. As I can't paint or draw for shit, I figured I'd have a go at sculpture. Its something which I find more appealing (something about the hammers and chisels). So I took a naive approach and poured myself a big block of plaster in an old milk carton, got a cheap set of woodworking chisels and started hacking.
This is the abridged set of photos, a slightly more expansive set are here.

Micromachines

Japanese engineers are damn damn cool

Forget me not....

Just been to see my first real Bollywood movie. It was called Ghajin, a hindi remake of a tamil remake of Memento.Ok... to get this off my chest to start with... it was pretty damn bad.

So the first 10-20 minutes of the movie were ok(ish), kind of a standard action movie, of a very impressively buff Amir Kahn kicking some guys ass, then working out who he is etc.... The movie takes the basic idea of Memento (and everything else), that the main character has no short term memory. In fact the director goes as far as to write this at the beginning of the movie just in case people can't work it out. Anyhow, the first 20 minutes is not half bad as an action remake of memento. Then the horror sets in...

Suddenly, the movie drops into a flash back of our protagonist's life before he looses his memory. In summary, he's the owner of a huge cell phone company, amazingly rich and successful. A cute girl trying to get a break in the advertising film company she works in makes up a story that the big shot guy is in love with her and they're going to get married. Her boss is amazed, gives her breaks in the hope that the big shot will raise the profile of the company. The guy, hearing that a crazy woman is claiming to be engaged to him, secretly goes to see her, pretending to be an actor (she doesn't know what the big shot looks like), he falls for her. Much hilarity in sues... He ends up going to the company christmas party (where the big shot is the guest of honour), pretending to be himself (try and keep up). Even more hilarity ensues.

Ok, so that's the flashback... except that it isn't a flashback in the sense I'm used to, it is a whole (1.5 hour) romantic comedy that is dropped into the middle of the action film. As this is Bollywood, there are several song and dance numbers, which fit in as naturally as a sumo wrestler in a nunnery.

Thankfully, half way through this there is an interval..... Then it just keeps on going, dropping back into gritty action (think John Woo with indian accents), the girl rescues a train full of abducted children, is latter hunted down and killed in front of our hero, who is lobotomised at the same time, hence the memory loss. Eventually revenge is got, with the help of a somewhat awkwardly inserted female med-student character. There are more songs, people die, people cry, eventually memory man ends up caring for small orphans (I'm actually serious).

Apart from my basic hatred of musicals, whatever language they are in, it was just a damn strange movie. Most of the dialogue was terrible, the writers took the idea of memento, simplified it lots, took out all of the confusing cut scenes and re ordering. Added lots of fights and more cute women (although being a good Indian movie no one gets kissed). My guess is that after this, a studio exec decided that there weren't enough songs, or is wasn't enough of a family movie, so dropped almost a whole other film into the middle. After all, who cares if the film is nearly 4 hours long, there's an interval....and now its a family movie, with singing and dancing, and I'm assuming a catchy soundtrack for the small children to buy (to drown out the nightmares of the scenes of the nice lady being beaten to death with a metal bar).

Damn damn strange. Not going to buy the DVD.

Great blog...

Just found this great blog (via BoingBoing of course). Lots of pictures of professionally decorated cakes gone wrong...
(such as the 'When Harry met Sally' cupcake above).

genius...

Cool fish tank

Totally cool, totally too expensive, totally unnecessary....still, I love these little creatures, first saw them at Underwater world in Singapore... amazing little angels...