Fiddling

I was going to blog properly tonight while waiting for my hair to dry, but then I got distracted by emails for some of the things I'm juggling in addition to the day job:

• Follow-up queries on my co-edited volume Women and the Politics of Representation in Southeast Asia.
• Revisions and edits for my co-edited literary anthology work-in-progress In Transit: An Anthology of Writing from Singapore about Airports and Air Travel (yes, we need a pithier subtitle).
• Revisions and edits for a commissioned history of Singapore's Capitol Theatre, which should hit the shelves later this year.
• Pro bono editing for webpages for an NGO.

The day job, for those of you keeping score at home, is working [freelance] on the revamp of the Singapore History Gallery at the National Museum. Today that meant looking at some World War Two artefacts. It's quite harrowing, when you think about it, to be looking close-up at something that was worn by someone on the frontline. Suddenly every scrape and stain on the object seems laden with meaning.

Edited to add (10 February, 8:50 a.m.):
I inserted "[freelance]" in the last paragraph. I'm not a full-time museum employee and it should be clear that I'm not writing in that capacity.

Things you learn from watching reruns

I've been idly, irregularly watching reruns of the first season of The X-Files, after I happened by chance to tune in last week just as the first episode was airing on cable. I've never watched any of the seasons fully, and certainly never the pilot --- so it was something of a novelty to see Mulder and Scully right at the start of their grand adventure, back when Mulder seemed like nothing but a one-dimensional obstinate fanatic and the show hadn't quite nailed down how to portray Scully's intelligence yet.

Tonight's find: the actor Mark Sheppard, whom I first adored as Badger on Firefly and then as the excellent offbeat lawyer Romo Lampkin on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (which I've also been rewatching on my own). It turns out one of his earliest appearances on-screen was in The X-Files (season 1 episode 11, for those of you at home taking notes), as a man with pyrokinetic abilities. He didn't have that many lines, but he already had that trademark creepy, wide-eyed stare down. And the charmin' Irish brogue, of course.

Seeing him made me think of the "Hey! It's That Guy!" section of the website Fametracker, which like many gems of the late 1990s/early 2000s Internet, is now defunct. Between that and the fact that I was watching this on cable, I feel pretty old retro right now.

Educating my iPhone

A phenomenon otherwise known as "damn you autocorrect". From today's recorrected autocorrects:

• onsen, not Ibsen
• jaunting, not haunting
• prata, not pests
• fyi, not duo

I can't believe the iPhone autocorrect doesn't know "fyi".

Recalibrating

Three times today I had to tear parking coupons, and three times I caught myself just as I was about to pop out the tab for January, in time to switch to the correct tab for February. At a work meeting, I also started to tell someone, "We'll send you the document in late January ... er, I mean in the next couple of weeks."

By tonight, though, I got it right when I told ampulets that my birthday is next month. He said, "February?" and I got to retort, "No lah, today is February already."