John & Belle Have A Blog

Cream Puffery

I hear that Beard Papa Cream Puffs is opening in the US. The chain is based in Japan. There is one here in Singapore in the basement food court of Takashimaya (at Ngee Ann City). They make the pastry cream every day, with real vanilla, and then load it into a chrome pastry cream dispenser. When you order a cream puff, they fill the choux pastry right before your very eyes, thus avoiding the danger, all-too-present in Singapore, of soggy pastry. They are delicious and I recommend them highly. Don't wear black because you will get powdered sugar all down your front as you wander through the Japanese grocery store.

Mmm. The line was long for a while as a cream puff craze swept Singapore, but fickle fashion seems to have moved on. Damn sight better than the BreadTalk pork floss buns everybody was obsessed with a while back. (Basically a very soft yeast roll filled with Japanese-style mayonnaise and topped with pork floss. Pork floss itself is good, like fluffy pork cotton candy, but...)

Only Eyes

You Nexus Six? I design your eyes!

PowerPuff Girls

This post goes out the the ladeez, because the fellas don't really wear much makeup. This is something that makes it more work to be a girl. Nonetheless I sometimes pity guys because they can't change their appearance, and I find makeup to be lots of fun. So, the message today is that more people should wear fake eyelashes. No, wait. Seriously.

Ok, the full strip of lashes is difficult to manage properly and only appropriate for going out dancing, this is true. It can be hard to position and since the strip that forms the base is essentially going to look like liquid liner, it has to be perfectly even to look good, or, more simply, camoflauged in a wider line of black eye-liner. So no, you shouldn't go to work with silver lashes that have bits of feathers stuck on them, or you will indeed look like a big freak. BUT, there are also the little clumps of fake eyelashes, set in rows on little plastic trays. You can buy fancy ones from department-store brands like Shu Uemura but there's no reason to do so; just go to the drugstore, where they also sell the adhesive. (Note that this reasoning does not apply to the fabled Shu Uemura eyelash curler, which really is much better than all the others. You should just go get one.)

So, you pull one of the clumps out of the package with some tweezers, and dip its base gently into the liquid glue (you may have to tilt the bottle here). Not too much glue. You may sort of feel like "aah glue is near my eye" for a second, but it's fine. Now you put one clump at the outside corner of your upper lashes, repeat with a second one further in, and there you go. That is, the little blob of the base should be lined up with the base of your own lashes, and resting on top of them. Two on each eye, at the outer corners. I always curl my eyelashes and put one coat of black mascara on first. (And really, even if you think my fake eyelashes idea is nuts you should be doing this all the time because it is one of the quickest, easiest ways to look better and doesn't look as if you're wearing make-up at all. That, some Clinique gel blush, maybe a little Smith's Rosebud Salve, and your pretty self is out the door.)

I know, you're saying, why the heck would I be doing this, you crazy Belle Waring person. Why? Because you will look like f&^%*@g Bambi, that's why. You, but manga-drawing sparkle-eyed you. Let's just think about it like this: every single ad for mascara that you have ever seen, ever was actually an ad for false eyelashes. You'll do it and think, oh this is just silly; no one will possibly think these can be my real lashes because they're like a foot long. But the number of people who will look at you and think you're wearing fake eyelashes is zero. Everyone will just think you look really wide-awake and really foxy.

They sell special eyelash-adhesive-dissolver but it can be hard to find. Oil-based make-up remover and gentle rubbing will do the trick. And that's our lesson for today. Tune in some other time, when we learn about how Ettusais' Zero-Pore makeup base is the most awesome thing ever.

Now with extra Crepuscules!

Hey look! Someone made a Teethy statue.

(via Majikthise)

We Write Letters

Dear Republicans,
Please try and stop using phrases such as "his pimped out Caddy" when referring to black politicians, because it makes you sound like insane racists. Thanking you in advance,
Normal People

Piglet's Big Movie

For some reason, Zoë is entranced with Piglet's Big Movie [amazon]. Her are her illustrations of her favorite scene, in which Kanga pretends to think that Piglet is Roo, and gives him a bubble bath (or something like that.)

And:

I lost a library book today. So I'm depressed. So I identify with the Piglet in the pictures.

Piggy!!

Here by popular demand, it's the cutest toy ever stuffed with stale rice hulls by impoverished Montangard children. Ladies and gentleman: Piggy!

Gong Xi Fa Cai!

