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Posted at 12 Dec 5:27 pm. 0 comments
The buffet lunch at Kampachi sets its participants back $90+ each, but it’s worth it.
Sashimi so fresh its ghosts are still lingering around the delicately sliced meat, glaring at you balefully. Green tea ice cream that is absolutely divine. If tempura’s your thing they keep it coming as fast as you can crunch your way through, and the mochi was good enough for everyone to want – and get – seconds.
A table of about half a dozen is large enough to order all the varieties of teppanyaki, so we had two rounds; everyone had a taste without getting ahead of their stomachs. Our table was divided into two: those who do the buffet every year, and those who were two obviously newbies. Mine was the only ala carte order, showing which side I belonged conclusively to.
The stomach capacities of the veterans was amazing to behold. Some even managed bowls of cold soba at the end.
Then dinner at Brussels, Jaya One, which makes a decent sausage. Their brownie more closely resembles a chocolate cake, served with chocolate sauce, a scoop of ice cream and a halved strawberry. I do not recommend the Blue Jamaica cocktail; go for the beers, it’s what everyone else is there for. I can’t tell the difference between most, but ordered a Leffe Brune and Hoegaarden on advice from others.
What came could just as easily have been a Guinness and Kilkenny. I’ll simply never know.
It’s a Hoegaarden, dammit. Sez so on the glass.
Posted at 07 Dec 2:43 pm. 0 comments
Finally entered No Black Tie.
This is a great achievement because in the three or so times we’ve attempted to visit it in the past, we just couldn’t figure out how to open the door.
(Total. Utter. Complete. Fail.)
Inside there were wooden chairs arranged around tables in front of a small stage, an amazing deep-fried soft shell crab, a few glasses of 10-year old Dow’s, and a saxophonist with magic fingers and his band.
Would go again.
(Now we know how the door works.)
Posted at 16 Nov 10:53 pm. 0 comments
PD was great.
Good food, watery fun, and a brilliant game called Ring of Fire/Four Queens. Subdued debates late at night when most were asleep. We only went to bed hours into the new day and woke early for the hotel breakfast, but while exhaustion was expected it was funny how throughout the entire trip we were rarely all in the same room at the same time. People kept wandering off for catnaps in ones and twos.
Maybe five years earlier, a trip like this meant staying awake for as long as humanly possible, and indiscriminately employing the use of caffeine stimulants if unconsciousness was imminent. Every ounce of fun had to be milked of the time.
Now it’s “Fuck it, I don’t care if everyone’s dangling naked from the ceiling fan, I’m going to bed.”
We’re all getting old.
Then there was the thing about alcohol. I had fun the first night, but when everyone had gone off to bed without a single head spinning from overindulgence I admit to disgust. “Drink with me,” I appealed to Tiger, and he obliged, therefore saving my night.
We had half a cup of langkau each before I stopped, deciding I had enough.
Half an hour later my buzz was completely gone and I found I was as guilty of overcaution as everyone else. Pwned, totally pwned.
—
Rules for Ring of Fire:
People sit in a circle with a shuffled deck of cards. Each open one card at a time.
Ace, 2, 3, 4 – Pick the corresponding number of people to drink a shot – or one sucker to drink all.
5 – Question card. When the person who has this card asks a question and someone answers, the answerer has to drink. If the answerer says “Fuck you,” the questioner drinks. Is nullified only when the next number 5 card is opened.
6 – Thumb on table. Person can place thumb on table (or floor) at any time. Last person to notice and follow suit drinks.
7 – Hand on head. Same as (6)
8 – Strike a pose. Same as (6)
9 – Topic card. Person who opens it picks a multiple-answer topic eg. “Name the types of coffee at Starbucks” and gives an answer, followed by the person beside him and so on. If people fail to answer in time, they drink. Questions may be as obscure as the questioner wishes.
10 – Toilet card. No one may go to the toilet without this card. It may be exchanged for a penalty, eg. finishing their drink before they are permitted to go.
Jack – Ring of Fire: Everyone starts to drink. People may only stop drinking if the person beside them puts down their glass. Pray your neighbor isn’t a sadistic bastard.
Queen – Drink to the Queen. Everyone drinks a shot.
