Nobody Home

Ornate sunbird nest, now empty because the chicks have fledged.

The skin (technically exoskeleton) of a cicada. When a nymph matures, it crawls out of its skin which is then discarded.

Bike Friend

Of all the things I've owned or used, a bike, to me, feels most like a person – like a friend, even.

The inscription on this bike, which I saw one night when walking back from Toa Payoh Public Library, made me smile. "Always be with you."

Banded Snakes

After banded arthropods, I now bring you banded snakes.

These pictures are from a night walk along Old Upper Thomson Road. I went with a few friends who are amateur herpers.

They are all quite good at spotting snakes, but one of them – a Thai guy who moved to Singapore some years ago – is particularly sharp-eyed. He spotted both snakes pictured in this post – this gold-ringed cat snake:

…as well as this twin-barred tree snake, which – like the paradise tree snake featured earlier – is a "flying" snake.

My friend Kwang Ik and I were sharing a camera – my camera, but with his lens, flash and diffuser. Moreover, one of us typically took the photo while the other held the off-camera flash and diffuser. At this point we don't really know who took which photo, and in any case it doesn't really matter. "Collaboration is the condition of photography in the most basic sense," as this book puts it. We decided to share credit, and also thanked the snakes.

Baby Birds

Large-tailed nightjar with chick, at the Singapore Botanic Gardens:

...and Sunda scops owlets (how cute are they?!)

There are plenty of parks and forests in Singapore, but for reasons best known to the owls, they chose a built-up neighbourhood, right next to a bus stop. In the photo below you can see the tree – and the hollow – where they nested.

Word spread far and wide through social media and news sites, and half of Singapore turned up to see them.

Not that I have any kind of moral high ground; I obviously went to see them too. But I didn't want to add to the crowds any more than I had to, so I just stayed for five minutes, took some photos and went home.

Both the nightjar chick and the owlets have fledged now. I hope they have long and happy lives!

Nothing Left to Read

Outlook shows this message when you have nothing in your inbox:

This is not a state I have ever achieved, by the way. I generally have zero unread emails, but I don't file or delete all my email, so my inbox is never altogether empty.

Once or twice a month, I go to the library and stock up on books – mostly novels. Sometimes I have specific books that I want to borrow, but often I'm just browsing.

When I was a kid, I wanted to read everything. Even in my teens and early twenties, my reading tastes were more varied. And now? I still read a lot, but I feel like my tastes are narrower than before. When I go to the library without specific books in mind, I always worry that this is the day when I finally fail to find any books that interest me. Nothing left to read.

Or rather, the worry is not about running out of books; it's more about running out of interest or curiosity. Of my tastes narrowing to a point where I comb the fiction section of a library but fail to find a book I want to read.

The other day I walked through the fiction section in alphabetical order and, although I was admittedly just skimming and not looking too closely, I almost made it to the end without finding any books I wanted to borrow. Then in the Y–Z shelves, I suddenly found three promising titles: Lion City by Ng Yi-Sheng, The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara and Happiness Is Possible by Oleg Zaionchkovsky.

I didn't enjoy Lion City and gave up partway through. The People in the Trees was really good – like The Lost World (which I loved as a child) but with post-colonial consciousness. And Happiness Is Possible was a cracker – one of those instances when it felt less like me finding a book; more like the book finding me, at a time when I was was ready for it.

I liked it enough that, in keeping with my stated policy, I bought a copy for keeps.

Blue-Banded Creatures

Sunda blue-banded digger bee:

Electric blue jumping spider on my hand:

...and a close-up (sadly I only had my phone, but someday I hope to get a good macro shot of one of these beauties):

Backlit Geckos

I was saying to Tommy that his recent post, featuring a spider on a microwave, reminded me of a photo I have of a gecko.

Me:	Maybe I should post it. But I wonder if I've been posting too many animal pics recently.
Tommy:	No such thing as too many animal pics!

