John & Belle Have A Blog

Violently Sexist Rap Songs: Not Just Some Stuff Made Up By Orrin Hatch

Speaking of listening to unadvisable rap songs, it's when iTunes throws up a little something like the Geto Boys song Assassins that I question the wisdom of copying my bro's hard drive so indiscriminately. That stuff is just wrong. Of course, in the next moment he did me right with Maiden's Be Quick or Be Dead, so I shouldn't complain. Finally, that last lyrics site suggested that people interested in Iron Maiden lyrics might also be interested in Arcade Fire lyrics. This is in fact true, but...

UPDATE: it occurs to me that I don't actually know whether Orrin Hatch complains about violence in popular music. It just seems like the kind of thing he would do because he is a tedious, moralizing, prune-faced guy from Utah. This may reflect anti-Mormon prejudice on my part. Sorry, Mormon readers. Mormonism isn't really more crazy than other religions; it just seems more ridiculous and contingent because the founding events happened so recently. I think I saw some (white) Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses walking around an HDB complex the other day. I thought proseltyzing was agin' the law in Singapore?

Pigs In A Blanket

Man, some people are behind the times. My friend Kara and I hosted many fine parties waaaay back in the 1990's at which pigs in a blanket played a starring role. People would be arriving as we made them, and would often scoff about them. Especially they would scoff about the Dijonnaise. "Are you just mixing mustard and mayonnaise together?" they'd ask. "I'm not eating that." Sure, hipster guy. Sure you're not going to eat the Dijonnaise. Keep telling yourself that.

And you can be sure, as this fall’s party season gets under way, that pigs in blankets will be on all the right trays and platters. “They used to be like a joke,” said Ms. Blum, the party planner. “But everyone takes them seriously now.”

The plates would be clean long before even the jello shots ran out. I hear jello shots are making a comeback too. You know, with the homemade gelatin and fresh fruit juices? Seriously. You'll be reading about the gooseberry jello shot at fancy NYC cocktail parties any day now, mark my words.

Unrelated LiveJournalesque music note: I'm listening to the GrindLab's Ak Up. I'm not sure this is actually wise. I'm...medium on it.

Scuse Me While I Kiss The Sky

I think John might have posted this on the Valve already, but Zoë cracked me up today. I was shelving books with her and one had a picture of the tower of Babel on the front. She wanted to know what was up, and I explained the story (we needed a little back-story on the bible.) She wanted to know why god cared if humans were able to touch the sky, if he was so much more powerful and had made everything in the world. Um, because? Verdict: "I used to believe in god before I found out he was crazy."

Gabriel, move over to second trumpet

Damn. Maynard died. His manager: "Someone just said, 'Gabriel, move over to second trumpet.'" There's an old clip somewhere on the internets. Maynard blowing "Blow Gabriel Blow" with Ethel Merman singing. That'll clear up your earwax problem. But I can't find it now.

This Post Produced By Saban

The Times casts light on that tragicomic modern phenomenon: couples who lie in bed blogging with laptops. I am in bed right now! John complains that he's reading comic books and not doing something weird like blogging, but whatevs:

Larry Smith knows he is treading a fine marital line. Mr. Smith, 37, is the editor of Smith, an online magazine he founded, and he loves to work in bed at all hours — midafternoon, 2 a.m. if insomnia strikes, then again in the morning.
Sitting there in bed half awake with a cup of coffee is extremely pleasant,” he said.Yet Mr. Smith is all too aware of his wife’s mounting disapproval of his routine and suspects that a laptop-in-bed ban could be imminent.

Luckily John and I don't have this problem, because we're both blogging! Like these people:

Dr. Enoch Choi, 36, and his wife, Tania, 33, who have been married 10 years, both take laptops to bed to write their blogs. “I suppose I started the trend,’’ said Dr. Choi, a physician in Palo Alto, Calif. “But now my wife is just as much the nighty-night PowerBook key-banger, blogging away for her friends.”

Freaks. And I can't believe that having said "nighty-night PowerBook key-banger" he wasn't able to get a Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers joke in there somehow. Step it up, Enoch.

Sucks To Her Ass-Mar

The haze is pretty bad today. I know I've mentioned this before, but Singapore's neighbors tend to clear large swathes of land for palm oil plantations by burning off the forest, to the detriment of Singapore's air quality. Next time I go to a new doctor I want to put down, on the line for allergies: primary rain forst that's on fire. Also, teeny bits of burned up orang-utans and slow lorises.