King – The first three Kings escape unscathed. The fourth King downs his entire glass (in another variation, the contents of the glasses of the first three as well).
Posted at 12 Nov 1:17 pm. 0 comments
Organizing accommodation for our PD trip was a bit of an eye-opener. It’s not the same as it was when we were students. I only just realized that – slow, I know.
I suppose it’s only natural that when you’re on a tight budget, you’re more casual about your comfort. But for me, squeezing as many people into one bed as possible was part of the fun – that slumber party atmosphere, the whispers and giggles in the dark.
I’ve spent the night four to a double bed, each unable to turn on their side without disturbing everyone else, unwilling to use the ample bunk beds in the next room. On most trips, or even when the boys stayed over on Saturday nights after clubbing, we used to crash three to a sofa bed. And it was fun, convenient even, because if you wanted to stop someone snoring, you could just poke them instead of sacrificing your pillow to throw at their head.
(Sometimes they solved this problem by throwing socks. Dirty socks. Yes.)
It does makes perfect sense that some like their personal space, some are willing to pay for comfort. But though I hate to admit it, I’m nostalgic for unconscious mutterings, increasingly violent shoves against the insensate leg that’s taking up your sliver of the bed, the press of warm bodies in the cold dawn, the comforting chorus of regular, muffled breathing that seeps into your consciousness first thing in the morning.
Posted at 26 Oct 5:12 pm. 0 comments
So recently on one of those eternal email threads with Adam and Ross the topic of friends came up, and it got me thinking how it was getting harder and harder to make close friends. Meeting people is easy, the sunshine and rainbows kind where everyone is all smiles, but to me a real friend is a friend who trusts you enough to let you share their secret heart, their woes, their inner voices, to hold them when they are alone and lift them up when they sink down. There is no deep loyalty anymore, that’s far harder to win.
It made me think that some bygones should be left bygones, and close friends cherished for what they are, instead of being taken for granted.
This process is far less extreme than what Den went through to come to a similar realization: lying stiff as a board at night in negative temperatures while hiking up an ice mountain. Perhaps I’m not that masochistic after all.
Posted at 29 Sep 3:25 am. 0 comments
From the start, there was only one act I really wanted to see. I was there mostly because of Sexybum. “We’ve never been to a local concert together, baby,” he crooned, and turned on the pleading puppy-dog eyes. I never stood a chance.
So I got tickets for Catz and her beau and we all trotted off together. We lost them early on in the crowd so we circled round to the back where it was less crowded and sweaty, where we could cuddle without missing too much of the action. Of the entire lineup I have a soft spot only for Reshmonuu, but he was just finishing up as we reached the surf beach.
It must be said that MC Hotdog was a very pleasant surprise – his first few songs, though in Mandarin, had awfully catchy, engaging tunes to them. We cheered him until for some ungodly reason he started rapping about two tigers (?) to a nursery rhyme tune.
Why, indeed.
DJ HaZe must have royally pissed off the backstage crew pre-show. I couldn’t tell you if he was good or not because the sound was so soft, it was more like background music than a full-on rave set. It also had floodlights on full blast all throughout the entire set. You couldn’t look at him. You couldn’t hear him. If a DJ plays a set in a theme park and is invisible and inaudible, did he really play?
The main event came on at 10.30pm. We cheered loudly and wildly until we realized we couldn’t see a thing over the frantically waving hands and so made our way round to where we could at least stare at the camera’s projections on large white cloth screens.
And yes, they were pretty good even if they seemed exhausted after their punishing flight schedule. They seemed accustomed to a more engaged audience – so sorrylah, we all very shy-shy one. Will.i.am barely sang. Taboo was in tune, on the beat, sharp moves, but Sexybum dismissed him as eye candy, probably because the girls were going wild for him. Fergie looked good, but seemed unable to master the technical aspects of singing into a microphone, at least for the first third of it. She was briefly off key too but got her act together before the halfway point. Apl.de.ap carried the show. He sang most of it, DJed brilliantly for a spell, and was generally the show’s main man.