Thus reassured, I bring you, first, gecko on illuminated street-map:

...and second, geckos on restaurant sign:

Idiot

From Eric Hobsbawm's introduction to The Communist Manifesto:

…the original meaning of the Greek term 'idiotes', from which the current meaning of 'idiot' or 'idiocy' is derived: 'a person concerned only with his own private affairs and not with those of the wider community'.

Bloglook and Blogname

The other day I was reading a post by photographer Hannah Yoon, and thinking that Substack's design looks rather sophisticated and nice – whitespace, serif font, occasionally (in this case) broken up with an understated photograph. And I found myself wondering if I should give this blog another makeover to make it look more like Substack, or perhaps even start a new blog on Substack. (A parallel blog I mean; I wouldn't abandon this one.)

The new blog, if I were to start one, would be about photography. In 2020 I started writing regularly for a couple of photography websites, whereupon I decided I would reserve this blog mostly for non-photography topics. But I've recently been wondering if, rather than writing for other photography blogs, I should just start my own. Just an idle thought; I most likely won't act on it. In any case, changing this blog's design to make it more Substack-like was still an option.

Then I saw this tweet asking what people miss about the "good old days" of the web, to which @jeesun replied:

i miss blogs with a unique look. it seems like everyone uses substack nowadays.

I think I'll keep my old design for now :)

What I would like to change is how it looks on mobile devices. But that involves messing with the CSS template and implementing responsive design, which I currently don't (perhaps never will) have the energy for.

* * *

In hindsight, I would have liked to have chosen a blog name and URL that don't have my own name – but that ship has sailed.

Last year I wrote that one of the blog names I considered was The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. I think Planting Cabbages would have been a good name too. It's from a quote by Michel de Montaigne:

Let death find me planting my cabbages, indifferent to death, and still more to my unfinished garden.

Planting Cabbages is my username on WeChat, which I use to communicate with some of my Chinese friends. One time they asked me why I picked this name, and I told them about the Montaigne quote. They found it very interesting, and on the taxi ride home, we ended up having a long discussion about it. One of them also speaks French, so she looked up the original quote and proposed various possible translations. Another mentioned a Chinese philosopher who said something similar.

They later told me that the discussion continued after they dropped me off. The taxi-driver was silent throughout, but right at the end, as they were getting off, he asked, "But why cabbages?"

Two Beetles

A rhinoceros beetle we found on a night walk in Pasir Ris Park, sitting on a wooden bench.

I had to get quite close to the beetle, with my camera in one hand, and a flash (with small softbox) in the other. But the beetle was unbothered.

The next beetle (rose chafer) was sadly past being bothered; I found it in my room when it was already dead. It was lying on the floor, but I placed it on this book for the photo op.

The Lamb Lies Down on Balestier

Remember the dangerous sheep from last year?

Now the lamb is lying down.

Balestier is just the name of my street; the post title references a Genesis album.

Spiders with Prey

From the Singapore Botanic Gardens, a black wood spider (Nephila kuhlii) eating a bee:

Our Goth friend is an orb-weaving spider, same genus as the golden orb weaver featured last year.

I took the photo with a Fuji 50-230mm f/4.5-6.7 zoom lens (purchased secondhand for only SGD 130) coupled with a Raynox DCR-250 macro attachment. This combination does the job, but I'm thinking about upgrading to a dedicated macro lens for my Fuji, specifically the Laowa 65mm f/2.8. So I'm monitoring Carousell as one does, waiting for a good deal on a used copy.

The Laowa, borrowed from a friend, is what I used for the photo below, taken in Thomson Nature Park. A jumping spider (not sure what species) eating a moth:

Finally, a spider not with prey but with an egg sac. Heteropoda lunula, also known as the Lightning Huntsman, in Pasir Ris Park.

The last photo is from a night walk in Pasir Ris Park. In my last post I said I have a 100% (2 out of 2) record of spotting snakes at Pasir Ris. On last week's night walk, I saw an oriental whip snake (which I've seen before) and also a few dog-faced water snakes, which are apparently pretty common but I hadn't seen them before. I didn't get a good photo though, as they were in turbid waters.