Not there yet

I've had various conversations this week about why I live in Singapore, will I live here for good, will I become some kind of peregrinating writer, or will I decamp for other shores? Quite naturally, these conversations therefore turn to the good and bad of living in Singapore: what makes it home, what makes it aggravating, what makes it tolerable, what makes it fantastic, what makes it not. I hem and haw my way through these interlocutions, metaphorically sitting on the fence and dangling my feet sometimes on the Singapore side, sometimes on the other side.

And then this morning, in the middle of an email to a friend in London about Objectified screenings, I put my finger on the thing.

The thing is, even though Singapore has come a long way in the last ten years, in terms of offering a certain comfortable lifestyle, perhaps even one with certain hip and happening options that make it feel like there's a lot going on here (Formula 1! Shakespeare with Ian McKellen or Ethan Hawke! Restaurants and casinos with ultra! fine! dining! Charcuteries and fromageries and patisseries where birthday cakes cost well over $100!) ---

The thing is, there is this new film called Objectified, which is a documentary about industrial design, which was made by Gary Hustwit whose previous documentary Helvetica was about, you know, a font, and I'm not saying that Helvetica is going to change the world, but it said something about the modern sensibility in its exploration of the intersection between graphic design and daily life, and it's part of a wider, modern conversation about how we live, and Objectified, I'm sure, is a continuation of that conversation, that thinking about the state of things, and not just making things, making more things ---

And Objectified had its world premiere in March this year at the South by Southwest Film Festival. It's rolling out in screenings across the US and Europe. And I know it's been only three months since the film's premiere and it's not like it's slated in any other Asian cities yet ---

But what I'm saying is, Singapore is, you know, hips and haps, and there is no confirmed screening of Objectified here. Indianapolis, of all places, has had a screening already, and we have not.

So: Singapore. International? Yes. Offering the finer, or funkier, things in life? Sometimes, maybe. Really there, on the map, as a world city? I don't think so, nochyet.

My mind is full

In the run-up to my departure date, things are much more under control than they were the last time, but I still find myself with not enough spare braincells with which to write an energetic, witty post.

Maybe it's because a significant amount of my energies today went towards thinking about how to wrangle budget accommodation in Seoul, since I 'd procrastinated on making a reservation and my top two choices were fully booked. (Lucky for me, in this case it worked out for the better, because I've landed cheaper accommodation at a more central location.)

Maybe it's because the AWARE situation shows no signs of imploding or being amiably resolved. (More detailed thoughts to come later. I'm still working on it.)

Maybe it's because the weather it's so hot, it makes it difficult to think. On the bus back from Beach Road market today (I bought cheap army raincoats again), Ming and I were equally listless in conversation, thinking more about when we could reach the cool comfort of our respective homes. In fact, it was so hot last night that the cats came into my air-conditioned bedroom and slept on (not under) the covers.

I hope my brain gets to chillax soon.

Things I'll miss

If I were not away from Singapore from next week till mid-June, I would be at:

• the AWARE Extraordinary General Meeting on 2 May --- the We Are AWARE website has a primer on the issue, as well as handy FAQs that address a spectrum of public reactions. See also Popagandhi and blankanvas.
  
• the Pink Dot Sg non-protest gathering at Hong Lim Park on 16 May.

Even with Facebook and blogs to keep me updated while I'm on the road, I would rather be there.

A graveyard gander

Singapore's been having a heat wave this weekend, the kind where yesterday I took three showers and Darren text-messaged me at 11 p.m. to tell me that his car was reporting an external temperature of 33º C. (Today it reported a temperature of 34º C at 7:30 p.m.) But despite the heat and the temptation to have a Sunday morning lie-in in air-conditioned comfort, I hauled myself out into the sun, in time for the Singapore Travel Meetup Group's excursion to the Japanese Cemetery.


You might be able to tell from the pictures that we were there at high noon. It was hot and we were the only visitors. It's been years since I'd stepped into a cemetery in Singapore --- my own forebears having been removed some years back to very modern holdings at a columbarium --- so it was pleasant to follow the marked path and peer at the gravestones from a polite distance. Most of the markers were inscribed in Japanese, with the exception of one Western-style marble one in English (dated 1950).

The main reason I'd made myself go was because after researching and writing about the karayuki-san ("the women who went overseas", as Japanese prostitutes abroad were known in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), I wanted to see their final resting places for myself. Historian James Warren has tallied 425 karayuki-san graves at this cemetery; I didn't count them today, but it felt like they filled at least a third of the modest cemetery.

The graveyard was very green and very neat. Preetam said he missed seeing children playing in it, but a little peace and quiet is nice too.

The Good Friday ritual

This is what we do every Good Friday with my mother's side of the family: in the evening, we meet wherever our forebears happen to be entombed --- formerly at Bidadari Cemetery, now at All Saints Memorial Chapel Columbarium --- and we make the rounds. Since I was a child, I've remembered seeing old black and white portrait photographs of my grandfather's parents and my grandmother's mother, imprinted onto their greying marble (or marble-ish) tombstones. These were the only images I held of them; they all died before I was born.

Their markers today are smaller, made of more prosaic aluminium (or some other similar metal compound), each one fitting neatly into the perhaps 20 cm by 30 cm sconce it occupies. Instead of graves, they're in niches and we find them based on a very modern address indicating the block, floor and alcove. But the pictures are still there, albeit a little grainier than I recall.

My grandfather oversaw the relocation of his family's remains to the columbarium way back in --- actually, I don't remember when exactly that happened, just that it must have been at some point in the late 1990s because my grandmother, who passed away in 1994, has always been at the columbarium and not the cemetery, and also because my memories of tramping around the cemetery pre-date my university years abroad.


Tramping around the cemetery was, hands down, more fun than visiting the columbarium. Despite the untended graves (there was one that had collapsed inward near one of my great-grandmother's, I remember) and overgrown paths, it wasn't so much creepy as simply a bit messy. To get to the graves, we had to veer off the paved road at some point and track our way along uneven paths. No one wanted to accidentally step onto a grave --- although no one's really superstitious on that side of the family --- and no one wanted to go to dinner with dirty, muddy feet.

Then there were the snails, plump on the path, with those fragile shells that we all stepped on at some point if we didn't watch where we were putting down our feet. It got to a point where we were making jokes about it among the cousins, to see which of us happened to kill a snail that year (but we did feel very sorry the instant we heard a crunch under our feet).

For some reason, the cemetery was always fairly deserted when we made our Good Friday pilgrimage, which lent some charm to the occasion, as if it were some peculiar ritual that no one else had in their family. At All-Saints Chapel now, it's always crowded. Today we had to wait about ten minutes while a family finished praying around the niche of their deceased relative, which just happened to be in the same alcove as my family's relatives. And in every block, there were a couple of people lounging on the seats, exchanging news with their family or just waiting for the visit to be over. It's not easy to find a quiet moment, even if you wanted to.

We don't pray or bow when we stand in front of the niche of a relative. Mostly we jabber about the details on the marker, which other deceased distant relatives or friends are located nearby, and whether anyone's put new flowers (usually fake ones, fresh ones would wilt quickly in our weather and make a mess for the caretakers). Most of my maternal relatives are in the same block. Today we spent some time hunting for another cousin's grandmother's niche, but even though we'd stumbled across it in previous years, we couldn't find it today.


In the process, we came across other markers that made us pause and murmur. The long row of family members who died on the same day --- a car accident, perhaps? Two infant siblings, one born within a year of the previous one's death --- must've been just tragic for their parents. Two markers with no names, just an image of the deceased man, his dates of birth and death, a Christian verse and the name of the home where he must've been living before his death.

I took pictures today because it dawned on me this morning that I don't have pictures of the old cemetery. The thing about rituals is you think they'll go on forever. But in Singapore, even cemeteries disappear (Bidadari Cemetery was acquired by the government to build a new train station and housing). Pictures are more important than ever.

Tym says, "Treasure Your Mind!"

An old friend Facebook-mailed me to say that at work today, she'd received some mail with a letterhead logo that included the word "TYM". Needless to say, she did a double-take. But it turned out to be a Health Promotion Board initiative called, "Treasure Your Mind":

Treasure Your Mind (TYM) is a workplace mental wellbeing education programme which aims to empower employees and supervisors with the skills to achieve mental wellbeing through a 3-module programme comprising an awareness talk and a series of skills workshops.

There's also a TYM Day. It doesn't seem to involve any modules or workshops, thankfully.

It kills me to have my online moniker in proximity to so much governmentspeak, of course, but I'm a little tickled to think that some people, at work, might be saying things like, "Have you gone for your TYM workshop yet?" or "Eh, tomorrow is TYM Day leh, don't forget to say nice things to each other."

Have you had your TYM Day today?

How do I greet thee? Let me count the ways

Sure, there's the ordinary handshake. Then there's the hug. My family's not very touchy-feely, in fine Asian tradition, so I never really got the hang of hugging someone till I went to university in the US. It's become pretty commonplace now in Singapore to hug family and friends (or at least, friends of a certain generation), but that doesn't mean it's as straightforward as it seems.

Because there's the generic American-style hug, which can be as teddy-bearish as you like depending on how warmly you feel towards the person you're hugging.

But then there's also the French-style double air-kiss, which is the norm among some of my clients and friends from Europe or Montreal. Sometimes I forget and go in for a regular hug, then have to backtrack to this.

And then last night there was a belated-birthday kiss-on-the-cheek from a friend who usually bestows a hug. This had me confused for a split-second, wondering if I had crossed wires and misread the cue for a double air-kiss.

And then a few weeks ago, there was the unexpected buss-on-the-forehead from a friend, which was a peculiarly fatherly gesture to receive from someone who's about the same age as me.

All of which goes to show that while greetings might be predictable in most countries, when you live in a place as mixed-up as Singapore, you never know what you might get.

Travel talk

Serendipity is:

• Running into Preetam at last week's Hewlett-Packard launch event,
• Prompting me to visit his website and marvel at the usefulness of his Blogout '09 presentation, "Adventures of a Traveling Blogger",
• Leading us to exchange emails about our upcoming travel plans,
• Leading him to invite me to tonight's Singapore Travel Meetup Group's, uh, meetup.
  

It was my first time sticking my toe into anything meetup-ish, which turned out to be about ten adults sitting around a cafe table and talking mostly about travel. A lovely couple who'd recently been to Bandung, Indonesia did a little show-and-tell about their trip, then people just mingled. That same couple has lived in Seoul, so quite naturally we got to talking about Korea, then Vietnam, then Thailand, and finally Singapore.

Interestingly, the couple asked me if I knew of any particularly canonical Singapore fiction and I was stumped. I'm not a fan of Catherine Lim, Philip Jeyaretnam's writing doesn't quite strike me as being canonical and Alfian Sa'at's Corridor, which I like, feels premature nonetheless. In the end, I suggested they stick to theatre instead.

It's nice to be able to gab with new acquaintances for something on the order of two hours without noticing the time.

Hitting the notes

I've spent the better part of the last few weeks compiling endnotes for one of the books I co-authored. In other words: my co-author and I have been going back through our notes and earlier drafts, painstakingly hunting down exactly what page it was that Raffles called Singapore his "almost only child" or chided Farquhar for his "Malay connexion" (I love that archaic spelling). That also means much time spent in the library, verifying sometimes lurid accounts of pirate attacks in the mid-19th century or checking when the Japanese banned "imperialist" Western films during their Occupation of Singapore.

If it sounds both fun and, er, not at the same time, you're right. We could've saved ourselves the grief if we'd kept better track of these references while we were writing, but oh well. This is why I need to branch out into writing fiction; then I won't need to footnote every other darned thing.

This book, incidentally, is a popular history of Singapore, tentatively titled Singapore: A Biography. More details to come, but the important thing to remember is that it's not a textbook and not a government glorification piece. It's a story about this funny little island I happen to live on, and it's an island that has seen quite a few stories indeed.

Anyway, for now I hope to be done with all the endnotes after this week. Then I can stop squinting at old books on microfilm and focus on learning how to read hangeul instead.

Too darn wet

It's been unseasonally rainy, the kind of rain we're supposed to get in January (but this year we had just a lot of wind instead). It's odd having to deal with monsoon-style rain at this time of the year --- it just doesn't feel like March. But I don't really mind the wet. Gadding about in flip-flops brings me right back to last year's Vietnam trip, especially when I'm wearing the pair of black slippers I had to buy in Hue because my Tevas were giving me blisters. And I'm grateful for any cool weather that Singapore gets.

Nonetheless, I hope it's not going to be so wet in South Korea, which is where I'm headed next. It'll be spring and there's supposed to be "light rain"; I'm going to hit Beach Road market to pick up another $3 army poncho before I leave, but I hope I won't have to use it much.

What have been too wet lately are my pasta sauces. I failed to drain the diced tomatoes before chucking them in last week's bolognaise, resulting in a soupy sauce, and I messed up the proportion of chicken stock to sour cream on tonight's stroganoff, making for another liquidy concoction. Taste-wise both were fine, but these little screw-ups are the reason I never trust myself to cook a full meal for family or friends.

Cool things I found on the web today:

• Jon Stewart kicks CNBC's ass for years of bad financial journalism masquerading as market expertise (via my friend Dave's Facebook update).
  
• The Big Picture has some incredible images of people at work around the world (industrialisation never looked so good).
• Go Media has given us the perfect accompaniment to FAIL Blog: FAIL stickers (is there an Epic FAIL version?).

Spotted at the library

I spent most of my childhood and adolescence being the shortest kid in class. It wasn't till my late teens that it seemed like everyone (Asian) wasn't that much taller anymore.

So imagine how I felt yesterday at the library, when I got into the lift with a Caucasian man whose waist was as high as my shoulders. Think about that: his waist is at the same height as my shoulders. Fortunately, my brain only processed that after he had stepped out of the lift, or else I'd've been gawping at him all the way.

These few days I've been working in the reference library, which gets busier than you think with people taking advantage of the free air-conditioning and wifi --- including a teenager playing some kind of first-person shooter game on his laptop. Even so, it's not everyday that I find myself sitting at a table across from a man who's close to my parents' age, typing avidly away at his laptop --- beside which sits a mercury thermometer.