The sound people needed a seeing-to. I’d bet good money Fergie’s mike issues weren’t all her fault. The sound quality was so bad that once they stopped to ask if everyone at the back could hear them. And the cameraman seemed unable to grasp the basic guideline of “Focus on the singer.” As a result, for half of Big Girls Don’t Cry we were treated to a closeup of the guitarist’s guitar, and throughout the concert he continued to focus on everybody else walking about the stage BUT the person who happened to be singing. Highly infuriating.
And oh, yeah, it was Arthur’s Day after all so I should mention Guinness, but the line for the alcohol was so long, and the drinking area so tiny, we didn’t bother even though we could have done with a refreshing draught.
Posted at 21 Sep 1:13 am. 0 comments
We’ve just swaggered in, laughing, arms around each other in a casual gesture that signifies solidarity and protectiveness and just so happens to keep everyone else out. We have the energy of children, the strength and grace of animals, the careless pride of royalty. Even the erratically lit darkness cannot conceal the predatory eyes that swivel to watch, but they don’t concern us. They can’t touch us if we don’t want them to. We’re about to own this place.
That’s what it used to feel like.
These days – I don’t know. Maybe it’s the music. Maybe it’s the people. Maybe it’s the atmosphere. Here my friends and I walk into Zouk (or worse, Ruumz when it was still open) and it’s packed wall-to-wall with skinny emo teenagers with their flailing limbs, baggy jeans and chains and over-gelled hair made extra spiky for the occasion, trying to look fashionably unimpressed with the world. Hello, it’s a club. It means a party, fun times, you know? I didn’t sign up for Wangst and Depression Day at the kindergarten.
(But back to their hair. Is spiky hair the equivalent of a bright red breast on a robin in today’s teenage mating rituals? Do teen girls nowadays get turned on only if their fingertips bleed when they finger their man’s up-swept fringe? Am I the only one with visions of boys settling a fight over a girl by lowering their heads and running at each other like bulls?)
But people in the City seem to equate clubbing with standing around and looking aloof while pouring drinks down their throats. This is not my idea of fun. I can’t even hold a decent conversation because one can’t hear anything over the music and I get tired of bellowing into peoples’ ears. Added to the fact that I’m naturally soft-spoken, I might as well give up from the start. I do.
My friends tend to be mostly male, and single. They spend the entire night checking out the girls around the place, which I have no issue with, but they take Sexybum with them, the bastards. Which is usually fine by me except it leaves me without a similar partner in crime, and the local males are not at all worth checking out; in the City, the men in clubs make me feel vaguely soiled. In Melbourne, we never left each other’s side. I can’t recall being left alone for even ten seconds when I went out with my boys. Even if we were all dancing with different people, we were always within reach. Entire conversations were communicated with a touch, a glance, a tilt of the head. In a night we wrote a novel’s worth of dialogue with our body language.
(And most importantly, it was all about us! The night, the dancing, the jokes, everything was about us! We were too busy having our own fun to stand around watching other people have their fun!)
But here I am in the City leaning against the table sipping at my extra-strong drink and wishing I got drunk more easily. I’m bored out of my skull, tormented with a godawful track put on by some DJ who was grievously deluded in thinking he could spin, deprived of amusing chatter and even a companionable silence – hell, even companions, since more than half of them are prowling the club sniffing desperately for short skirts. What, you really think I enjoy that sort of thing? I’d have more fun at home getting drunk alone, which is essentially what I’m doing.
Back to that electronic cacophony of yowling cats they call music – why? Just… why? I listen to anything. I find pleasure in the raw super-rhythm of breakbeat hardcore. I don’t actually disdain remixed R&B as much as my elitist pretensions insist I do. But who the hell went to such pains to drag out the worst DJs from the cesspool of music fail, put them in the best clubs in the City and told them to play?
You just can’t dance to music like that. You can’t close your eyes and lose yourself in it – in another country I have walked into clubs stone sober and danced til dawn without touching a drop of alcohol. You just have to stand there and endure, as I do: no baby, good dancing will not be happening tonight. Most of the people whose company I enjoy don’t dance. A few who do favor grinding on me, for crying out loud, I’m not single anymore. I can’t walk out onto the floor and pick any partner as I used to do. Quite likely, my every move would be followed by accusing eyes, the owners of which just whisked Sexybum away to gawk at various other girls and their assets.
