#8, Singapore

• The “Prosperity Burger” is currently McDonald’s signature sandwich in Malaysia and Singapore. Its slogan is: “usher in an abundance of prosperity.” The burger comes in beef, or chicken.
• 19m people emigrated from Britain between 1850 and today – “no other country in the world ever came close to exporting so many of its inhabitants.” [Niall Ferguson, Empire]
• There were some bombings in Thailand on New Year's eve. No one is sure who carried them out, but suspects certainly include the current Government. The same Government is short of bomb sniffer dogs, needed to prevent the planting of more bombs, possibly by itself. As a result it is asking its citizens to send their pet dogs to bomb training school. More than 150 patriotic thai pet owners have come forward, so far. [Story in the Bangkok Post, also in the IHT.]

• That old favourite, the juxtaposition of modernity and tradition, Malaysian style. [Picture of prayer times and popular news stories, in the Malay Mail.]
• “Rai has starred in 24 films over the last seven years. That may seem like a lot of movies, but Bollywood, India's film capital, is famous for churning out more movies a year than Hollywood. Three new films are produced and distributed worldwide every day, attracting a global audience of 5 billion people. That's twice the reach of Hollywood.” [CBS News]
  

#7.2 Bangkok

• Verbs over-used in travel guidebooks: stroll, enjoy, relax, delight, wander.

• Two options: either Dove soap’s Campaign for Real Beauty does not use the same “normal” models in Thailand, or Thais and Europeans have a different concept of what counts as a normal looking / shaped woman. [Advert seen on SkyTrain station]
  
• 15,000 feature-length pornographic movies are made in Los Angeles annually. [LA Times supplement on What LA Gave The World]
• “MELBOURNE councils are paying private detectives to have sex with prostitutes, to gather evidence against illegal brothels. Melbourne City Council and Yarra Council yesterday confirmed they had paid private investigators to approach prostitutes, and in at least 17 cases, investigators had sex with them.” [Australian Newspaper article]
  
• The Australian National anthem, “Advance Australia Fair” was written in 1984. Prior to that, the nation sang “God Save The Queen.”

#7.1 Bangkok

• Some unknown proportion of the world’s population has not yet used a sit-down toilet. Some subsection of that group appears to travel on Malaysian railways. [Sign inside toilet on the KL to Butterworth (Penang) sleeper train.]
• This year more people will watch Bollywood films than Hollywood films. [Maximum City.]
• Singapore was the inspiration for China’s current economic renaissance. In 1978 Deng Xioping visited the formerly backwards island. Seeing the level of development Deng concluded capitalism to be a superior system to communism. He returned home, and shortly afterwards unveiled the beginnings of China’s system of Special Economic Zones. [Article in the Bangkok Post]
• OK Computer will be 10 years old this summer.
  
  

• I once heard it said that Britain was the only country in which you could find an orderly queue of one. Yet, unlike the scrimmage of getting on a London tube, passengers on Bangkok’s SkyTrain monorail system queue single file when waiting to board a carriage. They then file on to the train in line, one by one. There are also large flat screen televisions, with sound, on all platforms to entertain you, while you queue.
• South Korean singer Rain is Asia’s biggest pop star.

#7 Bangkok

• Some instructions can be a touch confusing. This sign in an Internet café in KL appeared to rule levitation as the only acceptable posture for gaining access to their computer suite.
• In 1700 India accounted for 24% of world output. Britain made up 3%. [Niall Ferguson, Empire.]
  
• Malaysia has an unusual system of rotating, elected monarchs. A merger of nine states originally formed the country, each with a royal family. Instead of picking one "supreme leader", it was decided that each Sultan would be get to be king for a period of 5 years on a rotating basis. The system continues today. Each monarch has a roman numeral following their name, signifying not the lineage of their Christian name in a line of monarchs (e.g. Henry V, or Henry VIII) but their place in the rotation system.