As in, an old-school mounted-on-a-narrow-wood-panel mercury thermometer. Placed immediately to the left of his elevated laptop --- to measure the amount of heat it's generating when he's working on it? I don't know ...

Today's random sighting was of a man around my age who was dressed in a batik long-sleeved shirt and a sarong. Both pieces of clothing were modern in style and print, so he kinda had a whole contemporary kampung look going. He was consulting big books (I couldn't see the titles) and had a nifty little netbook for taking notes.

Very, very random.

I wonder what I'll see during tomorrow's library visit.

Gloomy much?

It hasn't been a bad week for me at all, and I'm about to kick off my weekend at 2 p.m. on a Friday --- but this article in the Washington Post is the gloomiest thing I've read yet about Singapore and the global recession: "A global retreat as economies dry up".

Excerpt:

... as the world enters a period of deglobalization, Singapore is a window into the reversal of the forces that brought unprecedented global mobility to goods, services, investment and labor. ... Singapore is an epicenter of what analysts call a new flow of reverse migration away from hard-hit, globalized economies, including Dubai and Britain, that were once beacons for foreign labor. Economists from Credit Suisse predict an exodus of 200,000 foreigners -- or one in every 15 workers here -- by the end of 2010.

This was one of the five headline stories in the Daily Beast's daily news blast. Which makes me wonder what the rest of the world is thinking about Singapore right now ...

A little water rationing

Not exactly, but I did spend some time last night filling various jugs, bottles, the kettle, one basin and one stockpot with water. As Serene noted in response to my Facebook status update that I was hoarding water, it was very much a flashback to those Good Citizen (in Chinese, 好公民) or "moral education" lessons in primary school about saving water.

I was hoarding water because a warning notice came last week, saying there might be a "disruption of water supply" today from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. because they were gonna be tinkering with the water tank in my block of flats. In the end it was only a three-hour disruption, so that was three hours in the afternoon when I couldn't pee and couldn't drink water (because then I would need to pee) and couldn't wash the lunch dishes.

Now that the water's back, I have heaps of water lying around and no plants to pour them into. I'm tempted to leave the big basin of water out for as long as it lasts, since the cats seem to be perfectly happy drinking from it.

Lessons learned this Chinese New Year

Ikea is open throughout the holidays, so that those who don't celebrate the New Year have somewhere to go shop, and those who do have somewhere to go spend all their newly-acquired ang pow (red packet) money.

I went because I realised that I had invited seven friends over but only owned five drinking glasses. Also, I needed a lamp. And a throw for the couch. And one more wastepaper bin for the study.

Giant supermarket is open on the second day of the New Year, but not much else is at Parkway Parade. Which was good enough for me to get some strawberries and apples to create my Chinese New Year-coloured fruit platter.


Hosting four guests (the other three couldn't make it) is just nice at my place because everyone can sit around the dining table. I'll have to experiment with seating arrangements if I have more than four people show up.

It really isn't that far for me to walk to Parkway Parade (I've been taking the bus), with a few friends for company.

Money no enough

When my mother asked me a couple of weeks ago how many new notes of each denomination I would need for this New Year's ang pows (red packets), my head was full of moving house and I just gave her some rough numbers over the phone.

It was only when I sat down to pack ang pows this morning --- less than an hour before I'm due at Fifth Aunt's, I might add --- that I realised I'd grossly miscalculated and didn't have enough money. As a result, my first SMS of the New Year was hardly an auspicious one. I sent the following to my mom:

Can you bring me an extra $[amount redacted] in $2 bills?

Her answer was yes, of course, because my mother is nothing if not hyper-efficient. Unlike, say, me.

Happy new year, everyone!

Not here, not there

I don't really know where the week went, but it did. I did a small spot of travel writing to tide me over with some income for the week, caught up with friends for coffee/lunch/dinner/a movie, watched the US presidential inauguration, and did plenty of Chinese New Year shopping.


The interesting thing about waiting in line at Bee Cheng Hiang was realising that all the signs for bak kwa were in English. The staff spoke Mandarin (and probably other Chinese dialects) just fine, but I'm pretty sure they used to have Chinese labels too for their products.

Last night I was at Mustafa and they were playing bona fide Chinese New Year dong-dong-chang music. Go, multiculturalism!

Yam seng at the zoo

It's not every day one gets to attend a wedding dinner at the zoo.


The setting made a nice change from the usual hotel banquet feel, and the kids loved the elephants. I brought home a small stuffed giraffe.

Settling in

After Wahj graciously drove the cats and I over to the new flat during rush-hour traffic, I spent a little time getting them settled and watching them pace from one room to another. Then I left them to it and headed to my nearest HDB town central.

What I needed were essentials like toilet cleaner and breakfast food. What I ended up getting as well --- because what's the point of pottering around "the heartlands" if you don't make the most of it ---was some Chinese New Year decor and gloriously tacky ang pows to hand out to the kidlets.


I think I'm going back for the red-and-gold hanging lanterns and fu (luck) signs.

In the middle of the night

I stopped work at 3:40 am and was clearing up when I realised I'd forgotten to wash the French press after making coffee earlier this evening (at 10 pm, to be precise). So it was that in the middle of the doggone night, I'm pouring and scooping used coffee grounds onto the flower bed in the living room balcony. If anyone had seen me, I'm not sure what they would have made of it.

From the living room balcony, I can see the traffic on the newish overpass that connects the port in West Coast with the one in Keppel, and let me tell you, there's a surprising number of trucks hauling containers around at this hour.

Tomorrow I must cut another 1,000 words from my Lonely Planet text --- and then I'm done.

(I think.)

O$P$ (continued)

The tussle between O$P$-vandal and O$P$-target proceeds apace. The second round of O$P$ accusations that appeared on Thursday were whited out by about 2.30 pm on Friday. I didn't go out last night (Friday), but by 1.45 pm today, new scrawls were up. They're using black marker pens now.

O$P$

At first I didn't want to blog about this, because I thought it might worry my parents. Then I realised, I just spent seven weeks tramping all over Vietnam, during which time they probably worried over any number of things. This is small potatoes compared to that.

So here's the story: O$P$, for those of you not down with Singapore jargon, is vandalism shorthand for "owe money pay money". It's what loan sharks use to mark their territory on the walls around the homes of people who owe them money. You know, to cause them general embarrassment and unease, to make them pay up more quickly.

Between 11 am and 4 pm on Tuesday, someone scrawled O$P$ in red on various walls in the block where I live, appending the apartment number and (I presume) phone number and name of the loan defaulter to their warning. The door of the apartment in question was also defaced with paint. I know this because I live right next door. (That's the little detail that I thought might make my parents worry.)

Before 3 pm yesterday, the offending red marks on the white walls had been smudgily cleaned and painted over. I suspect I also overheard my neighbour speaking to some kind of authority figure, though not a policeman.

At some point today, the tireless vandal had scrawled more O$P$ accusations, again in red, over or beside the painted-over areas.

Now I'm wondering if this is going to turn into a battle of wills: can the local housing authority paint over the red marks faster than the guy with the red pen can go around marking up the place? Stay tuned ...

Inundated by coffee chains

Hot on the heels of learning that Tully's Coffee from Seattle has opened two outlets in Singapore, I just learned tonight that there's a Trung Nguyen as well (via The Travelling Hungryboy). And only yesterday I was whining on Facebook to a friend that I miss my daily dose of ca phe sua da.

Having said that, I don't think Singapore really needs more coffee chains when it already has Starbucks, Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, Coffee Club, Gloria Jean's and TCC (I'm sure I've forgotten someone). And the fact that Trung Nguyen doesn't serve ca phe phin (drip coffee) kinda negates the whole point of ordering Vietnamese coffee.

As I was lamenting to Yan Wei last week, what Singapore needs are more indie cafes like Saigon's La Fenetre Soleil.

Farewell, JBJ

Taken by elsija
I woke up to an SMS from my dad telling me JBJ had passed away. He was 82.

I didn't follow his political career that closely, but I remember he made Parliament sessions in the mid-1980s more lively, more alive (not that I understood the issues, at that time). What I didn't know was that he'd been running in elections since 1972, getting a larger and larger share of the votes in different constituencies each time, until his 1981 by-election win in Anson.

You can't find Anson constituency today. It's been eaten up by one of the Group Representative Constituencies. (Tanjong Pagar, I believe? But I might be wrong about that.)

The newspapers will undoubtedly recount the details of Jeyaretnam's bankruptcies and legal face-offs with various senior PAP politicians. I prefer to remember his fire and verve in Parliament, and his tireless attempts to reach out to Singaporeans outside City Hall MRT station.

JBJ passed away today, and Singapore is the poorer for it.

Formula One, schmormula one

While I was waiting for my hair to dry so that I can go to sleep, I came across this zinger of a response by Ovidia Yu to today's Straits Times article "Pride in F1 race missing". I didn't read the original article and there isn't a registration-free online version, but I'm guessing the news editor who wrote it feels that the ordinary Singaporean just doesn't give enough of a damn that the world's! first! Formula One night race! is being hosted here this weekend.

Yu had me with her first two paragraphs:

People I meet in & out of the city are polite to show ‘disinterest’ in the upcoming F1. In less guarded/more candid moments the response is more likely disgust/disapproval/ridicule.

Plus I doubt the F1 ‘fever’ you feel in town is for the F1–most people are more interested in working out road closure times & boundaries.

Amen, sister! Read her full letter, "F1 Singapore".

The taxi driver I was chatting with yesterday summed up the situation thus (in Mandarin): "All this Formula One, the government organises it to make the big companies, the government make money. What difference does it make to the rest of us?"

Do not make me uglify my blog

The National Heritage Board (full disclosure: I work for them from time to time) is having a "heritage star blogging competition", which asks people to write about a heritage-related topic or a museum visit. Aside from the cringe-worthy name of the competition, or the fact that it is a blogging competition at all, I'll allow that it's well and good to get people interested in writing meaningfully about their history or sense of identity. I even thought of taking part for the hell of it, seeing as I regularly write about museums or being Singaporean anyway.

Until I got to the part where I read that to qualify for the competition, one has to insert the "Brag Badge" on one's blog.

The term "Brag Badge" instantly set off alarm bells in my head (it sounds like something out of a Bratz product line), but even it hadn't, I took one look at the badges and decided that this was a deal-breaker.


Forget it. No way was I sticking anything that ugly on my blog, just to enter a competition. (Yes, I did it here to illustrate its ugliness, but the above is a screencap from the competition website and doesn't link back to the competition.)

I understand that they need a way to track competition entries. I understand that they're trying to stamp some kind of "branding" on this activity. But the "brand" of my blog is going to last a whole lot longer than any government campaign, and I don't need to clutter it up with other people's short-lived campaign artwork (particularly when that artwork conflates "star" and "blogger" as one word, ugh). Wouldn't a simple text link do the job as well?

Corporate attempts in Singapore to target (or should I say co-opt?) bloggers have been going awry lately (see what Vanessa Tan and my brother have to say). When are PR types going to figure out that not meaningful new media publicity does not come from, in the words of Cowboy Caleb, those who "[v]alue attending blog meetups, blog events, blog outings, blog sex orgies even MORE than actual blogging anything unique and interesting that you came up with yourself"?

The problem(s) with Palin

So I got up this morning, thinking I was going to get some work done (much to do before I go off to Vietnam) --- but then I made the mistake of reading the local news. I still hardly ever read The Straits Times, but I occasionally dip into Today to see if I'm missing any kind of critical Singapore news.

As it turns out, had I not read today's Today, I would've missed the very critical Singapore news that, in contextualising Sarah Palin's Republican candidacy for US Vice President:

• Chitra Rajaram declares, "... women all over the world, like me, warmed up to her immediately" (see "To critics ... I say, give her a break").
  
• Constance Singam, president of Singapore NGO the Association of Women for Action and Research, notes that she is"a role model for governments which would like to promote the image of women as savvy, modern working woman who is also the traditional wife and mother" (see "No way, not in S'pore").
  

Well. Nothing like news first thing in the morning to make me angry.

Okay, first of all, I'll give the writers some benefit of the doubt, in that perhaps their essays have gone through the usual newspaper editorial process and may not represent their complete views on Palin and "women's roles". In particular, I've read some of Singam's other more writing, which is typically more progressive, so this one seems uncharacteristic. But unless either writer offers a clarification of her position and/or posts an unexpurgated piece for the world to read, I'm going to have to take these published versions at face value.

And that face value is a very disappointing one indeed. Here you have opinion pieces by two representatives of modern Singapore women (Rajaram is the deputy editorial director for news, radio and print at MediaCorp, which publishes Today, even though it wasn't footnoted in her essay), and neither one takes Palin to task for all the very substantive reasons her policy positions are a problem for women, regardless of Palin's gender, and why her being a woman per se is no reason to support her.

Sure, Singam mentions in passing at the beginning (right before the gushing about how charismatic Palin takes over), "I am not sure if I want a superwoman and a conservative like Mrs Palin to make public policy decisions that affect my life." But then there's no elaboration. At the end of her essay she concludes, "women are still not powerful enough to change the value system that currently expects women to be superwomen and excludes men and women from achieving work-life balance." Amen, sister! But why wasn't this the primary argument of the essay, as opposed to the aforementioned gushing?

And if Singam's going to quote Gloria Steinem saying that the Republican Party is "trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice-president", why not go the whole hog and point to Steinem's critique of Palin's policy positions in that same opinion piece ("Palin: wrong woman, wrong message", published in the LA Times)? Specifically, Steinem writes:

Palin's value to those [right-wing Republican] patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves "abstinence-only" programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation ... [emphasis mine]

Rajaram, while you're busy saying you "respect the fact that [Palin's] decision [to support her pregnant daughter in keeping the baby] is based on her own values", you might want to note that Palin is keen on imposing those same values on the rest of America (and possibly the world, if Dubya's record with abstinence-only Aids aid to Africa is anything to go by). Which means that women and families wouldn't actually get to make their own decisions based on their own values anymore.

