I love the monkey's uncle

After an unfortunate but necessary delay for getting a bit of work done and for meeting some of my students we went off downtown in search of something interesting and novel. This took us downtown, where it was raining. Extremely, very, enormously heavily. The only cure for it was to wander around the spots which could be reached while staying under cover, since we didn't bring an umbrella. This took us from the City Hall station to Suntec City, which at night lights up like the Tron building.

There was a little Heritage Festival there, showing off various artifacts of Singaporean culture, like examples of Chinese trading ships with cases of things of different texture to feel, or the watches designed by students in town, some of them quite classy and some cheerily goofy enough to be appealing.

A toy store with an abundance of weird Japanese trinkets, plus odd wobbling deformed Disney ``princess'' characters, was an endless loop of ``The Monkey's Uncle,'' a cheery enough song but not something you want to hear unto infinity. And by the time we found something to eat, the rain had subsided, so we went out, saw the New Seventh Storey Hotel, which is 50 years old in its current location and nine storeys tall, and where porsupah stayed a few years ago. And then we got lost as I tried to guide us to the Little India MRT station. Typical of me.

And on another note, happy birthday -- when the day arrives in his time zone -- to skylerbunny and to Stephen Ratliff's Star Trek: The Next Generation fan fiction superstar Marrissa Picard.

Trivia: A cube may be cut into 48 or more subcubes. Source: Lure of the Integers, Joe Roberts.

Currently Reading: Planet Quest: The Epic Discovery of Alien Solar Systems, Ken Croswell.