Zoë's got a runny nose and cough (OK, too bad, but allergies.) Unfortunately she sounds pretty wheezy and tight. Wheezy like Mr. Sanford's dead wife wheezy. I'm taking her to the doc tomorrow. I understand that asthma treatments for kids are much better now than in the days when I choked down bottle after bottle of liquid theophylline and then sat up in bed all night, but hopefully this isn't asthma.

I realize that we talk more about Zoë than Violet on our blog. Zoë can talk better; that's part of it. Violet is just an unusually happy, funny kid who is physically adventurous, unlike some future comic book artists I know. She goes around all day saying things like "mommy, I'm so happy to see you!" and "mommy, your hair is nice!" and "I love bubbles!" She is self-sufficient in a way, and I often have to stop Zoë from bothering her as she amuses herself with something like randomly moving the gingerbread men around on the Candyland board ("I win! I love my game!"). I imagined it was going to be the other way around, with the little sister pestering the big one (that happens too, of course.) She is very loving, and there's nothing better than having her sit in your lap and hug you while patting your back gently with her fat hand. "It's OK mommy, there's nothing to worry about. MeiMei's here."

Look, It's Sooo Cute! A Baby Nerd!

Zoë, though she rocks the fine motor skillz like dolemite, is something of a klutz otherwise. Three-year-olds can run rings around her. So, at my mom's suggestion, I've been looking for a class for her where she could learn to be more physically confident. I meant to do it earlier this summer, but hey, tomorrow is another day. And next month: totally another month, too. Zoë hates the idea. Yesterday I was looking at the Little Gym in the Forum, where she had been to a birthday party long ago and had a great time.
Me: Hm, maybe you could take gymnastics here. It would be easy stuff and you could learn to do somersaults and stuff.
Zoë, exasperated and indignant: Mooommm! I'm going to be a comic book artist when I grow up! I don't need to learn gymnastics!
Me: Too bad.
It'll give her some Chris Ware-type dysphoria to write about later, if nothing else. Relatedly, we watched The Squid and The Whale last night and it was excellent, though it had many scenes of embarassment so painful that John and I were writhing around on the floor going "noooooo! Make it stop!". Also, there was an Improving Moral: Never Get Divorced. (Or maybe, don't marry this incredible jerk?)

Deep Thoughts

The Joker is a very mysterious character, of course. But I've been thinking. What if he's actually some sort of whale?

Second Link

Also in Singapore news, I saw this play last night at the theatre at the National Library, and I recommend it (it's only on for 2 more days, but probably not sold out). There's open discussion of homosexuality! (Gasp, faint, etc.) Singaporean society has been noticeably loosening up on things like this during my stay here. The production is really of two separate pieces, of which I only got to see the first because I scratched the hell out of my eye and had to go home and take my contacts out at intermission. My friends report that the second half was as good as the first, though more serious, and presuming that's so I give the whole thing two thumbs up.

Welcome To Biopolis!

Interesting article from the NYT Science section on how Singapore is aiming to transform itself into a biotech mecca on the strength of its liberal stem-cell policies and lavish funding. The government started a research center from scratch, the charmingly named Biopolis. Then they started throwing money around. Seems like it might work:

Two of America’s most prominent cancer researchers, Neal G. Copeland and Nancy A. Jenkins, are planning to arrive here next month to take posts at the Institute of Molecular and Cell Biology. The husband-and-wife team, who worked for 20 years at the National Cancer Institute in Maryland, said politics and budget cuts had left financing in the United States too hard to come by.

“We wanted to be in a place where they are excited by science and things are moving upward,” said Dr. Copeland, who said he and his wife had already rented a condominium near Singapore’s shopping district and had joined the local American Club....

Lavish salaries and lofty titles have helped Singapore staff Biopolis with a roster of foreign luminaries. In 2001, the same year President Bush first imposed limits on financing of stem cell research, Singapore snagged the National Cancer Institute researcher Edison Liu Tak-Bun.

Dr. Liu said he had felt hemmed in by outdated academic structures and the biotechnology industry’s preoccupation with financial survival.

“Singapore, however, welcomed new ideas and, because of its newness, provided degrees of organizational freedom necessary for me to succeed,” Dr. Liu said in an e-mail interview. He now works at Biopolis as head of the Genome Institute.

Should be interesting to see how this works out for Singapore; it's not a risk-free strategy by any means, but it certainly seems as if it could be a far-sighted policy. Real dominance in an area of research tends to snowball.