I think what annoyed me the most about the two Today essays was how much the underlying message was: "Palin's a woman, ergo we identify with and support her." Behold the gushing:

• Rajaram: "Mrs Palin, 44, is one of us — a wife, a mother (to a brood of five, at that!) and a career woman all in one. All of us 40-something baby-boomer women can identify and bond with her."
• Rajaram: "Three days after the baby was born, she was back at work. All mothers know how difficult that must have been ..."
• Singam: "The combination of these qualities makes her attractive to both men and women."
• Singam: "Women, can relate to her — a woman who has succeeded as a wife, mother and a public figure and who had to face the challenges of bringing up a child with Down’s Syndrome and face the problem of teenage pregnancy. Which family hasn’t had its problems?"

Okay, look: One does not support a person, political candidate or otherwise, only because of their gender (or age group, for that matter). Because then boys would only vote for boys, and girls for girls, and ... I mean, do I really need to explain this?

And if you are going to, in Rajaram's words, "identify and bond with her", how about examining the whole Palin package first? For a start, see the Steinem excerpt above (or the full article, while you're at it), or Slate's Sarah Palin FAQ. Instead, Rajaram's love-fest highlights the fact "before she was Alaska’s governor, she was the mayor of her hometown, Wassila [sic]". That would be the Wasila with a population of 5,400-9,000 people (depending on who you ask), i.e. the town had about as many people as 3-6 Singapore secondary schools? Singapore doesn't even have a constituency that small.

This, you know, is the evil genius of the Republican Party in the US: that in putting up Palin as their vice-presidential candidate, they have unleashed --- even in faraway Singapore --- a discussion of "women's roles" that demeans the very subject. Singam notes:

[Palin] symbolises family values dear to the aspirations of conservatives everywhere. Singapore policymakers would love her. Can they get Singapore women to have as many children and be active in the workforce?

Unfortunately, she only briefly critiques that Singapore position, pointing out that "[h]owever successful [Palin] is, she still goes home to her responsibility as daughter, mother and wife" while men are not subject to similar expectations of being son-father-husband. Meanwhile, the concluding paragraphs of Rajaram's essay happily flogs that conservative Singapore position:

... She is a small-town girl, who has worked hard to get where she is today.

Whether she gets voted in or not, Mrs Palin's small town values of family, fidelity, honour and responsibility will certainly hold her in good stead.

At the end of the day that's the backbone of what makes a good man ... or a good woman ... a great leader. [emphasis mine and what is up with those misplaced ellipses?]

Ah, conservatives and their "small-town values" (read: Asian values?). Because everyone in the big city doesn't give a damn about "family, fidelity, honour and responsibility" (just like anyone with those damn "Western values"). Thank you for buying into the culture wars, both the American and Singaporean versions. Thank you for so elegantly reframing the discussion of women's issues. NOT.

I am as old as ...

The cable car service that runs between Singapore and Sentosa.

Okay, I'm actually a month or so younger than the cable car service. But it's a pretty random local landmark to be "as old as".

Ah, the things you learn while doing research ... Now I wonder what other Singapore landmarks I'm "as old as".

What is't but to be nothing else but mad?

I've been watching quite a few Singapore films lately, such as A Wicked Tale, which I liked very much, and Mad About English, which I didn't. My opinion of the latter seems to put me firmly in the minority, though. Other people say:

• "This piece of work is huge fun from start to finish. It has more laughs, poignancy and warmth than any fictional movie in recent memory. And it beats any of this season's CGI-laden blockbusters for sheer enjoyment value." --- The Straits Times
• "... a hilarious look at China as its people embark on a mad rush to learn English before the Beijing Olympics. ... this film shows how ordinary lives are changed as China flings its doors open to the West." --- The New Paper
• "... does a great job capturing the charm and quirkiness of the people." --- movieXclusive.com
• "Mad About English is highly recommended, and goes into my books as contender to be amongst the best of this year's theatrical releases." --- A Nutshell Review/Sinema
  

Uh ... no, no, no and no. The film aggravated me enough that I spent part of the weekend writing down what I thought of it (without being ranty, despite the aggravation). Your mileage, as always, may vary.

---

In a scene from the documentary film Mad About English that also appears in the movie trailer, a police officer in Beijing unleashes his repertoire of Brooklyn-accented English: "Hey, whaddya want?", "Fuhgetabowdit!", "What's up, man?", "Put yer gun down!" Yes, he sounds as if he's been watching too many Robert de Niro movies.

We laugh, of course, because of the incongruity between the chubby, pink-cheeked Chinese mainlander, and the harsh New York slang that he rattles off so unthinkingly. But in the film we never find out how he picked up this accent, when he thinks lines like "Fuhgetabowdit!" are going to come in useful in his daily patrols, or why he enjoys chatting with tourists while he's in uniform (he's supposed to be a police officer, not a tour guide). He's an object of curiosity, both to the tourists he meets and to us watching him as he rehearses his "Welcome to Beijing" lines in English, German, Japanese and other languages. And he remains just that: an oddity, a strange bird, nothing more than a funny little Chinese man.

Multiply that by 92 minutes, and that's the sum total of Mad About English. Every English learners featured in the film, from a 12-year-old cherub to a 74-year-old retiree, is introduced with all the fanfare of, "Oh look! Here’s another Chinese person who’s a little nutty about learning English!" Then we hear the person dutifully recite a few English sentences – with some incorrect pronunciation or grammar, or moments of pure misunderstanding for "comic relief", of course. Perhaps he or she gets some airtime to murmur something about how important it is to learn English so as to welcome foreign visitors to the Beijing Olympics.

Then the film cuts to the next character waiting in the wings. Lather, rinse, repeat.

No matter how many times we come back to any of these people, we never find out their full stories. Where do they come from? How do they feel spending so much time and energy to learn a language that is so historically, culturally and grammatically divorced from their own? What are the implications of learning English when China is on the ascendant? Are these people fringe elements or truly representative of English learners in Beijing (or, for that matter, the rest of China)?

So many questions, hardly any answers. There's only so long that you can watch people stumble over learning a foreign language before it starts to feel not only trite and tired, but also mean and cheap. Stick a camera in front of anyone learning a foreign language – especially a language with such different roots from one's native tongue – and you’d pretty much get the same result. There are signs in Paris that have just as entertaining (or apparently insipid) translation errors in English as they do in Beijing. There are Americans or Europeans learning to speak Mandarin who make just as egregious or laughable errors as these Chinese mainlanders stuttering their way through English. Mad About English doesn't tell us anything that we don't know already.

It was also ironic that all the Chinese interviewees largely spoke in English, whether they were being interviewed or interacting with other (Chinese) people. It felt as if they were constantly having to perform in English, with little opportunity to speak in their native tongue and say what they really thought and felt. Perhaps this was deliberate, to show exactly how "mad" about English these people are, but it only made them seem more inscrutable and kooky (ah, those inscrutable Orientals!), allowing them to be laughed at but not understood.

And really, why should we laugh? Because they make mistakes, as beginners always do? Because they speak English "wrongly", as shown by the bewilderment of the white man they’re speaking to? The laughter makes us complicit in the white man's criticism (not critique, which is what's lacking here) of non-native English speakers, without questioning if that criticism is justified in the first place.

Sure, it's funny for about five seconds to hear a little old lady struggle with saying "bowel movements" and "take off your shirt" (she’s a doctor learning phrases she’ll need to communicate with foreign patients). But the job she does, the life she's led and her determination to learn shouldn't be dismissed on the level of toilet humour. All these people learning English – they deserve better than this.

Muzzled or misdirected?

Among today's news reads I found a Salon article rounding up the Olympics, "What I couldn't write in China". Among its conclusions:

... it [China] has also figured out the most modern means of efficient repression. Better than muzzling those with dangerous thoughts is creating a populace so focused on personal goals and consumerism that they have nothing to say in the first place.

I think that observation could as easily apply to Singapore.

An airport run

I didn't leave Singapore today, but I got to nose around the public areas of Changi Airport's Terminal 3 while killing time with G-man and the friend who was catching a flight. Terminal 3 feels strangely a little welcoming than Terminal 2, which has always struck me as rather cold. Maybe it's all the attempts to "green" the terminal and bring a little of the "garden city" into an industrial-sized space.


What Terminal 3 is really good at is introducing people to all of Singapore's retail and dining chains. I spotted signs for Crystal Jade, TCC, The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf, Coffee Club, Watson's and, of course, NTUC. The one that threw me off was Harris, but G-man told me the bookstore's owned by the Popular group.

Celebrating National Day

I did not see The Dark Knight. But I did see The Swordfish, Then the Concubine at the Singapore Theatre Festival, as well as the exhibition about The Artists' Village at the Singapore Art Museum, and some Vietnamese art. Plus it was all free (thank you, museums who had a free day and Ming who had complimentary tickets to the play).

The only part of the National Day Parade I watched was on the bus on my way to town for the play. As it turned out, the audience on bus was predominantly non-Singaporean. Workers from the Indian subcontinent were clearly the parade's biggest fans, huddling around the screen near the front of the bus. A group of students (coincidentally also Indian) were behaving as most teenagers of any nationality do when it comes to such things: chatting about girls and boys they fancied, listening to funny audio files on each other's cell phones, and taking the piss out of the odd flash of activity they caught on the TV screen.

When the bus passed by Lavender and Arab Streets, most of its passengers tumbled out and the parade lost its audience --- which made me wonder just how much Singapore is still segregated by race and language (perhaps all the more so given current government policies towards "foreign workers", "foreign talent" and "foreign students").

After the play, Ming and I went for very low-key beer and supper in the Bras Basah area. The low-key part was what I found astonishing, since the parade had ended around the same time not ten minutes' walk away, yet the streets we passed were fairly deserted. I guess all the party people were already at the party places, and all the people worn out from the parade extravaganza went home to put up their feet.

There would be pictures to illustrate this post, but I'm not very good at shooting in crowded situations.

Is it National Day already?

Until I asked sarah last night,"So what are you doing for National Day?", I hadn't really registered that it was National Day this weekend. I mean, I knew it was coming up. No way can you grow up in Singapore with the annual month-long red-and-white lovefest, without having the date 9 August burned into your brain as Something Significant.

But this year it didn't really loom as a major date on my calendar or my consciousness. Some possible reasons why, when I sat down and thought about it:

• I don't watch local free-to-air TV channels.
• I don't read the local papers.
• I no longer live in a public housing estate, which means that no one bugs me about flying the Singapore flag and I'm not as surrounded by government-sponsored banners with grotesque mugshots of politicians grinning down at me.
• When mr brown highlighted the un-originality of this year's National Day music video, I was too impatient that day to wait for the videos to load on the page and just took his word for it.
• The only person I know who was remotely involved in the preparations for the upcoming National Day Parade is a friend who did some traffic duty for his annual National Service reservist requirement.

I'm gonna visit some museums tomorrow, and possibly cap off the day with The Dark Knight, assuming there are any tickets left.

Oh, and I didn't watch today's opening ceremony to the Beijing Olympics either, though I enjoyed the images collected at The Big Picture.

Crazy is ...

Not the thousands and thousands of people swarming the Night Festival last night, but the fact that somebody decided Sunday would be a good time to run a loud motor all day to slice up the tree that they chopped down on Friday. (They have to slice it up into more manageable chunks so that they can transport the lumber away.)

Meanwhile, I'm trying to catch up on writing because I only cranked out twenty words instead of a thousand yesterday, and they were twenty crappy words that I promptly deleted today.

Sunday = day of rest? Not likely.

They cut down a tree today

The one right outside where I live, in fact. I thought they were just trimming the branches that overhang the road for safety reasons, but when I got home, the tree was gone.


So now there's nothing to provide a little privacy between my front door and the main road, or to deflect the worst of the afternoon sun. I hope there's a damn good reason for removing that tree.

Edited to add (July 31): An email from my friendly neighbourhood town council informs me that the tree had to be removed because its base was rotting. I asked them pretty please to plant a new one asap!

Government websites: the good, the bad and the ugly

The good

I needed to start looking at some 2009 dates for work, which entailed knowing when certain public holidays are, so I took myself over to the Ministry of Manpower website. As always, they faithfully list the public holidays for the following year, but now they've gone one better and provided the dates in an iCal format.

So all I had to do was download the iCal file and let Google Calendar import it. Easy-peasy. Importing information from the web into real life should always be this easy.

The bad

Okay, first off, let's make things clear: I like the library. I love books, and books live in the library where people can borrow many interesting ones for free, so I love the library. You don't have to make me go there or want to use it or want to like it. I'm sold. Tell me that I can access library materials or services online, and I'm thrilled that it saves me a trip down to the physical location.

(See how many times I used italics in that paragraph?)

That said, what the hell has happened to the National Library website? Or websites, I should say, because where before http://www.nlb.gov.sg served all library needs in one place, they recently decided to split their web presence into three domains:

• http://nl.sg --- the National Library
  
• http://pl.sg --- the public library
  
• http://nlb.gov.sg --- the rest?

To which I'm like, we're a nation-state, isn't our National Library already a public library? And where do I go to find what information? And why the hell do the sites take so damn long to load if the web assets have been divided up? And why the hell aren't any links, including "Contact info", working? (That last complaint occurred yesterday on pl.sg; within a couple of hours they emailed me to say that the links were working again.)

To quote from my email to the helpdesk yesterday:

I don't know what else doesn't work, but I'm tired of trying to find anything on this website. I miss the old NLB website. It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't as frustrating and impossible as the new ones.

I can only conclude that they're trying to be deliberately inefficient and, as I said to a web-savvy friend over IM:

maybe their secret plan
is to frustrate people
so we HAVE to go to the brick and mortar library

The ugly

Uh ... take your pick. Most government websites give me eye pain.

Yan Yan teaches you English

When I first started eating Yan Yan in the '80s, they came in two flavours --- chocolate or strawberry (feel free to say that in a "Okay Pocky" voice) --- and the biscuit sticks were plain and unadorned.

