In the Analects (Lunyu 論語), there is a line that goes as follows: “The master said, ‘If names are not rectified, then what is said will not obey/follow [true meaning],…
Someone forwarded me a YouTube video that someone made of a commencement speech that the late novelist, David Foster Wallace, gave in 2005 at Kenyon College. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z5TIFr5XMo The speech is…
I came across a series of seven “Army Behavior Posters” in the US National Archives that were created in the 1950s by the United States Information Service (but it was…
The previous post brought out some good comments by readers/friends on Facebook. We have been having a little discussion about why it is that Filipino musicians were (and to some…
In 1964, Filipino musician and songwriter Vic O. Cristobal (葛士培) and (I’m assuming Hong Kong) lyricist Ye Lü (葉綠) wrote a song called “Enjoy Yourself Tonight” (歡樂今宵) that was recorded…
I had never heard of the Batu Puteh Caves until I read about them in the July 16, 1903 issue of The British North Borneo Herald. These caves high up…
I got a dose of 70s nostalgia today, so I decided to take a look at what was happening in Singapore in the 1970s. And one of the first things…
I was looking at an issue from 1959 of a Chinese-language newspaper that was published in Bangkok, the Sing Sian Yit Pao (Xin Xian ribao 新暹日報), and I started to…
There is a museum that opened in Bangkok around a decade ago called the Museum Siam (some people call it the Discovery Museum). It was designed by Thai academics (and…
A long time ago I wrote about some advertisements for Worcestershire sauce that I found in a newspaper from Siam in the 1930s. At that time I looked on the…