singabore

new pictures!

so, as you can tell by the nature of the last few posts, i've been hanging low for awhile. i was sick for a bit in chiang mai which allowed me ample time to read (note book reports below) and enjoy some food. and then to bangkok for some "same same". i've really been lounging. but when my visa needed renewing (every 30-days in thailand) i jumped on a cheap flight to singapore. the food was the best i was told and thai food was becoming tiresome (can you imagine?).

singapore is a strange place. basically only 40 years old, what once was a fishing village of 160 people is now a thriving commercialized metropolis. there is some excellent architecture around; namely the esplanade arts center ("durian" as its called here because it looks like the treasured spiky fruit) that is really strikingly (i.e. spikingly) beautiful as well as a new 16 story library.

its so clean here its spooky. i think like most crimes here, littering must be heavily punished because there isn't a scrap or cigarette butt or anything on the ground. no graffiti either. Anywhere! its bizarre. chinatown is clean! what the hell? who ever heard of clean chineese? and everyone is tidy and clean and there isn't any poverty to be seen. its like one big social science experiment that i'm not sure i like. in fact, there's very little for me to do here since i don't shop and that seems to be what everyone does here. its really hot though and the best way to avoid the heat are the malls.

oh yeah, and everyone speaks english! everyone! whether they are thai, chineese, malay, indian, or arab. spooky. this is clearly what the global culture is becoming: everyone still looks different, they all speak english, and they seem to exist to consume material goods.

but the singaporeans eat. and that i can do. at the hawker stalls its common to eat with strangers and for them to offer you some of their food. in fact, the common greeting here is "have you eaten?" here is an example of what i ate yesterday:

char siew bao (steamed pork buns), grass jelly drink, pork innard soup, kaya toast with coconut jam, fishball soup, carrot cake (which is actually made of radishes and isn't sweet), rice porridge with fish, coconut juice (twice), and mee chong (an indian dish of spicy fried noodles with pork).

whew!

so not being able to take the mall scene and my (surely) expanding gut any longer, i'm off to bali. i've heard that they like littering so it will at least feel homey.

p.s. this is awesome

ishmael

by daniel quinn. this book is so amazing i'm having a hard time coming up with the right things to say about it. i'm not sure how to even start. its about our global culture, and why its wrong, or why it might be. how there are messages everywhere that "Mother Culture" dictates the way we think the world operates. it deals with sustainability and living in harmony with nature and how we haven't been doing either for 10,000 years. it takes a novel look at the biblical stories of adam and eve and cain and abel. sean had recommended it to me years ago and i've just gotten around to reading it. everyone should read this book and give it a thought.

p.s. i'm in singapore.

the fountainhead

by ayn rand. my first ayn read. it was brilliant. i devoured it in just over a week (it helped that i was sick). she puts forth her theory of objectivism wherein the individual's happiness is a result of their productive achievements. as she states it:

1. Reality exists as an objective absolute—facts are facts, independent of man's feelings, wishes, hopes or fears.

2. Reason (the faculty which identifies and integrates the material provided by man's senses) is man's only means of perceiving reality, his only source of knowledge, his only guide to action, and his basic means of survival.

3. Man—every man—is an end in himself, not the means to the ends of others. He must exist for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. The pursuit of his own rational self-interest and of his own happiness is the highest moral purpose of his life.

4. The ideal political-economic system is laissez-faire capitalism. It is a system where men deal with one another, not as victims and executioners, nor as masters and slaves, but as traders, by free, voluntary exchange to mutual benefit. It is a system where no man may obtain any values from others by resorting to physical force, and no man may initiate the use of physical force against others. The government acts only as a policeman that protects man's rights; it uses physical force only in retaliation and only against those who initiate its use, such as criminals or foreign invaders. In a system of full capitalism, there should be (but, historically, has not yet been) a complete separation of state and economics, in the same way and for the same reasons as the separation of state and church.

it is secondarily about architecture, which tickled me pink. the main character is a true modernist in his designs and his arguments against classical architecture are, in my view, dead-on. i'm definately going after atlas shrugged soon.

corrupted incorporated

shall i say it?
do i need to?

it appears that the insurance giant AIG's chairman participated in a deal that "may have been aimed at artificially bolstering the company's financial position."

doesn't this sound a tad familiar? haven't we been through all this before? weren't the new "transparent accounting" principles supposed to curtail such acts?

i'm shocked. and not because people of questionable ethics in high places exist. i know they do. sadly, its more the rule than the exception. when will we re-invent capitalism so we don't reward people for their bullshit behavior?

i'm not shocked because this exists. i'm shocked that it will be brushed under the rug tomorrow and the machine will keep on polluting and nobody will bother to make a change.

is AIG in your portfolio?
i bet it is.

skinny legs and all

by tom robbins. i can't say enough about this writer. why haven't i been reading him my whole life? he's a poetic genius. this one's about peeling back the illusions (or veils) of life. its about everything. although i'm tempted to buy all his books and read them back-to-back next up is some ayn rand.

elephant nature park (part two)

new pictures!

i've just concluded my second week at the elephant nature park, and the amazingness just kept on coming. i was finally able to meet Lek, the park owner. She is so kind and sweet and has such a huge heart. I was able to learn most of the elephants by name and even some of the 35 dogs.

later in the week we went on what's called a "Jumbo Express" - we drove out to a remote karen hill tribe village. before arriving to the village we went into the forest and tied blessed monk scarves around trees to protect them from illegal logging. it would be nearly unthinkable for a thai to cut down a blessed tree. i chose some really big trees off in the distance that i thought needed a little extra karma.

when we got to the village we administered medicine to the children and a few residents. the kids happily lined up for their shots and we would give them sweets and balloons. they loved those balloons. i'm not sure they had ever seen one before.

the next day we bamboo-rafted down the river to an elephant camp that had some sick elephants. upon arriving we were ushered into the back - as it turns out they would allow us to treat the elephants (for free mind you) but we had to do it out of sight of the tourists. we treated about 5 elephants for cracked feet. because of over-working and extra dry conditions, their feet were cracking. some were worse than others, but you could see that they were very tenuous when it came to going up or downhill. we squirted this milky solution on their feet and coated their nails with iodine. they were'nt too happy about it.

another elephant had a huge hole in its head. their mahout said he didn't know what it was from but Pom, the one running the Jumbo Express, said the mahout probably hit him with his metal hook. the final treatment involved putting anasceptic on a gash on the side of an elephant, clearly from the harness used to carry toursists. it was deep and bleeding.

the hardest thing about this trip was that we couldn't say anything to the tourists. these elephants needed to rest for about a week with no work, but instead were going to be carrying more people in about 45 minutes. i'm sure, if the tourists had known, they wouldn't have ridden the elephants. besides, elephants are slow and terribly uncomfortable to ride on for any length of time. but if we had told the tourists what was going on, the park would not allow Lek and her group to treat the elephants at all, and they would be far worse off without treatment.

sigh.

i hope to return to the park if i can find a substantial project to work on. i feel like i've cleaned up my fair share of elephant shit. still looking for an apartment here with a kitchen - you wouldn't believe how hard it is to find one.

p.s. as far as those huge spiders are concerned, they're totally harmless (although still fast as lightning). i ran into enough of them at the park that i can now expertly shoo them away. a moment of silence for the poor guy who met his demise on the bottom of my shoe the other week.