Now the biscuit sticks try to teach you English.


More accurately, they try to teach word association in English. This is what the sticks say (the animal name is on the top end of the stick, the rest of the words on the lower half):

• Bat --- Only in the night
• Stag beetle --- Love it
• Rhinoceros --- Think big
• Elephant --- Jumbo
• Cow --- Muuuuu
• Frog --- Amphibian
• Rabbit --- Eat more carrots
• Owl --- Active at night
• Panda --- Go for more
• Sheep --- Wool sweaters

Now what I want to know is: who gets to be the copywriter for the Yan Yan sticks, and where can I sign up?

Of ethics and the law

Ah, our lovely Singapore government. They won't decriminalise gay sex, but they haven't ruled out legalising organ trading.

I wake up early only on special occasions

Like making plans with Wahj to go take pictures at the Botanic Gardens, a plan we hatched after I casually mentioned that I hadn't really been to the Gardens since they were spruced up a few years ago.

The only other park where I've spent a fair amount of time recently is East Coast Park, and the main advantage the Botanic Gardens has over that --- or just about any other park in Singapore --- is that it's set back and away from roads and traffic, and prohibits cycling or rollerblading. All of which makes for a very pleasant and peaceful stroll, in that most English sense of the word.

I have learned two things about my propensity (or lack thereof) for taking pictures of "nature":

• Still-life portraits in natural settings don't really excite me.
• I keep seeing things as desktop backgrounds.
  

(There's more in the Flickr photo set.)

These are not the birth rates you're looking for

The next time someone tries to convince me that the Baby Bonus and financial incentives are the way to get the population numbers back up to replacement level, I'm going to point them to what happened in Ulyanossk, Russia.

Giving parents US$11,000 for having a second child on Russia Day (June 12) worked real well, didn't it?

I am a kaypoh auntie

A minor road accident (turning car vs. oncoming motorcycle) just occurred at the intersection immediately in front of the block where I live, and like a good kaypoh (busybody) auntie, I first cracked open the window louvres, then half-opened the front door to see what was going on.

Then when I saw what it was and my curiosity was sufficiently sated, I closed the door and went about my business.

Telltale signs of a road accident in my neighbourhood: the unexpected crash sound (today, accompanied by a mild but startled scream), followed by the resumption of traffic noises at a muted level, because I live on a not-so-wide road and if the accident takes up even one lane, everyone has to slow down to pass (and stare, of course).

Of governments and new technologies

I know I said I was going to write a proper blog entry soon, not just toss out links, but I couldn't pass up on the comparison which leapt out at me while I was reading this morning's news.

The UK government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Make public a wide array of government statistics for the Show Us A Better Way competition, where anyone can suggest new ways of using that data to make people's lives better. It hopes to attract everyone from the tech industry to "hardcore coders to adolescents in their bedroom". BBC News even calls it "data mash-up" in the article headline.

The Singapore government's idea of harnessing new technologies: Minister for Community Development, Youth and Sports Dr Vivian Balakrishnan is quoted on Channel NewsAsia as saying:

I think we will get into the 'YouTube' style of politics, which means it's multimedia. It's no longer enough to just talk, you must have moving images, you must have sound, you must have music. And if it makes an impact, you will get millions of hits. And if it's true but boring, without multimedia, then no one's going to watch it.

Also, as quoted in the Straits Times:

Because you think you are not revealing yourself, a lot of people on the Internet engage in what I call virtual shouting. They want to gain attention and the best way ... is to say something crazy, outrageous, scandalous, maybe even defamatory.

Uh. Yeah. So one is releasing information out there in the hope of getting something good back in return, while the other is still concerned with the Sisyphean task of outshouting the crazies.

As a tax-paying citizen, I certainly know which project I'd rather my government be working on.

ROJAK #11

I liked:

• Cherie Tan's illustrations
  
• Lim Zi Sin's pierced paper artwork
• Sherman Ong's excerpt from his documentary, Thit, Rau Cu & Che (Meat, Vegetables & Dessert), and his HanoiHaiku photos.

I went home thinking about:

• What makes art art
• Whether art has the right to shock in order to engage
• How many people have the patience to stop and think about art.

Just another night at ROJAK.

The logic of heritage conservation in Singapore

1. "Respond" to public sentiment (as measured by a Straits Times poll with 1,103 respondents) by declaring that a bus stop dating from the 1970s will be conserved.

2. On the same day, announce that there will be construction of a new Bugis MRT station. By the way:

Due to engineering constraints which cannot be avoided , the land currently occupied by the New Seventh Storey Hotel (NSSH) and part of the adjacent State land fronting Rochor Road, is required for the construction of the station box and the at-grade station structures, such as the station's entrance and lift facility. The NSSH will have to be demolished to allow for the construction of the station.

Never mind that the New Seventh Storery Hotel is a cultural landmark, the only building in Singapore that still has a classic manually operated "caged" elevator, not to mention the only place in that part of the city where you can sit outside and have a great steamboat meal.

Also, because the government (in this case, the Land Transport Authority) is clearly a great believer in doing things by the book, it decided that it couldn't in good conscience inform the hotel ahead of time that its time was up.

Even though the hotel has to vacate the land by the end of this year. Because six months is a fair lead time for any hotel business, as we all know.

3. For those of you who enjoy an extra dose of Singapore-style irony, note that this is all decided on the same day that the Cabinet minister in charge of the civil, Teo Chee Hean, tells an audience at the Global Behavioural Economics Forum that:

"policymakers are changing the way they deliver their messages - instead of the usual carrot-and-stick approach, they are favouring a softer method to help shape public attitudes."

(I'm quoting the Channel NewsAsia report, not the Minister's words verbatim, because I can't find a copy of the speech online.)

Oh, I totally agree, Mr Minister. Very soft sell on this one. That's why everyone I've spoken to who feels the same way I do, can only swear in response. Popular reactions:

• "SHITTTTTTTTTTTTT"
• "ARGH"
• "Cheebye" (repeated several times)
  
• "should enbloc Istana" (this seems to be gaining ground)

budak, being more creatively inclined than I am right now, has a more eloquent haiku to offer:

singapore storeys
oft find themselves caught well-short
by new trains of thought

I have to stop thinking. It hurts too much.

Related posts: Photograph it before it's gone, I love Singapore, In memoriam

Busy proofreading, no time to blog. But G-man sent me a gem of an SMS yesterday:

Walking through a HDB town centre at lunch ... overheard snippet from a conversation between some mobile phone sales staff ... Indian guy saying "You want to see my ex-Chinese girlfriend?"

So if she's not Chinese anymore, what other race would she be?

Out of Focus, Night & Day

No, the post title is not a description of my current state of mind, despite the last-minute proofreading job that's sapping all the creativity from my system. No, it's referring to the Out of Focus exhibition, part of the annual Month of Photography line-up. This year's show is at Night & Day, a bar slash gallery at Selegie Road. I'd been to the bar space before, but this was my first time climbing up to the top floor exhibition space.

Ironically, for this was a photography exhibition, I didn't take any photos while I was there, even though I had my camera with me and there were several people taking pictures throughout the evening. I blame it on being distracted by many conversations with many people whom I haven't seen in a while, not to mention that after being cooped up at home for almost three days with only proofreading and the cats for company, it was nice to be surrounded by the buzz of human conversation again.

Oh, but the photographs. My friend Gozde Zehnder curated a series with words and colour that reminded me of the visual sensibility of the short film she made with her husband, Take Me Home a.k.a I Saw Jesus. Everything else was in black and white: Geoff Pakiam's study of camera surveillance, Ng Sze Kiat's empty spaces and Chen Shi Han's whimsical toy soldiers.

The problem with writing about photographs is that it's really just much better to go and look at them yourself.

Seeing the civic district

Who knew that walking around for one hour in the post-rain mid-afternoon tropical heat to take pictures could be so draining? I was ready to pass out when I got home after dinner, and it wasn't even 8 p.m. yet.

During my one-hour ramble, I learned that there are weeds growing out of the clock tower at the Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall, Falun Gong types still practise meditation under Esplanade Bridge and the Cenotaph has metal snaps to keep the skateboarders away. See the Flickr photo set for more commentary.

Yes, I finished sorting and uploading these images before I finished sorting through my Shanghai pictures. Maybe because there were fewer of them.

Wherefore art thou, irony?

Behold the headline of a Channel NewsAsia report from yesterday:

Nationwide campaign launched to get entrepreneurs to think out of the box

I am speechless.

Rehabilitating real estate flyers

At tonight's wedding dinner, a new acquaintance was talking about the difficulty of finding a short-term lease on an apartment. My immediate suggestion was, of course, "Find a place that's gone en bloc."

(For my non-Singapore readers, see my attempted translation of the term "en bloc" and its associations here.)

Which then reminded me that I was supposed to mention my friend Daniel's personal project, Bloc Me, with &Larry, to redesign the hideous "for sale/rent/agent available" flyers that flood many mailboxes in Singapore.

Their solution uses nothing more fancypants than the fonts Arial and Times New Roman, Powerpoint software and "excellent design sense" (I'm quoting the website). Two templates are available for download and free usage; I just wish the images were available in a non-Flash format so I could plonk the flyer designs here. They're very clean, white and communication-friendly --- far less offensive and more effective than the tripe that most of us are familiar with.

Related post: Photograph it before it's gone

O Mustafa, O Mustafa

Hands up, if you can sing along.

Outside:


Inside:


The emptiest section at Mustafa is the one with all the gold jewellery (rear building, ground and basement 1 levels). Or maybe it's more popular during the daytime. After 1 a.m., it's all about the food, household and DVD sections.

I went home with one packet of ready-to-eat rice and some muruku.

For your reading pleasure

The Top 50 Blogger-powered Blogs, ranked based on some fancypants mathematics involving Google PageRank, Technorati Ranking, Bloglines subscribers, backlinks and Alexa Rank. Most the big guns are there, including PostSecret (#1), Blogger Buzz (#9) and Xiaxue (#24).

Yes, Singapore's very own Xiaxue, who, if you believe the math, outranks Eschaton (albeit narrowly, it's at #26) and Ikea Hacker (#33).

I don't know whether to laugh or to cry. Then again: "Lies, damn lies and statistics".

A morning at the museums

It's International Museum Day today, which meant free admission at quite a few museums, which meant I really had to get off my ass and go see all those art exhibitions I'd been talking about.

Step 1: Find a friend who would be equally keen in seeing some artwork on the weekend.

Step 2: Make plans around his schedule, so that I won't feel that it's one of those wishy-washy slash "flexible" arrangements that I can bail out on. Even if it means meeting him at 9:30 on a Saturday morning.

Step 3: Go go go!

Our first stop was the Matthew Ngui retrospective, Points of View, at the National Museum of Singapore. I hadn't seen much of his work before, so it was cool to wander around a darkened space, looking at videos and installations that seemed to be all about fragmentation and deconstruction. My favourite piece: Swimming: at least 8 points of view.


Image taken from The Kakiseni Blog
Next, we cut across SMU to the Singapore Art Museum, which was sadly much less populated, even though it was free admission there too. I wanted to see the Alberto Giacometti exhibit, because I'd stumbled across quite a few of his sculptures during my museum rambles in Paris and London last year and liked them very much indeed. As it turns out, the visiting exhibition here consists mostly of his pencil sketches, which are nice too but not as fun to look at as the sculptures.

Since we were already at the museum and they had a whole bunch of other stuff for us to look at, we ended up wandering from room to room at random, seeing Xu Beihong, various Southeast Asian artists and a whole dollop of contemporary Vietnamese artists who were probably the most colourful of the lot. Ironically, the Vietnamese art galleries were the most deserted in the entire museum --- yet they were also the most interesting (to me, anyway). Note to self: visit more art galleries the next time I'm in Vietnam.

Because the museums were having free admission, there were more people than usual for a Saturday morning. Nevertheless: the parents at the National Museum were all making a beeline for the child-friendly Mozart: A Child Prodigy exhibition (we didn't bother going in because it was so crowded we'd've had to take a number and wait our turn). I saw less than five kids in the Matthew Ngui exhibition right next door; ditto in the entire Singapore Art Museum.

I know that "kids" and "modern art" are terms that don't generally occur in the same sentence (unless the sentence is a dismissive "A lot of modern art looks like it was made by kids"), but the only way kids will get less afraid of art they don't immediately recognise or understand, is if they have the chance to run around, look at it for as long (or as short) as they'd like, and go away knowing that they don't have to fully "get" its "meaning". While I was predictably grumpy as a kid whenever my parents schlepped me off to some art exhibition, seeing all kinds of weird (to my pre-adolescent eyes) shit went a long way towards normalising the idea of visiting a place with artwork.

I still don't get most of what I see, but I like looking at it and I know it when I really, really like it.

International Museum Day activities continue tomorrow and Monday. No more free admission, alas, unless you happen to be a senior citizen, but there's still plenty going on. I might pop by the Viet Fest as the Asian Civilisations Museum tomorrow, to see if I can ferret out a fresh spring roll or two ...

Lianhe Zaobao in the news

I know I spend a lot of time slagging off on the local mainstream media, but let's give it a little props where it's due: Lianhe Zaobao gets mentioned today on the BBC as having exposed the story of Taiwan losing US$30 million of public funds meant for diplomatic negotiations with Papua New Guinea.

It's nice to have the country's press mentioned in a somewhat do-gooder fashion for a change and without an interjection like "government-friendly". Maybe it helps that Singapore and Taiwan don't have official diplomatic ties (even though the army boys still go there for training).

Strike three, but we got lucky

Because I am a freelancer who is --- for all intents and purposes --- surgically attached to her internet connection, Cowboy Caleb calls me on occasion for last-minute restaurant advice and I spend about five minutes helping him pick a place where he can fête a client or boss on his company's tab. The other typical condition is that it has to be a place that he knows how to get to in Singapore, which can be harder than it sounds.

Today he calls at about noon from Hong Kong and needs a place for dinner tonight. He can't expense the meal, but still needs it to be nice enough. Oh, and no Asian food.

