double take

Seoul was rather grey. The head-turningly handsome men at every corner made up for it, somewhat. The comforting ginseng chicken soup helped too.


With only four days and pockets of time in between work, I didn't get take in much culture, though I consumed kimchi daily, if that counts. I did manage to buy four dresses, two pairs of footwear, two T-shirts, one pair of socks and a whole bunch of Korean beauty products in that short time though.


For the most part, the weather was bearably chilly, but was perfect on the night we had cocktails on the grounds of a 500-year-old palace on which an alien mothership had landed. Strawberries -- not any old strawberries, but plump and sweet ones from Korea -- dipped in chocolate are divine with champagne. Why did it take me so long to discover this?


I had been telling everyone before the trip that I would, finally, get to see cherry blossoms, but it was clearly not meant to be. The season was over and all I saw were these flowers which I suspected -- and Googled to confirm -- were azaleas. Pretty, but not quite the same.

who likes monday?

Last Monday, I was inspired to do something boliao.


I snipped stalks of yellow flowers from my front yard.


I packed my collection of brown glass bottles into a paper bag.


I made little cards and tied them with green ribbons.


And left them on my colleagues' desks before they got in to work.

Happy Monday, folks!

me x 3 = self-portraits

I had a "I also can do" moment when I saw these book covers. I'd like to think mine is more artistic (hand-drawn with marker), more environmentally friendly (recycling crinkly paper that is wrapped around clothes from boutiques that want to be classy) and much cheaper. Well, free, actually.


Doggie likes to wash my face in the mornings -- with his tongue.


I'd been looking for a merry-go-round for a long time, not knowing that there is one within walking distance of my office. It's a mini version, but I still had a giddy goody time.

#27

Before: Unruly brows (click on the photo to enlarge at your own peril!)


After: Defined brows (I feel so much more groomed now. It's troublesome being a woman, so much plucking and shaving and whatnot.)

#27 off the list, thanks to a voucher from M for a brow threading session.

triptych

ART REVIEW
Triptych, circa 1999 (digital art)
By MS
Currently being restored at Musee Zuckerberg

Suggested head: Poetic justice

By Fayë Wachowski-Hong

In certain circles, the exploits of mysterious Facebook guerilla-activist MS are the stuff of legends. Nothing much is known about the artist who finally destroyed the formerly unstoppable social networking site by introducing a virus into its database in 2009.

Upon logging into their accounts, users were greeted not by their homepages, but by rapidly morphing screensaver-like graphics of the grossest kind: exploding jellyfish marinated in tomyam soup, tennis balls sprouting millions of eyeballs complete with luscious lashes and the classic one of Mark Zuckerberg repeatedly superpoking himself while an interrogator asks him to Become A Fan Of Jolin Tsai.

Fed up with the then-controversial redesign of Facebook, users found MS's spam-art to be the last straw. In one day, the site lost 80 per cent of its members. The term Facebook is now commonly used by insiders as shorthand for "rapidly imploding Internet phenomenon".

The plot thickens, however, with the recent discovery of this triptych, which experts believe were executed by MS using very primitive tools (the Paint programme that used to be found on the now-obsolete operating system, Windows) during a bleak winter in Leeds. They were retrieved from a hard drive by a nerdy innkeeper, who believed he was downloading vintage porn.

While MS's Facebook graffitti was the height of gory sophistication (several users lapsed into a catatonic daze at the vividness of the images), this triptych of early works express a very different aesthetic. The bold use of primary colours, the choice of language, a phallic object and nature as elemental, eternal themes and the studied simplicity of the composition - these all indicate a serenity that one would not have expected of the notorious MS.

Art historians will now have to revise their take on the influences and motivation behind the artist who spawned the MySpace vandal, the YouTube destroyer and the various others who formed a generation disillusioned by Web 2.0's failed promises. This glimpse of MS during a phase when the World Wide Web was a space for seemingly innocent doodles cannot help but induce a pang of nostalgia for a simpler time.

nobody nobody butchu

I'm so addicted to this song. I dance in my chair when I listen to it in the office. And I wish I could move like that.



My sissy is going to punish her students by making them do this dance routine. I can't wait till their vid hits YouTube.



My fave move is the one where the hand becomes a pecking beak. When can I master this dance!