When I go downtown on what are usually weekend jaunts I take it pretty much on trust that something will happen that's remarkable enough to be worth writing about. Today was turning out pretty dull, as far as that goes, although my tired state has been dulling my mind. My attempts to sleep more have somehow been going wrong, and I've been feeling more exhausted even when, by the clock, I'm sleeping longer. I may have reached the point of no return; I'm trying to stop telling people how I am that I'm a bit tired, since there are getting to be people who've never known me any other way.
In any case the threat that a trip to Orchard Road would turn up nothing novel (despite a grisly crime committed near the MRT station last night -- the second case of a victim's body being dismembered in several months) dissipated when I stepped outside Ngee Ann City and found a penguin. Not an actual, literal, penguin, mind you; somebody dressed in a penguin costume, waddling around in a sort of corner among the pillars and architectural elements outside. He wasn't performing or handing out flyers, just sort of shuffling around in a group of teens in brightly colored quasi-uniforms. There were a couple more packs of teens in quasi-uniforms and soon I was able to figure it out. Or, well, spot the sign that explained it all: they were getting ready for a Lion Dance.
If you've watched enough episodes of Sagwa probably you've seen one, or the preparations for one; it's a big, colorful, festive, loud pageant intended to bring luck and happiness. I'm not much on parades myself, so I didn't stick around for it, but I do wonder how the penguin figured into it. There is of course a connection, since penguins, like lions, aren't native to China, so it all fits logically together.
Trivia: The Pittsburgh Penguins won their first Stanley Cup in 1991. Source: New York Public Library Desk Reference, Paul Fargis, Sheree Bykofsky.
Currently Reading: A Logic Named Joe, Murray Leinster. It's a collection of novellas and a few short stories printed by Baen books last year, and boy, I'd forgotten how much I do like Leinster. The title story keeps getting cited as The Prediction of the Internet and ... there's justice in that. It gets at the ubiquitous nature of the computer terminals, the abundance of information from trivial to critical, and how mighty hard it'd be for society to give it up. I miss the days when computers were called logics, too, somehow.