We settle on Valentino's, because we've been there before and it's pretty damn good food. He asks me to get a reservation (yes, I am officially his entertainment secretary, didn't you know?) and SMS him when the table's booked. I call. Valentino's, it turns out, is fully booked for the night.

A little SMSing, another phone call. "How about Marmalade Pantry at Palais Renaissance?," I suggest, "because the air-conditioning at the Holland Village one isn't working [as I found out to my dismay on Monday night]."

"Where's Palais Renaissance?"

"Next to Orchard Towers, between Orchard Towers and the Thai embassy."

For reasons that cannot be reported here, Cowboy Caleb declines to go anywhere near Orchard Towers. We settle on Ember at Hotel 1929, another reliable choice that he knows how to get to.

I call and: "We regret to inform you that we will be closed for renovations from 30 April to ..." Cheebye. I hang up without bothering with the rest of the automated message.

"Strike two," I SMS Cowboy.

He calls back. By this point, I'm trawling through The Travelling Hungryboy for ideas. We confer. "Okay, Wild Rocket," he decides.

I call and I cannot believe my ears: "I'm sorry, but we're closed tonight for a private function."

Clearly, the moral of the story at this point is that it is not possible to get a dinner reservation at a decent place on the eve of a public holiday (it's May Day tomorrow), unless you planned your evening a week before and had time to work your way through an entire restaurant directory.

Cowboy cannot believe it; neither can I. James comes to the rescue on MSN: "Cork", he says, "63279169." Does Cowboy know where Capital Towers is? Why yes, he does. After which he SMSes: "I boarding the plane. You decide."

Meanwhile, I'm calling --- and miracle of miracles, they are open, they have tables available and they are pleased as punch to take Cowboy's reservation. I manage to sneak in a last confirmation SMS to Cowboy and the URL for Chubby Hubby's review of the place before he switches off his phone on the plane.

As far as I know, dinner went all right.

It seems Secretaries' Day has just passed us by, so Cowboy owes me a huge bonus next year. He should buy me dinner at a nice place.

Too hot to handle

Taken by ampulets2
You know the weather is too hot when:

• Ink has taken to sleeping in the bathroom sink throughout the day.
• Running two standing fans in the living area doesn't do much good except to channel the warmth around the room more quickly.
  
• The tiniest rumble of thunder sends me into rapturous joy (it didn't rain in the end, but it was a little cooler around noon).
  

I am officially tired of this weather. Rain, please!

I have become a breakfast person

It used to be that I didn't eat breakfast at all, and it was a point of pride for me to declare as much. My mother was a little surprised by this, seeing as she'd faithfully fed me breakfast through most of my growing years, but I'd fallen out of the breakfast habit when I went away to university and didn't quite pick it back up when I moved back to Singapore.

Until now.

I blame it on all the good food easily available around me. Within a 5-10 minute walk from home are an excellent German bakery, a Cedele outlet and, if all that fails, two grocery stores. Within a 10-minute bus ride are a lovely Malay eatery with tip-top epok-epok and shops with various Peranakan kueh options. A 10-minute car ride away is Scruffy Murphy's at East Coast Park, home to the oily English breakfast (the photo above was taken last year; when G-man and I ate there yesterday, the grilled tomato and mash had been replaced by baked beans).

So eating breakfast has become quite a delightful way to start out the day, despite the fact that it's usually eaten while I'm doing work, and now I often find myself wondering, "Hm ... what else can I eat for breakfast tomorrow?"

Clearly, I need to start cooking my own breakfasts, especially on the weekends. I haven't made French toast in months, and after having a passable croque madame for lunch today (disguised on The Caffebar's menu as "ham and cheese sandwich with egg"), I'd like to try making that too. I also need to replicate the scrambled eggs with smoked salmon that James had earlier this week.

Breakfast today consisted of two epok-epok and two slightly overripe bananas. Breakfast tomorrow will be an orange cranberry muffin from Cedele. After that --- who knows?

The Lana virgin

Yesterday, the best friend and I went to visit Ondine and the twins, and my mom was there too to help with the kidlets, so it was clearly an occasion that called for a Lana cake. 1.5 kg of it, in fact, a good hunk of which is still sitting in my fridge (yes, the sacrilege, but I couldn't eat it all in one day).

But that's not what I'm here to tell you about. No, no --- this is the story of the Lana virgin.

It seems that Lana Cakes, along with any number of other good cake stores, were featured in a recent newspaper article about the best cakes in Singapore. That's the only explanation why a woman ahead of me in the queue (who looked about my age, standing there patiently with her mother and her child) asked the counter staff very matter-of-factly, "Excuse me, do you have a brochure?"

A brochure? In my head, I was thinking, "What kind of place do you think this is --- a normal bakery? This is Lana. They don't have brochures. You come in, you get your cake, you go, that's it."

The counter staff was nicer. "No, I'm sorry, we don't have any brochure. We just have a few kinds of cake, or when you call and order, we can tell you."

"Ohhh ..." The woman seemed mystified, but conferred politely with her mother. Meanwhile, the counter staff went to retrieve my dutifully pre-ordered cake. By the time she had shown it to me and done it up in the trademark white box with a purple ribbon and was sliding it into an equally purple plastic bag, the woman had decided she wanted a 1-kg cake and asked for a slip of paper to write down the birthday message she wanted icing'ed on it.

The best friend and I walked out of the shop, shaking our heads. A brochure from Lana? We didn't cluck our tongues like old biddies, but I know I wanted to.

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Related posts: Lana cake for lunch, I am a Hobbit

Technorati Tags: Singapore, Lana cake

Of neo-nomadism and neighbourhoods

It was a year ago that I decided I liked the term "neo-nomad", and now the Economist has a whole special report on it.

The thing I find about living the neo-nomadic/digital-nomadic lifestyle, is that when I read a "special report" like that, I tend to go, "Ho-hum. Tell me something I don't already know."

Or else I tend to assume that these reports are confirming what I hope will happen, like this scenario from the article "The new oases":

... urban nomadism makes districts, like buildings, multifunctional. Parts of town that were monocultures, [William Mitchell, a professor of architecture and computer science at MIT] says, gradually become “fine-grained mixed-use neighbourhoods” more akin in human terms to pre-industrial villages than to modern suburbs.

I count myself lucky to live in a village-like neighbourhood now. The free wifi is dreadfully spotty (why, oh why, can't Wireless@SG get it right?), but all the other elements --- brick-and-mortar stores delivering basic services, a mixture of chain stores and "local" enterprises, low-rise living and neighbourhood folk who kind of recognise each other after a while --- are well in place, and have been for decades.

Being neo-nomadic Working freelance means I can spend more time here and still get enough work done to pay the rent. I'd like to think, along the lines of Mitchell above, that the broader neo-nomadic trend also means that it will keep this neighbourhood village-like, with the kind of vibe that made me want to live here in the first place.

(I'm still hoping the coming MRT line doesn't muck up the neighbourhood either.)

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Technorati Tags: neo-nomad, nomad, The Economist, Siglap, Wireless@SG

Wicked weather

It's been a very strange March here in Singapore. First, an alleged terrorist escaped (okay, that happened on February 27, but the guy's still missing and the usually über-efficient Singapore government has been dead silent on the matter).

Then it started raining like it was December again, not just for one day but for almost two weeks already. I keep expecting to hear "All I Want For Christmas Is You" when I go shopping, but then the mail reminds me that it's actually tax season instead.

The other song that's been going around in my head is the Counting Crows' "A Long December" --- because with the rain, it's starting to feel that way.

Of course, now that I've blogged about it, the rain will probably stop.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore weather, rain

On being plain-spoken

After spending a day or so trawling through interview transcripts wherein government employees regurgitate corporate jargon as if it were the gospel truth, it was something of a relief to find out (via the World Wide Words newsletter) that in the UK, at least, the Local Government Association recognises the importance of speaking plainly and has singled out certain "non-words" that are to be avoided, such as:

• capacity building
• engaging users
• outcomes
  
• pathfinder
• stakeholder
• synergy
  

(Those are just six out of the top 100 "banned" words, by the way.)

The Local Government Association's logic is simple:

Without explaining what a council does in proper English then local people will fail to understand its relevance to them or why they should bother to turn out and vote. Unless information is given to people to explain why their council matters then local democracy will be threatened with extinction.

Besides local democracy, I think fruitful and intelligent thought is also threatened with extinction if people keep talking in Newspeak. You know society's in trouble when even teenagers are parroting phrases about "lifelong learning" back to you.

I am going to wave that list of 100 banned words in the face of the next government client who asks me why I didn't just use the language in their press release. Maybe their new motto oughta be: Jargon Less, Say More!

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Technorati Tags: jargon, Newspeak

A Saturday's adventures

For all that I rail about crowds on a regular day, I don't mind occasionally plunging myself into the thick of one when I don't have any particular objective in mind. Evidence, to wit: the Great Chinatown Walkabout of several years ago, which was followed by the Great Hari Raya Puasa Walkabout, Comex last September, and more recently the Singapore Air Show last month.

Yesterday's challenge: the Singapore IT Show.


Part of me wanted to buy a terrabyte hard drive just so that I can say I have one --- but my 200 GB backup drive isn't even half full at the moment, so who am I kidding here? Nonetheless, my brain is still sufficiently new to the concept of a terrabyte that I kept referring to it as a "one-tetrabyte" drive. To which my friend enquired, "Is that like ---" beat "--- tetra pak?"

After a couple of hours in the crowd, it was time to get out of Suntec altogether.


At Food for Thought, I really like the brownies (Aunty Rubiah's, according to their website), but I can never finish one on my own. So I only order it if there's someone to eat the rest.

Fortified with caffeine and sugar, I was off to a hen night at Oohtique!.


At which I think I drank more than anyone else except the bride-to-be. It was only four drinks, but enough to earn me the following Truth or Dare question: What was your worst drunk experience?

(Tangent (TM Stellou): On a sort of related note, I once remarked that I have a couple of drinks, three or four times a week --- to which a medical professional at the table said, "You realise that's about the healthy limit, right?" Surely his maths is wrong?)

The story of my worst drunk experience, like the full details of what transpired last night, will stay only with those who were there to share it. Suffice to say that last night's activities ended around 1 am at Geylang Lorong 12, where a totally illegal pushcart vendor sells kick-ass carrot cake (chai tow kway).

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore IT Show, Food for Thought, hen night

An unexpected taste

It's extremely disorienting when the pork chops from a Western food stall at a hawker centre taste like Twisties (chicken flavour).

Fortunately, it wasn't my dinner.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, pork chops, Twisties

Planes, tanks and people

So I said I'd blog about the Singapore Air Show, but then I was busy catching up on sleep.

Ru's friend thought it was "hot, tiring and boring", and I can see why people would think that: the legendary kilometre-long queues for the shuttles at Pasir Ris MRT station, the energy-sapping mid-afternoon heat, the queues for other stuff that seemed to be going nowhere. We exited the show at 3:40 pm (over an hour before the official closing time) and spent over an hour in the line for a cab, not because there weren't cabs willing to come in to pick up passengers, but because the design of the traffic flow and cab line didn't move people and cabs along more efficiently.

But I guess I'm not the sort of person who goes to these shows in the first place, so the whole thing was a bit of a novelty. The last time I went to some kind of military show in Singapore was probably back when my father still qualified for VIP treatment, which meant no waiting in line, plenty of cold drinks and cooling off in an air-conditioned lounge whenever one wanted it, and lots of chances to bounce in the seat of some random piece of military equipment. So yes, I was a teensy bit jealous when I spotted a certain Minister and his family getting the special tour with the US Air Force guys, especially since regular folks don't get to clamber all over the planes and tanks like they used to be able to at SAF Open Houses.

Other things were different too. The noise from the planes during the aerial display seemed less, which also made their aerobatic moves seem less impressive. There were many, many more foreigners in the crowd --- the "1 in every 4 persons in Singapore is a foreigner" statistic translated into something more like "1 in every 2 public visitors at the Singapore Air Show".

But some things don't change. All those military vehicles on display still smell the same when you get up close. I still don't know what most of the vehicles were, despite my friend's running commentary. And it's still goddamn hot all. Day. Long.

Another reason things probably worked out well was because I had good intelligence from G-man and Beeker about cab lines, walking distances, sunblock and free back issues of military journals. Plus the surprising discovery that an ice-filled Nalgene bottle wrapped in a towel, then in a plastic bag and then stashed in my little messenger bag, retained enough coolness that the water remained icy cold for 3-4 hours.

They really ought to bring in more cute pilots, though.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore Air Show

The teh si that failed

Last night, Suzie and I were wandering Chinatown, looking for a breezy spot to enjoy a little night air and maybe some teh si (tea with evaporated milk). There were no availably breezy spots at Maxwell Hawker Centre, while there were no hot beverages to be had along Smith Street. So we deposited ourselves at the well-touristed corner of Trengganu and Pagoda Streets.

On hindsight, I should've known better. This is the yellow-chaired coffeeshop that is always full of tourists. But then, we just wanted a simple teh si --- we weren't asking them to whip up a mean char kway teow or anything.

First, the guy who makes the drinks wasn't available. When he got back, he brought us one drink instead of two. While he toddled off very good-naturedly to make us the second one, I had a sip of the first, which was suspiciously pale. Yuck --- far too much milk and water, hardly any tea. I went back to the counter to ask the guy to add more tea to the cup. Maybe he heard me wrongly, but he added a dollop of sugar instead. While I flailed my hands trying to explain my request, he said he would just make me a new one.

A couple of minutes later, we had two glasses of tea, as pale as the first had been, and were out two bucks for it. Sipping the tea gingerly confirmed that it was, again, mostly milk and water --- in fact, mostly water. I didn't bother to drink mine; Suzie persevered through most of hers.

Clearly, the worst teh si in all of Singapore, and given that every other drink stall here makes it, that's saying a lot. I had a merely mediocre one at lunch today, but after last night's experience, it didn't seem so bad.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, teh si

I did not know that yesterday

Blog post title taken from the eponymous blog, which I read from time to time.

