The donation drives swing further into action, and I noted BreadTalk -- a chain of stores that sell bread- and cake-based snacks -- has begun making a 9.0 Bread. It's a big dome, maybe big enough to hang over the edge of my iBook, of bread and egg and cheese baked until crispy; it sells for S$2.30 and they donate $0.90 of each purchase to relief funds. It's quite a bargain for the amount of food you get, and it offers a painless way to donate much-needed relief funds, and I only had to mildly restrain myself from screaming what sort of monster names a snack bread after a colossal natural disaster only five days past? as I watched. They mean well, yes, and if they didn't name it after the Richter scale measurement I could probably take it.
Otherwise it's a day designed to leave me mawkish; long heavy rains interrupted with long light rains. I had the chance to say goodbye to a friend, the former chair of the department, who gave me this, my first real grownup job. I was afraid I was going to miss him entirely when I realized today would be a public holiday and I hadn't seen him yesterday, but it's amazing how you can use this e-mail thing to contact people and set up meetings. I gave him a gift, and he gave me a cable modem Starhub said they didn't want back.
Also Channel i is going off the air, victim of the merger between Singapore's two big English-language broadcasters. That's a pity; while they were always on a very short budget compared to Channel 5 -- Channel i didn't broadcast anything but commercials before noon, for example, on workdays -- they were generally more creative, and their news broadcast was dramatically better. Plus they ran Space: 1999, though to be fair Channel 5 airs Battlestar Galactica (1978) and The Six Million Dollar Man.
Trivia: The first official Sunday baseball game in the National League was played 17 April 1982. Source: The Jersey Game, James M DiClerico and Barry J Pavelec.
Currently Reading: Time is the Simplest Thing, Clifford Simak. See you in the new year.