Which part of the above sounds good to you? How much fun do you think I’m having? What-
-what? Oh, I’m sorry, I just got carried away for a moment there. No, I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to the club tonight, but thanks for asking. I’m just feeling a little tired.
Posted at 30 Jul 3:29 pm. 0 comments
In my day, when someone had a cold you gave them vitamin C, warm chicken soup and a box of tissues and sent them to their room to sleep it off. Before the week’s end they’d be better. Sometimes a particularly nasty case dragged on another week, but if it did – so what?
“Your mother’s been ill for what, three days now?” my dad said when he called up. “Take her to the hospital.”
“It’s not H1N1,” I retorted, reading between the lines.
“How do you know?”
“She’s only got a runny nose, for starters.”
“There you go, talking like you know it all. Doctors can’t even tell if it’s H1N1 or not and there you go like you know everything.”
My dad: well-respected and feared by many, but he has his really dim moments.
He tried to dissuade me from going to Sarawak too when I was on Day 4 of a cough that Mum had taken five days to recover from (and promptly passed on to me). “It could be H1N1, how would you know? It could turn into pneumonia.”
I touched down in Sarawak the next day, experienced instant recovery and proceeded to run in the rain, hike, club, drink, dance and scream myself hoarse at the Rainforest World Music Festival.
Speaking of which, three perfectly healthy friends of mine actually pulled out of Rainforest last minute, forfeiting their air tickets and paid accommodation in a move that still makes me sigh when I think about it, even though I vowed to be understanding. The rest of us had great fun. We’d have had more fun if everybody had been present, but c’est la swine flu paranoia.
Dear H1N1-phobic persons, please go out and get some perspective. The grip on reality comes free.
Posted at 24 Jul 4:49 pm. 0 comments
About a year ago Shazza and I were talking about sites we wanted to set up. Shazza is a good friend and a bad influence. Around her I drink beer (which I usually dislike) and smoke (which I usually don’t), and I have a ball. There’s just something about her that encourages drinking, smoking and long relaxed talks at cafes or bars – and I’m not complaining!
She was introducing me to CMSes, specifically recommending Drupal and dotNetNuke, which she works with. “CMSes?” I said in my infinite ignorance. “They help you build a whole new site with half the fuss? Hey, I’ve done those before.”
What she was really referring to, I found out after some research, were not the pithy amateurish PHP solutions I’d churned out a couple of times to assist other even less web-savvy users tack on a variety of standardized pages to their sites. A proper CMS is capable of customizing virtually all aspects of a website you can think of and then running the whole thing efficiently. It can build from its tiny, helpful component bits a well-oiled, multi-functional monster more likely to grab your browser and rape it than let itself be displayed meekly. (This is a good thing. In some circumstances. I think.) If one knows their way around code, the sky’s the limit. Even I, who navigate PHP with the equivalent of a cane, a guide dog and the kindness of many strangers, can see new horizons opening up before my dark sunglasses.
The Drupal vs Joomla! vs Mambo vs Zikula, TYPO3, etc. debate will continue as long as the Net lasts, so I’m not going to go into it but feel free to google if you want some entertainment. The main reasons I chose Drupal:
- Flexibility and customization. Drupal doesn’t have as many modules or templates as Joomla! or Mambo, but the ability to customize makes up for it and more. Nothing annoys me more than reaching a limitation I can’t get around. I start flailing about with my mouse and deleting things.
- Control. Because I’m a control freak at heart and I have plenty of love for multiple user permissions.
- Categories and taxonomy. Taxonomy is a lovely little thing I’m only just beginning to play with, but the possibilities are wonderful. Nesting, for starters.
- SEO. Can anyone say Clean URLs?
So far, absolutely no regrets. The amount of time it’s saved me is phenomenal. I can spend more of my day on Facebook now.
P.S. – The dreaded Drupal learning curve is highly overrated. Some people seem to think wrapping their heads around Drupal is akin to figuring out the Riemann hypothesis – wrong. Trial and error (programmers are more than familiar with this) will set you right eventually. Tutorials help. Or jumping in both feet first always has my vote.