Happy New Year, everyone! This is the year of the pig. Violet is pleased as her special stuffed animal is a pig named "Piggy." Piggy is pieced together from hill tribe textile scraps, is very hard as it's apparently stuffed with sawdust and frankly smells a little funky. I got Piggy in Vietnam. It's really the time of year to bust out that red cheongsam, so here you go. Precious photos. More under the fold. You must all admire my haircut, which I did my own self as usual. With the money I save on not haircuts I can have a cheongsam custom sewed for me at last like I've always dreamed! I told John he has to check out Wong Kar Wai's In the Mood For Love from the school library so I can take screencaps to the tailor. People pretty much say this about me now, but with the right attire I know I could elicit those siren words "she dresses like that to go out for noodles?!"

The High Dials

The High Dials are a great band and everybody should listen to them. You can just follow the link and hear for yourself but they sound quite a bit like Doves (link to lame-ass Flash-festooned site, sorry), and not totally unlike the High Llamas. They claim to be psychedelic/pop, but the drumming is too tight for that. Real psychedelic music like the Incredible String band or Syd Barrett sounds like either a) it's been cleverly written in 7/9 time or b) the musicians are so out of it that there's not actually any rhythym at all. Their myspace page has some downloads and tour info. It seems they don't have a record label right now, but can that be right? No, because the High Dials are totally airwolf. Y'all should go check it out and give them money or love or something. At least friend them.

Playa Turn Your Head Around/Take Off That Crown, You Been Robbed

Bush administration officials are being met with cruel, cold, unwarranted skepticism from the Traitorious M-S-M:

"In the old days, if the U.S. government had come out and said, 'We've got this, here's our assessment,' reasonable people would have taken it at face value," the official said of the Baghdad briefing. "That's never going to happen again."

Why do they have to be haters?

Asked about the "highest levels" charge, Burns replied: "The president . . . did not claim that today. We are not claiming that today."

That was precisely what the military asserted in its Baghdad briefing for reporters Sunday, a secretive session in which no cameras or tape recorders were allowed and no names were given for the speakers.

The charge was that Tehran's operatives were supplying explosive devices to Iraqi Shiites who are killing U.S. troops. Proof was laid out on a table: Iranian-made weapons and copies of false identity cards found on captured agents said to be members of the Quds Force of Iran's elite Revolutionary Guards.

"The Quds Force," a senior defense analyst then explained, "on paper reports to the IRGC, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. In reality, they really report directly to the supreme leader," Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. "So the activities that the IRGC Quds Force are conducting in Iraq, we assess, are coming from the highest levels of the Iranian government."

(Although the briefer emphasized that he was referring to Khamenei and not to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bush cited the Iranian president at yesterday's news conference. "Whether Ahmadinejad ordered the Quds Force to do this, I don't think we know," he said.) The briefer's comments Sunday shifted the focus of a lengthy presentation that had been planned for more than a month. Several media accounts Monday morning noted that no proof had been offered for the "highest levels" charge. "The process fumbled what should be an easy story to tell," one administration official said ruefully.

Seriously, don't hate on an administration official like that. We have someone trustworthy lined up for the Powell slot, and we made Powerpoint slides, Condi's working with POTUS on flashcards so he can remember who's actually in charge of Iran's government, and it's going to be awe--what now?

Controversy grew Monday over reports that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, had told reporters in Australia that while he knew the weapons were Iranian-made, "I would not say by what I know that the Iranian government clearly knows or is complicit."

Frantic telephone calls from Washington to Pace's traveling party ensued. Snow and his counterpart at the State Department, Sean McCormack, were pummeled in daily briefings and directed questions to the Pentagon.

On Tuesday, even as Snow told reporters in Washington he had spoken with Pace and they were on the same page, the general reiterated his view. The discovery of the explosives, Pace said during a news conference in Jakarta, "could not translate to the Iranian government per se is directly involved in doing this."

This is the kind of low-key pushback by military figures that will make it impossible for the Bush administration to gin up a shooting war with Iran, right? Please? Pleasepleaseplease? I vacillate between thinking that war with Iran is so spectacularly stupid and insane that it can't happen, and a sinking sensation of "here we go again."

Relatedly, I only came to the realization in the past few years that other nations could rightly turn to the US and say "you get in a lot of wars, dawg." No, really. For whatever reason I still had this image of us biding our time over here in cornfed muscular isolation until we really got pushed into the shit. Turning the events of the past hundred years or so over in my mind I had to concede that, quite frankly, there ain't no telling when we're down for a jack move.