The annotated budak

I want...

... Jelly Roll Morton's Complete Library of Congress Recordings! The father of jazz himself strums the keys "like a singer of tales... and conjures up a New Orleans funeral, from the wailing dirge to the graveyard to the racuous march back to the wake, with all its sorrow and jubilation." I want to hear how he "plays Scott Joplin's “Maple Leaf Rag” in brilliant ragtime, then interprets it his own way, slower, but with much more swing...."

Earlier, in a fit of irrational exuberance, I put in an order for a year's subscription to New Scientist. Actually I don't really want to (just) read the magazine; I rather write for it.

I think Angel tried to flatten me again last night. Maybe she was helping mrs budak perform a preemptive strike on my duck to prevent from it from emitting ghastly eruptions of nocturnal musings.

Now, I wonder if we could get Angel to wear something like this?

Booky meme

From mrs budak, I am supposed to bold the books I have read, italicise the books I might read and cross out the books I probably won't read.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller - couldn't get pass the first chapter. The book reeks of an annoying smirck.
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell  - started but didn't get far. Probably because it doesn't feel like fiction.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess   
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert

Lunchtime

My duck was too attached to the chair, so I skipped lunch yesterday.

Today, however, my duck had mrs budak's salad made from celery, lettuce, baked mushrooms and beancurd, and some orangey stuff in a vinegary dressing.

In other news, my duck extends a half-hearted approval to a ban on fur. Monkeys may disagree, but isn't feathers much better? You never hear of folks wanting to "fur" their nests, do you?

There is an ochre patch of unknown origin on my table. I think it's been there since last week. It resists my fingernails and appears to be growing in size. Hmmmm....

In management, Theory X represents the command-and-control approach which assumes that the company "must counteract an inherent human tendency to avoid work." Theory Y, in constrast, "assumes that people will exercise self-direction and self-control in the achievement of organisational objectives to the degree that they are committed to those objectives." But what about cases where one's objectives outgrow the vision of the organisation that spawned them?

Clear...

...water in a stream in Sime Forest with scattered patches of Blyxa aubertii and Limnophila sp. I could sit all day by the banks, watching the schools of rasboras and barbs foraging amidst the leaf litter while swarms of dragonflies battle in the airspace above to the amorous tune of katydids and cicadas.

The last picture shows three specimens of Rasbora elegans. Two individuals are of an unusual aberrant form with striking red tails and lacking a spot on the flank, unlike the usual form on the top right of the picture.

[Dr. Tan Heok Hui of the Department of Biological Sciences at NUS confirms that the fish is Rasbora elegans. Rasbora borapetensis is quite a different fish and I have not encountered it in the Central Catchment Area so far. Unfortunately, I have yet to see many other native species as well, including Rasbora bankanensis, the dwarf snakehead (Channa gachua) and the forest halfbeak (Hemirhamphodon pogonognathus).  Also, if you look closely at the third picture, you can see a nice specimen of  Cyclocheilichthys apogon swimming with the Puntius lateristriga and Systomus binotatus.]

Eye to eye

Aliens

The picture isn't the best, but you can clearly see the double-tail of the little goldfish on the left. The two other red fish are platies. Both species, along with some fancy guppies, were found in a stream at Sime Forest close to the feeder road. Goldy will probably not last very long; those double-tails aren't really good for predator evasion.

The platies and guppies, unfortunately, are very hardy and adaptable, so unless some kingfisher, pikehead, snakehead or Clarias cat manages to single out these colourful aliens for a meal, it's likely that subsequent generations will revert to type – with wild-type colouration and resilience. For now, the rasboras and barbs that share the stream are at the edge of a man-made invasion. Good intentions and ignorance are a tragic mix.