Last night, I left the Discovery Travel & Living channel on for white noise, which threw up a World Café: Asia episode on Singapore. Presenter Bobby Chinn went through the usual hawker favourites, then ended up on Pulau Ubin where an Indian woman cooked him nasi kerabu --- described on the show as a dish once common in Singapore that's all but forgotten now.

To which I say: nasi what? Turns out it's a synonym for nasi ulam, which I think I've seen listed at Malay food stalls before, though I've not tried it. Google actually turns up more entries related to the Kelantan variety, where the rice is apparently tinted a bright blue colour. Don't think I've seen that in Singapore.

Then today, while IMing with Suzie, she expressed a craving for kuih rose. To which I pretty much responded again with: kuih what? Once more Google threw up images of food I didn't recognise, though Suzie's well-acquainted with the snack. How did I miss this while growing up here?

All of which points to the fact that while we rave about how much great food we have in Singapore, there is always something else lurking in the next stall or shop that we haven't tasted yet.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore food, nasi kerabu, kuih rose

There goes the neighbourhood

I woke up this morning to the news that the government is going to build more MRT lines (yay!), including a new Eastern Region Line that will link Marine Parade, Siglap, Bedok South and Upper East Coast, to Marina Bay in the west and Changi in the east.

I've lived within 7 minutes' walk of an MRT station for the last eight years or so, and it's been great in terms of convenience. That said, I'm moving on Thursday to a neighbourhood without an MRT station, which still works out because it's strategically placed along enough bus routes that I'm going to be well-connected to downtown.

I was kind of looking forward to not taking the train so often. There's something a little warmer about the experience of travelling on a bus as opposed to a train, though I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it's because there was no MRT before 1988, plus I never lived near an MRT station till 1999, so I feel somewhat transported back to my younger self whenever I take a long bus ride. Maybe it's because with SBS Transit's iris NextBus service, it's easy to check how much longer the next bus will be, which takes some of the frustration out of the waiting time (yes, it's a psychological palliative, I know).

Anyway, my new neighbourhood is now slated to get the new Eastern Region line. I don't know how I feel about that. On one hand, yay! I'm all for having a more comprehensive MRT network and more comprehensive public transportation routes overall. I'm a city girl at heart and I know that until we all get personal teleportation systems à la Star Trek, cities need good public transport systems to make them liveable.

But there are two things that make me sigh when I think about an imminent Eastern Region Line.

Exhibit A: the construction nightmare that is Holland Village (Flickr throws up some relevant images, though they don't full capture the dust, the mess and the rats). It's been going on for a couple of years but feels much longer, and the first thing that happens when the bulldozers and other arcane construction machinery move in, is that businesses suffer. Residents can or sometimes have to live with the inconvenience, because they can't pack up and move willy-nilly, and maybe they can stick it out. But businesses that get displaced or lose their customer base don't have the wherewithal to hango n and wait for the sparkling new MRT station to be completed.

And the thing is, the kind of businesses you find in offbeat little neighbourhoods like Holland Village or Siglap, are precisely what gives these places their colour and character. They're the reason people want to live and eat and do business there. They matured organically into what they are today without government intervention; no one declared they wanted to create a "Bohemian Hub" in either of these neighbourhoods (plus I don't think the Katong/Siglap stretch is really bohemian).

If you construct a massive rail network in such a way that undermines and destroys the businesses that were there in the first place --- the businesses that were thriving on their own and brought the neighbourhoods together, which is why then the government decided to install a new MRT station there --- then it's kind of ironic, not to mention frightful, isn't it?

Other related examples of death-by-government-intervention in Singapore: Dempsey Road (though that's not a residential area), Chinatown (the area's been screwed with for decades) and Geylang Serai, which lost its landmark 42-year-old market a couple of years ago.

The other reason I'm diffident about the Eastern Region Line is that there's something to be said for a place not being that easy to get to. Not that every place needs to be as isolated as Charlie's or the old Buckaroo's, either --- but there's a certain tipping point, so to speak, after which a neighbourhood becomes too popular, too crowded and pretty much goes to hell. Some people already think Holland Village has jumped the shark, Dempsey Road certainly seems headed that way (I mean, it's got a Long Beach Seafood Restaurant, for heaven's sake) and Little India would've been a casualty long ago if it wasn't so completely colonised by migrant workers from the subcontinent.

As I said, I'm torn. I want better public transport options, but the government's existing track record isn't exactly stellar. For every Chinatown that been stabbed through the heart, it's only created the likes of HDB Hub, AMK Hub and Tampines Mall instead.

Just as well I'm moving to Siglap, I guess. At least I'll have the chance to enjoy it before, well, whatever happens next.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Siglap, Holland Village, MRT, moving house

Late-night non-shopping

There are many marvellous things at Mustafa. Food, of course, but I still have some ready-to-eat packs on the kitchen shelf from my last trip there, er, several months ago, so I forbore from purchasing more. But they also have electronic accessories from brands I've usually not heard of before, sometimes with instructions in fragmented English that don't quite explain what they're to be used for.

So it's surprising that I could Google the very cool toaster that I almost bought just for the hell of it: the Memphis red 2-slice toaster from Morphy Richards. It makes me think of the aesthetic of KitchenAid mixers, but at a fraction of the cost, of course --- this was Mustafa, after all.

I'm trying not to accumulate stuff before I move, so I applied my usual "rule" to counter impulse buys: if it's there when I go back, I'll get it. The other caveat is that the kitchen in the new place has to have counter space for it, which is not at all a given.

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Technorati Tags: Mustafa, Singapore, moving house

This never rarely happens

And lo it was, that before 4 pm in the middle of the workweek, I found myself having finished all the work I'd scheduled to do for the day

I'd felt myself inching towards this achievement around 3 pm, when I realised I had two more paragraphs to write, max, before I could shoot the document off to the client and mark the task with a triumphant "done!". And then I actually did finish, despite taking time to play with the cat instead of ignoring him like I'd been doing all day.

Which is bloggable only because I usually whine about long work days, so let's give the short ones their credit where credit is due.

Not that I'm about to go goof off for the rest of the day; there's still odds and ends of administrivia to wind up. But no more paid writing for today, and I'm taking tomorrow off to settle some moving-house matters, so let's just say I'm taking my weekend early.

On a related note, my cousin updated his Facebook status yesterday to say he was "amazed how many S'pore friends mention 'work' in their status updates!" And he works in DC, so it's not like he's slacking off somewhere on a desert island. Separately, I once had two phone calls with friends who were still working after 8 pm on a Monday night --- to which James, the friend I was with, asked incredulously, "Are all your friends workaholics?

Er ... no comment.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, work, workday

Too expensive for my blood

Apropos of selling the flat at a fair price, I thought I should point out that the BBC reports on the Global Property Guide list for 2007, in which Bulgaria tops the list for house price growth at 30.6%.

Except that when you factor in inflation (though not local currency), Singapore moves from #3 to top of the list.

Top of the list, people --- that's how much the housing market has skyrocketed here, relative to the rest of the world for the same period. If things keep up at this rate, I'm not sure that I'll be able to afford to live in this country anymore.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, housing prices, cost of living

I can't believe I've been saying it wrong

I've always said I have a limited command of Singlish because I don't speak Hokkien. I didn't get the humour in Money No Enough and other Jack Neo classics because of that, and even my swearing is limited to a couple of common phrases I picked up on the school bus.

Now it turns out that I've been getting a bit of my Singlish-of-Malay-origin wrong too. I've been saying "pasar", as in "not my pasar", which I thought meant "it's not my concern" or "it's not part of my job" --- but it turns out the correct word is "pasal". "Pasar" means "market", which I knew but never spotted as being at odds with the phrase, while "pasal" means "business", which is where the phrase comes from.

Dammit.

Interestingly, no one's ever corrected me till a few days ago, and the Dictionary of Singlish and Singapore English lists "pasal" as a variant of "pasar". Even so, I'm going to try and say the right word from now onwards.

Oh, and "Sarawak"? Is pronounced "suh-RAH-wahk", not "SAIR-ruh-wahk". Damn my Americanised pronunciation sometimes.

Edited to add (March 7): I recently learned that I've been getting "hentam" wrong as well. It's not my fault --- my mother and many people I know say "hantam" instead!

Oh wait ... they're all Chinese ...

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Technorati Tags: Singlish, Singapore English, Malay

When political leaders get hip to the internet

As I was wishing dolcelatte merry Xmas online last night, I was also watching the BBC, which triggered the following exchange (pardon the lack of proper punctuation):

ME: i am watching the queen's youtube channel on bbc
ME: it is surreal
dolcelatte: oh i heard about that
dolcelatte: havent checked it out yet
dolcelatte: i'll watch her christmas day speech on christmas day
dolcelatte: and it'll be like i never left blighty
ME: pretty cool, the queen :)
ME: way hipper than lee hsien loong
ME: hehe
dolcelatte: lee hsien loong is so not hip
ME: ya
dolcelatte: sigh
dolcelatte: and the queen is like 80plus
ME: i can imagine this will be a topic of conversation at the next young pap meeting
ME: "queen got youtube leh! We only had hip-hop and blog - how? how?"
dolcelatte: hahaahha
dolcelatte: but if they had youtube channel
dolcelatte: it would be political video
dolcelatte: and then, they'll have to ban themselves!

Actually, if such a channel were launched, it would no doubt debut with such nuggets as the MDA rap.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, YouTube, Singapore politics

The elaborate Venn diagram of our lives

A friend told me today about this new girl he's seeing. It being 2007, of course he had to have me check her out on Facebook. Which led to the revelation that she knows some people I know --- not surprising when two degrees of separation is par for the course in Singapore.

What was surprising is that she knows an old classmate of mine from primary school, whom I haven't spoken to since the late 1980s when we bumped into each other at Centrepoint. And that, upon peeking at his list of Facebook friends, it turns out that he knows a number of people in my existing circle: a former colleague, an old neighbour and a friend's ex, among others. Which leaves me further surprised that we haven't crossed paths more recently.

I like Facebook, but sometimes it just reminds me that Singapore is just Too. Damn. Small.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Facebook

Where have all the good books gone?

At Borders last night, my friend was whining that she couldn't find any of the books she was looking for. Given that initially she was looking for books in the philosophy or linguistics sections --- not exactly the best-stocked sections in any Singapore bookstore --- I wasn't too surprised. But when she got to the Ian McEwans and there were only three titles on the shelf (barring the heaps of editions of Atonement with Keira Knightley on the cover), I started to wonder ---

--- and wandered over to the R's, where my favourites Philip Roth and Salman Rushdie reside. Roth was more than adequately represented, with new editions (look for the book covers in primary colours) of just about every one of his major works, and a number of minor ones too. Rushdie, however, was languishing as McEwan had been: only Grimus, The Moor's Last Sigh and Shalimar the Clown (two copies) were wedged onto the shelf, lost amidst the spines of other less weighty but visually more striking books.

"I want to do a test. Give me the name of another famous author," I said to my friend.

"Margaret Atwood," she said, because we had just been talking about the cover of Moral Disorders.

There were also only three Atwoods on the shelf: Moral Disorders (a bunch of copies), The Penelopiad and The Tent (one each); we later stumbled upon Negotiating with the Dead in the literary criticism shelves.

"Is Borders not selling real books anymore?" I wanted to know.

Fortunately, my next litmus test was Milan Kundera, which passed with flying colours. And then we decided to get outta there before we bought up the entire bookstore with those lovely 30% discount vouchers (print as many as you like; they expire today), so I didn't get to do any more tests.

But still: only three Ian McEwans (and my friend bought one of them, Amsterdam), three Rushdies and three Atwoods (fiction, anyway) --- whereas in the past they've carried practically each writer's entire oeuvre?

"Maybe they haven't restocked the books 'cause people have been buying them in the sale," saith my friend.

To which I retorted, "There aren't that many people in Singapore who would read Rushdie."

The other thing I do at bookstores is rearrange books if they're misshelved. So if you went looking for the above-pictured shelf of Rushdie today and if no one tampered with my arrangement after last night, you would find the two copies of Shalimar the Clown side by side (as they should be), with The Moor's Last Sigh shelved to their left.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, books, Borders, Ian McEwan, Philip Roth, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood

Random is ...

Random is running into Torrance when I went to collect my passport on Wednesday. Or rather, him running into me --- he came over to see who was tapping away at a shiny white Macbook in the crowded collection hall.

I'd foolishly assumed from my previous experience of making a new identity card that I would be outta there within half an hour. Instead, the number I drew at 2:01 pm was the 200th in line, so I settled myself down to do some work. When Torrance showed up 20 minutes later, his number was 40 after mine, so he flipped open his PSP to pass the time. Yes, we are geeks.

(More importantly, I got my passport after a total waiting time of about 1 hour 20 minutes, so now I can make travel plans again!)

Random is also watching teenage boys try to solve Rubik's Cubes while on the MRT trains. I saw one with a 3x3 cube on Tuesday, and a few others with two 5x5 cubes the day after. Are they making a comeback, just like all things '80s? It was very surreal to watch them strategise in Mandarin how best to twist the puzzle next.

For the record, I suck at the Rubik's Cube. An uncompleted Rubik's Cube taunts me from a high shelf in the living room, to remind me that I have neither patience nor the pattern-recognition skills for it.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Rubik's Cube

The week in pictures

On Monday, I went out to sea. But only for a little while and it was choppy enough that I had to stop taking notes and concentrate on the horizon to quell the potential seasickness. Now I know exactly where some of the Southern Islands are, like Kusu and St John's. They always seemed such a long boat ride away when I was a kid.

PS: Our port is truly, irredeemably ugly.


On Wednesday, I popped in on Culturepush's Next Stop: Wonderland tour of Majestic Bar. Groovy art. Besides Yuki Chong's stained-glass ceiling installation (above), I'm also in love with Sandra Lee's third-floor blue-room set-up, staircase and all.


