Chinese New Year (beginning after the end of the first complete lunar cycle in the new solar year) is a time for Chinese from all over the world to gather together, stop working, visit family, and sit around eating. After living in Singapore for a while, I’ve started wondering why this is considered a holiday instead of a normal day.

Maybe because it’s the one day of the year where parents (at least our neighbors’ grandparents, aunts and uncles) allow their kids to gamble. If you ever find yourself at a CNY dinner surrounded by a bunch of screaming kids and teenagers being ‘supervised’ by a bunch of adults chittering in a mix of Singlish, Mandarin, and Hokkien, sitting at a card table playing blackjack and drinking, not, like… a lot or anything, but enough to affect your ability to derive general rules to a game with a lot of arithmetic involved, please note the following differences between Singaporean and western blackjack so you, too, don’t lose $30 and 60 minutes trying to figure out what’s going on:

• There is no splitting. This is to prevent confusing all the players in an already hectic game even more.
• There is no doubling down, for the same reason as above; also most kids are playing with their parents cash, so encouraging reckless betting is not something the elders try to do.
• There is no surrendering/folding. If you quit you lose your entire bet.
• Blackjack pays you double, immediately, even if the dealer also has blackjack. Don’t ask, just shut up and take the money.
• Dealer, tricky little bastard that he is, does not have to stand on 17. He can hit again and again, as many times as he wants and if he loses, hey, it’s his dad’s money anyway, plus I think a lot of those bills are mine…
• The Chinese invented something called ‘5 Card Dragon’, whereby if you have 5 cards and are still at or below 21, you win. This also pays double.

“Anatomical sausages.” Taken by coworker P in Taiwan. I’m going to continue never eating sausage again.

Ahh, memories…

Kratom actually does something. Perhaps not very sleep-inducing in normal (3-5 gram) doses, but quite relaxing, speaking from several months casual use. Highly recommended. An opiate agonist, so use with care based on how much of an addictive personality you happen to have.

See the first entry here (and pretty much every other math-related entry also; an awesome website in general). A loxodrome sconce for your nightlight; an idea so awesome I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it first.
_{Heartbreakingly, not for sale here or anywhere else I could find.}

M and I had lunch this afternoon at a little restaurant/coffee shop near our place. This place, Wang’s (王) Cafe, is a pretty common type of restaurant from the Singapore/Malaysia/Indonesia area called a ‘kopi tiam’ (‘kopi’ = coffee, ‘tiam’/’店’ = the local Chinese dialect word for ‘store’ or ‘shop’). They usually serve strong coffee brewed with a ‘sock’ (see here) wherein the coffee is placed in a cloth bag (the sock), and hot water is poured over it and collected in a pot. This is then poured over the grounds again and re-collected in a second pot; then back and forth a few more times for quickly-brewed yet very strong coffee. This can be served as kopi-C (‘C’ for cream, although it’s actually sweetened condensed milk), kopi-O (the letter ‘O’ for zero, i.e. no cream), or kopi-O kosong (‘kosong’ being the Malay word for ‘empty’, meaning that there’s no cream and it’s also empty of the sugar that’s usually put in the cup before pouring the coffee. I, of course, always have kopi-C because why settle for less?

Kopi tiam fare most stereotypically consists of kopi, kaya toast (kaya being a jam or spread made from sugar, eggs, and honey or pandan leaves, depending on the area) which is kaya and a giant thing of butter sandwiched between two thin pieces of toast, and soft-boiled eggs, usually eaten with heavy Chinese soy sauce. All in all, sure heart-attack fodder, though the locals seem to live to a ripe old age nonetheless. More recently they’ve also started serving other simple things too, usually noodle soups or Malay-derived rice-chili-and-fish dishes. In the first picture above (my lunch) there’s ‘mee rebus’ (‘mee’ is the local dialect’s word for ‘noodles’, which is ‘mien’ in standard Chinese, and ‘men’ in Japanese, from whence the word ‘ramen’ comes), kaya toast and kopi-C. The mee rebus is yellow egg noodles served with a hard-boiled egg, bits of friend bean-curd (the crouton-looking stuff which is the curd layer skimmed off the top during tofu production and then deep-fried), bean sprouts and a lime, all in a thick, mildly sweet curry sauce.

M’s lunch in the second picture is laksa, a dish native to the mixing of southern Chinese and Malaysian cuisine which was originally found only in Singapore and parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, which consists here of white rice noodles served in a thinner, yet still quite heavy, broth flavored with chili paste, coconut milk and chicken or vegetable stock with fish cake, egg and sprouts thrown in for good measure.

The total cost of this extravagant meal was 11 Singapore dollars.

i.e. accidents involving nuclear weapons.

Trippy psychological/philosophical film by Jim Fucking Henson. (1969)

edit:50 minutes of video + 11 minutes of weird bonus cartoons

We’re minding the neighbors’ dogs (and rabbit; not shown) for the week. Despite the rumors, dogs and cats get along quite well if they’re pets that are carefully acquainted with each other and are not competing for space or resources. To this end, having small, quiet dogs with good upbringing is invaluable. Good upbringing for cats doesn’t mean much since they appear to be genetically assholes.

During the first days of his new wandering life, in the first greedy whirl of regained freedom, Goldmund had to relearn to live the homeless, timeless life of the traveler. Obedient to no man, dependent only on weather and season, without a goal before them of a roof above them, owning nothing, open to every whim of fate, the homeless wanderers lead their childlike, brave, shabby existence. They are the sons of Adam, who was driven out of Paradise; the brothers of the animals, of innocence. Out of heaven’s hand they accept what is given them from moment to moment: sun, rain, fog, snow, warmth, cold, comfort, and hardship; time does not exist for them and neither does history, or ambition, or that bizarre idol called progress and evolution, in which houseowners believe so desperately.

Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, 1930.

Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael (1992)

???

Classical and techno, together at last.