I had heard that ones can go up as well as up. I thought 1+1 =10.-, add another 1 to get 11, one more for 100, so on and so forth.

Thankyou. Here's your receipt. Pleasure doing business with you ma'am.

-X

Stuart wrote:

They say there's one born every minute, that's 300 per hour!

You just made my head hurt :P

-X

Nope.... read it.... still don't understand it...

*backs up and reads again*

60x5=300


I laughed anyway.

:)

When we switch over to the new site, we need to get the Dogblog a RSS feed like NFG's...

This place is dead!

Firsfron wrote:

This place is dead!

*comes up behind Firs*

Braaaaaiiiinnnnnsssss


*departs unfulfilled*

:P

-X

Aren't zombies repellent without help?

[ December 06, 2007: Message edited by: Em ]

Found it.

888888

I've been traveling this past week, business stuff, and it's brought me to Singapore.  I've never been to Asia, which is a horrendous thing to admit for someone who grew up on the Pacific Rim (but I'm an honest guy, so I'll admit it.)

Of course, one obstacle to my Asianization has been that the Pacific is a big ocean.  I've flown across it before (and boy, were my wings tired!) on trips to Australia and New Zealand, and it's definitely a bum-bruiser.  It's a lot better if you can get someone to spring for Business Class.

The first leg was 14 hours to Hong Kong.  I now have that destination on my to-do list, because a changeover in an airport isn't a real visit, and just coming in at night was enchanting.  The islands, frosted with lights, looked like Candyland.  It really made me want to come back and explore it properly.  (Also, I'd just had some sleep and then watched the Simpsons movie, so I was in a good mood despite the hours in the air.)

The second leg was much less brutal, three hours to Singapore, and I stepped off the plane, through Customs, and out into quite an impressive damp heat for after midnight.  My shirt was stuck to my torso before I crossed the indoor parking lot.  As they say here, "Wah!"  (It means something like "Yikes!" or "Holy Humidifier, Batman!")  There are no seasons in Singapore, apparently, except for Hot And Wet, Hot and Wetter, and Hot But Hasn't Rained Yet Today (But It Will.)  The little mini-monsoons are cool, with impressive lightning and thunder, and you can always tell who are the out-of-towners because they look up when the sky goes boom.  (To the natives, it’s as ordinary and only slightly less regular than their own heartbeats.)

Singapore is known by some seasoned travelers as "Asia Lite" because it's very clean, very Westernized, very safe, and most everyone speaks English.  I have to say, as much as I like to have street cred, much as I'd like to think of myself as a Man of Danger and Dodgy Situations, I'm perfectly happy to be cutting my Asia teeth here.  The people are extremely polite, even to the extent of strangers smiling back at you on the street (I wonder where that comes from, 'cause they sure didn't learn it from the English colonizers.  I lived in London for years and the only person who smiled at me in public had no teeth, smelled like the floor of a brewery, and was peeing down his own leg at the time.)

Singapore's also a fascinating ethnic mix, majority Chinese, but with substantial representation from Malaysia and the Indian subcontinent, plus a lot of other kinds of Asians, as well as a goodly number of us pale folk (most of the ang mor  I run into seem to be from Australia, New Zealand, or England.)  It's hard to tell in a tourist- and business-fueled nation whether you're actually welcome or they're just faking it, but if it's the latter they fake it pretty damn well.  Not just the paid professionals, either (like hotel staff), but average folks going home on the MRT (light rail) or in the shops.

As evidence of this, consider the following: I spent an astounding hour in Mustafa Centre, the giant five-Wal-Marts-stacked, 24-hour shop in the Little India district, where despite the massive size of the place the goods are stacked to the ceiling and the aisles are about as wide as an airline toilet.  Imagine twenty thousand or so people trying to get past each other, sometimes pushing shopping carts, through spaces where you couldn't spread a Munchkin's doormat.  Even in my rather polite California hometown somebody would get slugged, maybe even get an iPhone jabbed in their i, but here I didn't even see any dirty looks being passed.

They say that people who like sausages or the law should never see either one being made, and it's possible that behind this facade of patience and cheerfulness sits some grim government Ministry of Acceptable Behavior where those who will not smile are made to smile, and good attitudes are surgically implanted into the unwilling, without anesthetic -- Singapore does have a famously paternalistic, somewhat authoritarian government -- but I doubt it.  I have no doubt they would levy the full 1000 dollar fine on me for littering if I decided to do so, but I'm sure they would apologize and smile shyly as they pried the money from my clutching fingers.

My business friends here tell me that you can actually let your kids run free in the crowded public parks -- we visited a beach beside a busy shops-and-restaurants district in Eastern Singapore where folks come down on the weekend and pitch tents, rollerblade, and picnic, and generally hang out, and kids were indeed running free and fearless as puppies, so maybe it's true.  It certainly made me want to bring my own kids.

I miss MTV, which is notably absent from the hotel television channel lists -- not that I particularly love MTV, but it usually gives you an idea of what's considered "commercially cool" in a given area, the official endorsed view of youth -- and I wonder what else I'm not being allowed to watch or experience.  But what I am getting is a pretty fascinating mix of cultures and cuisines, friendly people, not to mention so many brilliantly lit Christmas decorations hanging all over in the shopping district that it looks like mating season in Fairyland, so if this is Asia Lite, then I'll happily throw a six-pack or two in the shopping cart.

Steady lah, Singapore.

mabinogi wrote:

...but not recently ;)

Yea!

-X

Firsfron wrote:

"Yea!"? That's not very nice... ;)

Yea?

-X