Yesterday, there was ROJAK. I hadn't been to one in some time, and since my Singapore Writers Festival panel put me right across the street from the old City Hall where it was happening, I had no excuse not to drop by for a bit (until my stomach demanded to be fed anyway). It was very, very cool to be sitting in the same room that I've seen in so many black and white photographs of historic events.

Things that I forgot to take pictures of this week:

• The also very cool Dual City Sessions party on Friday night, where I ran into all and sundry, and managed to finally meet a couple of people that I'd been hearing about for the longest time. Other people have pictures on Flickr; all I've got to show for myself is a pair of well-worn wedges (lots of traipsing up and down the stairs), a resolution to bring my mom to see what her Old School has become, and the vicarious thrill of reporting that I loaned Daniel the camera to make his art.
• The Reel Blogging panel I did yesterday evening, which I completed failed to even, er, publicise. Good thing Stefan was, as usual, quick with the blog post and the camera to record what went down.
  

Pardon the lack of more eloquent descriptive phrases. My brain's all used up from crunching text for that Very Important deadline.

No pictures of the new Macbook yet. Let me post this, then I can go play with it.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore port, Culturepush, Majestic Bar, ROJAK, City Hall, Dual City Sessions, Singapore Writers Festival

Playtime

At the gift shop at the Chinatown Heritage Centre, $2 buys you this:


I thought anyone who went to primary school in Singapore in the early/mid-1980s would be familiar with it, but apparently ACS boys are not. Good thing the rules are easy to explain.

In the debut game of Wahj vs. Packrat yesterday, both players wound up with three pieces "home" and one piece left to trudge forlornly, perhaps forever, around the board. So they, er, declared it a tie, which I'm fairly certain is not kosher in the rules.

The thing is, I'm fairly certain I played this with someone recently (i.e. maybe the last year or so). I seem to even recall reading the rules printed on a piece of dusty thin paper. Now who was I playing with and whose set was it?

Other retro amusements that have recently entered my possession include a bunch of small toys that came out of a goodie bag assembled for the adults at Nate's birthday party. The capteh (shuttlecock) didn't last long with Ink around.


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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore games, aeroplane chess, capteh, Ink the cat

As if we needed another reason ...

But the Media Development Authority gave us one anyway.

Reason #1 (yes, #1) the Singapore government's attempts to "nurture" a media industry are doomed to fail: Sing along to the MDA Senior Management Rap.

Beeker warned me that it would be "cringe-worthy". I think he meant to say "revolting, ridiculous and impossible to sit through" --- although I did, to the bitter end, just to see how bad it would get.

As I just said to Adri, it parodies itself.

Now what I want to know is: why are taxpayers' dollars being spent on this??

Edited to add (12:31 am): The video's so popular, the original site takes ages to load --- so naturally, it's been Youtubed.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, MDA, Media Development Authority, Singapore media

Taking care of business

It was a good thing I chucked my brand-new passport photos into my bag this morning, because I found myself with an unexpected couple of hours free between appointments this afternoon and decided that I'd best betake myself post-haste to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority to get my passport renewed. Yes, I've learned my lesson.

At first I was blindly queueing up at the e-services terminal, but then it occurred to me to ask a human being instead --- particularly since the queue to speak to the human being was moving more efficiently than the one for the e-services terminal. As it turns out, to renew one's passport, all one has to do is a) request a form at the general enquiry counter, b) fill it up (the form promises to take no more than 3 minutes, and really, it doesn't), c) slap a passport photo onto it and d) drop it off in one of the many clearly marked deposit boxes for this purpose.

Oh, and you need to have a credit/debit card number that you can put down so that the government can take its $70 fee.

Since this über-efficiency meant that my passport-making errand took a lot less time than I expected, I found myself wandering the SMU campus with time to kill, which took me happily to the exhibition "Education at Large 1945-1965: Student Life and Activities in Singapore". As an interviewee in the exhibition's main film said, students used to get very passionate about ideologies and principles --- not about celebrity idols." (This may not be a verbatim quote, but you get her drift.)

Helpfully for people like me with mediocre Chinese abilities, a full English translation of the exhibition panels is available in a handy brochure. Go see!

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Education At Large

Breaking the bad taste barrier

In the middle of this evening's Ikea research trip, I pointed at a lamp and asked. "Okay, so tell me: is that outrageously ugly or cutting-edge ahead-of-the-curve design?"

"Outrageously ugly --- "

"Thank you. I thought I was the only one who thought so."

" --- Actually, it looks like the opening show at the Biennale last year. Especially the bigger one." And my friend pointed at this version of the lamp in question:


Obviously, my friend shall not be named, or he'll never work in this town again.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Ikea, Singapore Biennale, ugly

In which Singapore ranks #77

The World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report 2007 is out, and Singapore ranks 77 out of 128 countries, with a score of 0.6609 (on a scale where 0.00 indicates a measurement of absolute gender inequality and 1.00, gender equality). The top Asian country is the Philippines (ranking: 6; score: 0.7629) and good ol' Switzerland is at no. 40 with a score of 0.6924.

Now I wish I'd paid more attention in statistics classes so that I could actually figure out what the report and those numbers mean ...

(Via Broadsheet.)

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Global Gender Gap Report

Orange and yellow make the world go Hallow-eeny

I didn't do anything Halloween-y this year, unless you count the orange I ate after dinner as some kind of tropical substitute for pumpkin (it was sliced into wedges, not carved, and consumed with all the finesse of a ravenous zombie).

I did "give" a bunch of friends candy corn, courtesy of the SuperPoke! application on Facebook. But that was mostly because I was excited at both finding out that SuperPoke! had Halloween actions, as well as seeing the words "candy corn" (another Americanism that I'm sure ballsy is picking up). Not that I ever actually liked candy corn. Feed me some Reese's Peanut Butter Cups any day --- available in Halloween colours all year long!

I was telling James how it's wicked fun dressing up for Halloween only if you're clever enough to think up an ironic costume, like Oz does on Buffy (season 4) when his girlfriend Willow is dressed up as Joan of Arc whom she says had "a close relationship with God" --- cue Oz pointing to the friendly white sticker on his flannel shirt that says, "GOD". Tofu Nation had a pretty close encounter with one such cleverly costumed couple this year: A-Salt and Battery (scroll down to the image of the woman in bright yellow).

Now that I think about it, maybe I should've done something Halloween-y this year. After all, given how rabid the religious right has been in Singapore lately, by next year Halloween might be banned, along with the abominations of birth control and pigskin footwear.

BARTLET: I like your show. I like how you call homosexuality an abomination.
JENNA JACOBS: I don't say homosexuality is an abomination, Mr. President. The Bible does.
BARTLET: Yes, it does. Leviticus.
JENNA JACOBS: 18:22.
BARTLET: Chapter and verse. I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I had you here. I'm interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She's a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, and always clears the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff, Leo McGarry, insists on working on the Sabbath, Exodus 35:2, clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here's one that's really important, 'cause we've got a lot of sports fans in this town. Touching the skin of a dead pig makes us unclean, Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother, John, for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads?

--- "The Midterms", The West Wing

Yeah, I'm as pissed off at Thio Li Ann and her supporters as any other reasonable human being. Yeah, and I said "pissed off", not "pissed on [her grave]". And this isn't anonymous, either.

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Technorati Tags: Halloween, SuperPoke!, religious right, 377A

The most unexpected language error I found today

"Hick-ups", instead of, well, you know.

It's a strange error to find, especially since it's in a Singapore publication from 2002 and it's not like Singapore wasn't thoroughly so English-educated then that people didn't know then what hiccups were.

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Technorati Tags: hiccup

Barely eating

My stomach is extremely unhappy this weekend, which took all the fun out of my mother's birthday dinner last night. I haven't been able to retain anything in my system, although I'm now hazarding a banana walnut muffin (bought from Cedele yesterday before I realised how seriously ill I was).

Anyway, before I got sick, I went to the National Museum's 120th anniversary party on Friday night, which included the premiere of 120, a commissioned theatrical performance (I don't know how else to call it) about the redesign and revamp of the museum. Very postmodern, as these things are wont to be.


Since then, all I've done is try not to aggravate my stomach further. I suppose drinking orange juice wasn't the smartest move in the book, but I hate that icky taste in the mouth that comes from being sick. On the other hand, watching some season 2 The West Wing helped, mostly because I know certain episodes so well I can just sit around and wait for the punchline, which sometimes goes like this:

JOSH: You've heard.
BARTLET: About the Chinese refugees?
SAM: They escaped.
BARTLET: Yeah. Can you believe it?
JOSH: No, as a matter of fact, neither one of us can believe it, sir.
BARTLET: That detention center was being guarded by the 22nd Division of the California National Guard. Now, what does it say about our reserve army?
SAM: That 83 men, women and children who haven't eaten in two months staged a prison break.

--- "Shibboleth", The West Wing

I haven't eaten (properly) in two days and I don't think I could help the cat stage a breakout from the apartment right now.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, National Museum of Singapore, sick, The West Wing

A hodge-podge of stories

I've been meaning to blog for the past four days at least, but whenever I've sat down with this blank Blogger screen in front of me, nothing's come to mind.


I mean, there was the story about the mango. My friend and I were walking along Upper East Coast Road when a) two bats dived out of the tree just in front of us, b) I spotted a huge mango on the road just beside the curb. "A mango!" I squeaked. My friend was nonplussed, although he stopped to look down at it. "Get it!" I squeaked." But then a taxi was coming down the road. "It'll squash the mango --- " "No, it won't. Get it!" And then we had a mango. It's in my friend's fridge, last I heard, so I can't report on how it tastes (you see why this makes a weak story?). I'm still amazed that it fell off the tree just as we were walking by --- thank you, fruit bats!

Then there's the story about wandering through a corner of Chinatown with Wahj on a too-hot Saturday afternoon, during which I introduced him to Global Sounds World Music Cafe, while interjecting every now and then about the Japanese prostitutes that used to inhabit Spring Street and the "death houses" (where the destitute went to die) that used to run down Sago Lane. That's what comes of spending a week reading about the seedy underbelly of 19th-century Singapore. Wahj said I should start running walking tours, but this being Singapore, one needs a pesky government licence for that, plus it's too hot to be walking around that much.

What other stories have I got for you? My uncle had quite a few when we all had dinner over the weekend. He'd just come in from Canada, but from the stories he told, you'd think he'd just returned from a round-the-world expedition. The best story was about taking a public bus between towns in Turkey --- only to have armed policemen muscle aboard with a handcuffed man that they were transporting to prison. Those were the days, I guess ...

Today's sad tale could be of how I had (as usual) too much work and had to (as usual) work after dinner. But instead, let's talk about coriander pesto and how it's totally different from basil pesto, which means that my pasta dinner didn't taste exactly as I'd expected (though it still tasted alright). Coriander always makes me expect a curry flavour. Guess I'll have to go look up a different recipe now ...

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Technorati Tags: random

Another reason the news in Singapore annoys me

There are many reasons why I don't typically read The Straits Times or watch MediaCorp News or Channel NewsAsia, but here's one more that I've not regularly articulated:

The first 10 minutes of the nightly news concentrated, as it always does, on the comings and goings of the senior leadership, which seemed to consist mostly of making speeches.

It's from yesterday's BBC News story, "Lessons from the Burmese uprising", and describes TV news bulletins in China, but I think it applies well enough to TV news in Singapore. How many times I've listened to or read news reports (including lame news ticker headlines) that dutifully reported the mundanities in a minister's speech as if they were the gospel truth or Eureka! moment. In an age when almost anyone with an internet connection can speak directly to a global audience, does the mere fact that it happened to be a politician who said something make it news anymore?

I happened to switch on the TV at 9:15 pm last night because I wanted white noise and was tired of my iTunes playlists. For a moment I was tempted to leave the TV on Channel 5 and wait for the 9:30 pm news bulletin --- but then I remembered how annoying previous experiences had been and switched over to the pabulum of a Discovery Travel & Living programme about travelling in Alaska instead. At least there were pretty glaciers to look at.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore media, Straits Times, Channel NewsAsia

Dropping in at Comex

It was one of those days, when one spends most of the day faffing about doing nothing --- then at the end of it comes a mad dash to Comex one hour before it closes, to suss out the prices of PC desktops and external hard disks (for a friend, not for me).

I rightfully expected it to be a madhouse and it was, except for those uncanny pockets of emptiness where half-hearted salespeople were trying to move units of software (people go to Comex to buy software?). There were at least two very loud and enthusiastic booths pushing units of what I think was called an iMuse: an MP3 player, camera, address book and two other applications (maybe one was for playing games?) built into one device. For me, the "iMuse" moniker is what killed it --- it made me think instead of iPods or other Apple-engineered devices with more brand cachet.

Over at a cell phone retail booth, the sales guy was yelling rhythmically into the mike: "I give you discount of 50% ah! Unbelievable ah! Only five units left ah!"

And then there were the ever-popular Stuff girls. As we wove our way through the squeeze in front of their booth, I overheard a man asking one of them, "So the magazine, it's monthly, is it?" He must read it for the articles.

We walked out of Comex five minutes before closing and there were still hordes of people pouring in. The cab stand outside Marina Square was, as I'd predicted, a darn sight less messy than the one at Suntec, plus it had the advantage of being located beside a 7-Eleven. While selecting my drink from the fridge, I thought to myself, "Drink something you won't be able to get for the next two weeks," and selected a can of Pokka green tea.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Comex

Notes from the National Day Rally 2007

Which I watched while making dinner in front of the TV (a salad and open-face sandwiches are easy that way) and chatting with sarah online.

First of all, WTF was up with the turquoise shirt? (Yes, it merits a "WTF".) Combined with the purple lighting, it was all very getai, all very 881, all very distracting.

When I finally got over that shock to my system (mostly by listening to the speech, rather than watching it), the man was maundering about education. I said to sarah, "It's very sad when a prime minister sounds like he just learned that secondary school students know how to use video cams --- WHEN THIS IS THE AGE OF YOUTUBE." Maybe he needs to watch Teacher Tube more often (via apophenia).

sarah thought it would help if he didn't talk about good teachers in neighbourhood schools as if he'd never met any before. Not to mention the implication that good teachers are those that come up with all the gee-whiz projects --- where's the love for teachers who are plugging away to get the basics right?