• Iraqi Banknotes featuring pictures of President Hussein are available for sale in Melaka, Malaysia. The seller of these notes reported a brisk trade at the turn of this year, in the days following his execution. Most customers were reported to be buying out of sympathy, and dislike of his American executors.
• Correction. New Zealand has 4m people, and 60m sheep, not 39m as posted earlier. Such is the country’s enthusiasm for sheep that, from this year forward, February 14th has become “National Sheep Day.” Minister John Anderson said that the day would be a “meat industry milestone.” Anderson did not mention if the choice of that particular date should be construed as having any greater significance.

#6 - Kuala Lumpur

• A Megacity is defined as a city with more than 10 million people. At present there are around 25 such cities in the world, 13 of which are in Asia. Projections suggest there will be around 35 by 2015. Almost all of the new additions will be in Asia.
• Megacities make up a tiny fraction of the world's landmass, but consume roughly 60% of world water and produce 80% of carbon emissions. [Demographics of Megacities]
• Kuala Lumpur has a population of 4.4m, making it the 71st most populace city on earth. [City Population]

• The Petronas Towers in KL, the world's second tallest buildings, were built unusually quickly. The designers decided to hire two consortia - one from Japan, the other from South Korea - to construct the two seperate towers. The result was an unofficial competition to be finished first, and a 24 hour construction schedule involving up to 2000 builders working through each night, on 12 hour shifts. Eventually, and despite starting weeks behind their rivals, the South Koreans won. [Tour of the towers.]
  
  

# 5 Melaka, Malaysia

• Male Cats in Singapore often have one ear clipped to show that they have been spayed, and are owned. Stray cats in possession of both ears are periodically rounded up and destroyed by authorities. [Conservation with owner of "Pete", seen above.]
  
• 35 million Indians pay income tax. The country has a population of around 1.1 billion. [Against the Gods, by Edward Luce]
• 1/10th of humans rely on the gangees river for water. [Report on BBC World]

• Singapore has begun to build a spaceport. The $115m facility will be the world’s first commercial port for space travel, and will feature sub-orbital flights at a cost of roughly $100,000. It will be completed in 2009. [Short article in a magazine in the back of a Singapore taxi.]
• The 621 mile Straits of Melaka, the stretch of water between eastern Malaysia and Indonesia, suffers from the world's highest rates of sea piracy, with estimates up to 40% of the world's pirate attacks occuring here. The International Maritime Bureau rank the stretch of water as the most dangerous on earth. [Conversation on a boat, confirmed in various reports including here.]
  

#4 - Singapore

• In the near future it will be possible to embed solar cells in flexible materials. Coca Cola is among the companies most interested in this innovation. They want to make a can that will power itself. The can will then use this electricity either to cool itself or to power a moving digital image on the can’s front, similar to those on large billboards.
• Enemy combatants in Kashmir killed 72 Indian soldiers during the last year. More than 100 more died by taking their own life, while fellow soldiers killed 30. [New Straight Times, 18th January.]
• The total casualty figures for nations fighting in the 1915 Gallipoli campaign were Turkey (86,692), Britain (21,255), France (9,798), Australia (8,709), New Zealand, (2,701), and India (1,358). [Auckland Museum.]
• A proportion of population, more New Zealanders fought in the Great War than any other allied nation. 1 in 5 New Zealand males signed up to fight. [Auckland Museum.]
• There are 39 million sheep, and only 4 million people, in New Zealand.
• Known for its authoritarian system of justice, Singapore jails 350 people per 100,000 of its population, the 21st highest in the world. This is less than half the rate of the USA, which comfortably leads the world in incarceration rates per capita, with 737 jails per 100,000. India jails just 30, among the world’s lowest. [ICPS Global Prison Population Rates Survey.]

#3 - In Queenstown, New Zealand

• "The notion of what is a luxury and what is basic need has been upended in Bombay. Every slum i see in Jogeshwari has a television.... the real luxuries are running water, clean bathrooms and transport... The greatest luxury of all is solitude. A city this densley packed affords no privacy.... A good city ought to have that; it ought to have parks or beaches where young people can kiss without being overwhelmed by the crowd" [Maximum City, by Suketu Mehta, p156.]
• Half of the population of Bombay has no access to a toilet. That translates to 5 million people producing two and a half million kilos of human waste, every day. [ibid.]
  
