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Sick of returning to vomit
I’m coming down with a cold, which is a ridiculous thing to happen in a tropical country. I have muscular pains in my legs, my head aches and my voice is deterioating into a whisper. I’ve taken vitamin C, paracetamol and chocolate and still I feel quite, quite grotty.
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Settlers
Near my office is a cafe called Settlers; it’s in a row of shops and bars that starts with a vaguely lacklustre bar and ends with one of those karaoke joints where there are no windows and you have a terrible (but possibly unjustified) sense of foreboding when you walk past. Having said that, Settlers […]
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I’m not racist but …
How come you never hear the phrase “I’m not racist but …” apart from when it suffixes something racist? To my knowledge, nobody has ever said “I’m not racist, but did you know that bauxite is the most plentiful source of aluminium in the world?” Then again, you never hear anyone say “I’m not hungry, […]
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Ribblestrop
Today I read another book set partly underground, the rather odd Ribblestrop. Rather than being full ofexcrement-encrusted soldiers, it’s populated with some fairly likeable children (one with an indestructible head, another missing a toe but with a mysterious fortune, a feisty heroine, a gang of eccentric Himalayans), some unlikeable or ineffective adults, an underground labyrinth […]
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The Subterrene War Trilogy
After devouring the first two parts of Ian Tregillis’ Milkweed Triptych, I was given as a bonus item the first chapter of T. C. McCarthy’s Germline, which seemed a fairly gung-ho future war story. But it was for free and I was in a bookshop in Taipei two weekends ago, so when I found the […]
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Congratulations! (again)
This feels like further disappointment. OK, I may be outside of the dreaded 99%, but that still makes me just one in a million. That doesn’t seem as special as I’d hoped for.
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Congratulations…
I got an email from LinkedIn, to congratulate me on being in the top 10% of all the profile pages, ranked by views. Only trouble is, 10% of 200 million is still quite a lot. “I’m one in 20 million” doesn’t have quite the right ring to it.
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Don’t do race jokes
When I moved to Singapore, one thing that I noticed was that it felt as though a lot more material was based on racial stereotypes. I think that’s partly because the scene was more homogenous in Hong Kong: apart from Vivek Mahbubani, when I started going to the local club the comedians were almost all […]
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Short stories
Every so often, somebody will say that Hemingway wrote the greatest short story ever, in only 6 words: For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Well, I wonder if we can get a bit shorter: Check the safety, Ernie! There you go: biography, dispatched in 4 words. If you didn’t like that, perhaps you can seek […]