• Writers banned under the regime of Saddamn Hussein included Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Herge, the author of Tin Tin. [An article in the Press, a New Zealand paper, which might have also been in the UK Sunday Times.]
  
• Nineteenth Century immigrants to the New Zealand colony of Christchurch were left on a nearby beach, with a tent, for 40 days and 40 nights. If they proved to be disease free after that time, they were granted entry.
• Neuroscientists think there are six basic human emotions: anger, fear, sadness, joy, surprise, and disgust. [An article in the Christmas edition of the Economist, which i'm still getting through.]
• Most Indians are under 25. Given the size of the country, this also means that India is home to 20 percent of the world's population under 24. [McKinsey Quarterly]

#2 - In Christchurch, New Zealand

• Australia’s resource boom is strong enough that employers complain in the press about their inability to stop the drain of service sector workers leaving to become miners. Feeding these workers is now a significant problem, with reports suggesting managers at KFC in certain towns in Western Australia are now paid in the region of $100,000 to ensure they too do not move sectors. [Report in Australia’s equivalent of the FT.]

• Melbourne is the third largest Greek city in the world. Athens and Thesoloniki are numbers 1 and 2.

• The Largest polling station in the last Australian federal election was Australia House, in London. 40,000 Australians voted there.

• The 4^th richest woman in China is a muslim, who made her money from nothing in paper recycling.

• The world’s most expensive real estate is next to Heathrow airport. [New York Times Sunday magazine, short article on Aerotropolisis, or airports that look like cities.]

• There is a reputed to be an unwinnable Australian drinking game, in which participants must drink every time the group can identify an occasion on which cricketer Shane Warner was a disgrace to the nation. Aficionados of Warnie’s misdeeds can apparently name up to 30-odd occasions upon which he has tarnished Australia’s good name. Only one of these involved parading in his smalls with two blonde prostitutes, and a giant inflatable penis, and being photographed by a British tabloid newspaper.
  

#1 - In Sydney, Australia

• The Australian press, when reporting a violent crime case in which aboriginals are the suspects, will refuse to identify the protagonists by their ethnicity. Instead they will make vague references to suspects having “ties with the aboriginal community”, but do so (if at all) only at the very end of an article. [A white youth was recently killed randomly by two young aboriginal men in New South Wales, a crime much reported in the Australian press.]

• Kangaroos are considered such a nuisance in Queensland that farmers will hire hunters for to cull them. Hundreds can be killed in one night. [My friend Alice, with whom I stayed in Sydney, grew up on a farm in Queensland.]

• Kangaroos are best seen at dusk. They don't like being out in the hot sun.
  

• China receive 1000% more foreign investment than India, but its return on investment capital is roughly a third lower. China’s development path of relying on external investment from abroad is has more in common with Latin American countries than either Japan, or South Korea. [Conversation with Mark Thirwell, The Lowy Institute for International Studies, Sydney.]

• In Queenstown New Zealand you can take a Lord of The Rings Tour in which you are taken to 20 locations from the film, are given a full lunch, and are “allowed to handle items used in the film.” What the items actually are – Gandalf’s socks? – is not clear. [Lord of the Rings Tour company website.]

• The new Oasis album, Don’t Believe the Truth, isn’t actually half bad.

• The New York Times, the Wall St Journal and the Washington Post have no Australian Correspondent. [From the early page’s of Bill Bryson’s cliché packed book on Australia]

• Australia’s Prime Minister John Howard is a power walker. He walked 4-5kms a day. Last week he chalked up 20,000 career power walking kilometres. [Report in the Daily Telegraph, an Australian tabloid.]

• In India, electoral participation is positively correlated with poverty. In most advanced democracies, the opposite is true. [From Maximum City, a book I’m reading.]

• Richie Benaud owns a French vineyard. [Joked about in “Boned”, the new CD from the 12^th Man, confirmed by wikipedia]