Oh wait, he foiled me with the obligatory "let's have the teachers stand up and take a bow" moment. But hey, in that contingent of about 40 teachers, where were all the women? The contingent was heavily male, which is hardly representative of the local teaching population. Or maybe the women were just better at making excuses not to attend the Rally ...

Reason #7924 why Singapore will never get its act together like a real society: the prime minister is happy to operate at the level of "Singaporeans like incentives", and toss more incentives at them. So the government thinks non-Malay students will study Malay as a third language if they get two bonus points towards JC admission --- which some of them will, but that's no guarantee that any of them will actually continue using the language after they snag their two bonus points, or that they will be able to effectively use the language as adults. Given all the former Chinese-as-a-first-language students I know who are barely bilingual today despite the "A"s they scored in school, let's just say I'm skeptical about how this new programme will fare.

I'm also wondering if trumpeting a programme like this will make some of the latent racism in Singapore all the more evident if the Chinese majority fails to respond even to prime minister-endorsed incentives and shows no interest in the programme. Sure, there'll be some who say there are more "useful" (e.g. widely-spoken) languages one could study instead of Malay, but there'll also be those for whom the bias against people of another race spills over into a bias against their language. We'll see, I suppose ...

Moving along, I said to sarah, "I find it weird that the PM says 'twenty-one-five' instead of 'twenty-fifteen' [when he's referring to the year 2015]". What is up with that? Everyone says "nineteen-fifteen" and not "nineteen-one-five", right?

And then there was the whole "Just do it" Nike reference --- the prime minister, ladies and gentlemen, telling people to get on with sex to make babies.

You know what? Even less than I want to hear my parents talk about sex, I want to hear any government representative talk about sex. Even as a "joke". Which was not funny. At all.

On the other hand, everyone could just take such "wisecracks" at face value and run out and start having wild bunny sex a) outside of marriage, b) without protection. Let's see how much they'd like that.

(Obligatory PSA time: If you're going to have sex, make sure you are protected. For heaven's sake, don't believe the prime minister and "just do it".)

So the prime minister was talking about his former constituent, an old woman who was worried because she was receiving medical treatment and her CPF money would run out this year. And all he said to her was a smiley "Man man lei" (Cantonese for, "Let's do it slowly"). Let me just say that if my grandmother were still alive and the old Cantonese woman in question --- not to mention any number of other fierce elderly Cantonese women I know --- she would tell him exactly what to do with his "man man lei". I think even my mother would, in Cantonese and in English, because she's effectively bilingual that way (no need for two bonus points for JC admission, either).

An old woman's only source of money is running out and he says "man man lei"?!?!?!

In the same vein, I'm sure the 91-year-old woman he spoke with really loves her menial job working at a hawker centre. Did no one stop to wonder if 91-year-old men and women should be working in the first place?

Lee Hsien Loong: I think we must improve the returns on the CPF.
ME: No shit, Sherlock.
sarah: Eh, he went to Cambridge, okay?

Lee Hsien Loong: It's going to cost the government a lot of money [to improve the returns on the CPF].
ME: Excuse me, the government get money from where? From our TAXES correct?????
sarah: YAH LORRRRRR.

I'm not saying they shouldn't spend the money, I'm saying they shouldn't talk about it like it's the government's hard-earned profits and savings, when in fact, last time I checked, it's the people's. This is what happens when the prime minister's allowed to refer without a trace of irony to "Singapore, Inc." in his speech, and no one calls him on it.

MEGO sections: CPF changes and HDB upgrading. Oddly enough, the HDB section more so than the CPF bit. The only thing I had to say about the HDB plans: "Y'know, if you didn't clear Punggol Point, you wouldn't have to plan to "bring back" al fresco dining to it."

Finally, just before 10 pm, it was over. But only after the prime minister waved his arms like an animatronic puppet.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Singapore politics, National Day, National Day Rally

Not the coolest thing to do, I'm aware ...

But is anyone going to be watching the National Day Rally at 8 pm so that we can heckle it together online?

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, National Day Rally, heckle

The roadside routine

There's a certain imperiousness with which I stick out my hand to hail a cab. It's not so much a "You, cab, come here now!" as an expression of my own (misplaced?) sense of purpose: "I've got shit to do, and I need to do it, and I need a cab NOW."

Sometimes the gesture mellows into a wide-winged flap, executed with all the slow desperation of one who knows the empty cab is going to pass me by because, it would seem, he has better things to do than to pick up a live fare. So the unabahsed sweep of my arm is a defiant challenge: "You can't possibly miss seeing this outrageous move, so don't come and act blur" --- which it will do anyway, and drive on by obliviously.

In Singapore, you don't often hear the New York cab-call whistle, or see the swaggering New York hail. The latter is a gesture that's grown magnified with frequent repetition in the movies, almost to the point where it's a heil gesture rather than a mere hail. Most cab-getting motions I've seen here aren't quite so drastic. As for the whistle, I wonder if it's because men who whistle in public seem capable only of hitting the notes that squel "wolf-whistle" and therefore can't fathom using their lip-blowing skillz for anything else.

Of course, none of these gestures --- aye, even the New York heil, I'd wager --- are guaranteed methods of landing a cab in Singapore. After all, what good is a flapping arm against the power of the pre-late-night-surcharge dearth of cabs, or an individual cab driver's insistence that he has to go to Hougang when I want to go to Holland?

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, cab, taxi

Invisible City --- have you seen it?

To begin, I should admit my biases: I'm friends with Pin Pin and I really enjoyed her previous film, Singapore GaGa. Even though I didn't really know anything about Invisible City while she was putting it together, I went to see it with more than just an open mind --- I went with the expectation of being surprised, again, about some overlooked facet of the Singapore story (a phrase that, by the way, desperately needs to be reclaimed from where it's been boldly slapped on a fat red memoir).

Having seen the film, though, I'm not sure what to say about it. I sat down to write a "typical" film review, but I ended up waxing lyrical bloviating about this, that and the other detail in a predictably self-important but meaningless fashion that demanded immediate backspacing.

Perhaps I'll just say this: Invisible City is a very different film from Singapore GaGa. It is a quiet film, a thoughtful film, a film that invites you between the edges of a crumbling memory to see what's left within. It's unflinching at certain moments, maiden-coy at others. And it's a journey worth taking with the filmmaker to find out what we have forgotten (ironic as that sounds).

As the Singapore Heritage Fest gets underway and Singaporeans wring their hands and rend their garments over en bloc property sales and threatened 80-year-old trees, I can easily imagine Invisible City becoming pigeonholed as some kind of call to arms to save our history and heritage before it's completely obliterated. But that would be an insult to the film that it is. Watch it, watch it a little more closely, and you'll see.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Invisible City, Tan Pin Pin

Wordiness: caffree

Leafing through George Windsor Earl's The Eastern Seas (published in 1837), I came across a description of Singapore as home to people of many different races, including "Caffrees". The word made me think of "coffee", which made me think of someone from South America --- very logical, I know. At any rate, it was clearly some anachronistic term for a group stomped upon in the course of colonialism.

Which turned out to be not too far from the truth. The glossary of military terms at a Macquarie University Library website informs me that "caffree" (also "kaffir") refers to an African native brought to Ceylon as a slave or mercenary soldier by the Portuguese, Dutch or British. Not that you ever see any pictorial depictions of Africans in nineteenth-century Singapore (or, indeed, of Singapore today, barring a few players in the local soccer league), but it makes sense that where the empire went, there some slaves also followed.

Now I wonder if any caffrees ever settled in Asia ...

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Technorati Tags: wordiness, Singapore, caffree

Photograph it before it's gone

That's pretty much the spirit behind my friend Kay Chin's ongoing photographic project, Enbloc: Collective Memories. He's setting out to document old, and not-so-old, homes in Singapore which have the en bloc sword of Damocles hanging over them.

(The term "en bloc", for my dear foreign readers, is Singapore shorthand for the recent phenomenon of property developers snapping up entire housing projects, so that they can tear them down and build obscenely profitable new condominiums and the like. Their formula is usually simple: replace the existing units with 3-4 times as many smaller apartment units on the same plot of land. As more of these projects have gotten underway, there's been much national hand-wringing and lamentation about the buildings of historical, cultural or simply idiosyncratic significance at stake.)

If you live in a residential development that's going under the en bloc hammer (or maybe 'wrecking ball" is the better metaphor), let Kay Chin take a picture of it and perhaps use it in a future exhibition or book, and in return you get a signed photograph of your favourite spot in your home.

I'm lucky in that all the places I've ever lived in Singapore are still extant, as are the schools that I attended (though the buildings might be put to other uses today). I'm pretty much a minority though --- most people have a story that begins with "My school was closed down ... " or "We used to live there but it was demolished to build ... "

Things have a short shelf life in Singapore. Even honking big buildings.

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Related posts: Singapore, vividly yours

Technorati Tags: Singapore, en bloc, Tay Kay Chin

In with the new, out with the old

I was going to blog about reactions to the iPhone (over in the US) and the closing of the National Stadium (here in Singapore) --- but then there was the weekend with parties and prosecco, and then I forgot that I owed a client some work, so I spent Sunday catching up, albeit at a leisurely pace.

Anyway, when I talk about the iPhone (without being able to get my hands on one in this country), people don't seem to take me seriously when I point out the lack of MMS and a better camera (2 megapixels is so 2005, not to mention that there also seem to be grumbles about the camera quality). Plus ringtones are limited to what Apple packages with the phone --- that's so 2000! I appreciate the functionalities it got right, but even so, maybe I'm not really the market that Apple's targeting at the moment ...

With the National Stadium, what more is there to say, I guess? Except to quote the line from Alfian's play Homesick: "How can we build a national identity if we keep tearing down everything with the word 'national' in it?"

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Related posts: In memoriam

Technorati Tags: Singapore, iPhone, National Stadium

Prices going up, cigarettes going out

Bogged down as I have been in work, I only recently came to the realisation that we're four days away from July 1, when:

• Singapore's goods and services tax (GST) will go up from 5% to 7% --- thank you, Apple Centre at Wheelock Place, for dutifully informing me of all the stuff I might wish to buy before the GST increase; and
  

• smoking will be banned in "entertainment outlets e.g. pubs, bars, discotheques, lounges (including KTV lounges), nightclubs, etc." --- thank you, BBC News, for today's story on the impact of the UK's own July 1 smoking ban on shisha outlets, which made me wonder about the future of their counterparts in Singapore.

I've sounded off on the GST hike before, and I maintain that retailers need to start distinguishing on their price tags between how much of the price is the actual cost-to-the-consumer-and-pocketed-by-the-retailer and how much of it is the GST-given-to-the-government. But of course, Singapore isn't exactly known for a healthy culture of consumer protection: Channel NewsAsia today reported that the Competition Commission of Singapore doesn't see anything awry with NETS' fee hike. Interestingly enough, the NETS fee hike (from 0.55% or less of a transaction to 1.5-1.8%, i.e. close to what credit card companies charge) also kicks in on July 1.

So from July 1, we can expect prices in Singapore to unilaterally rise by up to 4% (2% additional GST + up to 1.8% to cover the increased NETS fees) --- which is, by the way, more than the putative 3% rate of inflation that gets bandied about. Up with progress indeed.

As for the smoking ban, I take the point that non-smokers want to have their fun and not smell like it too, but already I'm a little nostalgic for the smoke-filled embrace of a crowded bar or dance club. Blame it on the fact that I dated a chain smoker in college. Blame it on the fact that while only 12% of Singaporeans smoke, in my social circle it seems that every other person does. I don't mind people smoking around me and it's a little odd to think that I'm witnessing the end of a cultural era of smoke-filled "entertainment outlets".

Of course, one might argue that my expression of sentimentality's disturbingly akin to, say, a denizen of sixteenth-century England lamenting the fact that women don't wear white lead makeup anymore. But the broader point is this: if the smoking ban is merely a legislative acceleration to make people stop Doing Things That Are Bad For Them, at what point is it acceptable for a government to interfere in a private decision or preference?

For instance, plagued as I am by reams of junk snailmail that gets shoved into my mailbox or wedged into the gate outside the apartment everyday, there are times when I have fascist urges to demand legislation that would outlaw such an egregious waste of paper. Or how about legislating against the consumption of sweetened drinks like Coke (still my favourite drink of all time, by the way) or Mountain Dew or any number of drinks that are of absolutely no nutritional value and arguably contribute to all the wider health problems associated with a diet with an excessive sugar intake?

My point is not that we should introduce more legislation à la the chewing gum ban. My point is at what point do we legislate all manner of human behaviour?

Meanwhile, I guess I'll be hanging out on the pavement a lot more from next week, enjoying the traffic pollution along with my friends' cigarette smoke.

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Related post: Got a light?

Technorati Tags: Singapore, smoking, no smoking, smoking ban

An afternoon at Geek Terminal

When Adri first told me she wanted to check out Geek Terminal (first seen --- by us, anyway --- at theory.is.the.reason), my initial reaction was: Great concept, but couldn't they have come up a name that was more Wired and less Hackers? Then I said, "Oh, I'm not usually in the Market Street area."

And then at 3 pm today, I found myself at Chulia Street with several hours to kill before meeting Little Miss Drinkalot for dinner. So I ended up at Geek Terminal after all.


The verdict:

• The decor --- Futuristic-ish. A bit too much silver and a few too many plasma screens for my personal liking, which is why I ended up sitting in one of the red chairs and stared at my own laptop screen instead.
• The coffee --- Illy! I approve.
• The wireless - Free and fast on my laptop. However, my Nokia N95 didn't get along well enough with the cafe's wireless network to be able to upload an image directly to Flickr. Oddly enough, the usually more patchy Wireless@SG did the trick instead.
• The Eubiq power plug system --- Very cute! And idiot-proof.

The only downside is that the table height is a little awkward for short Asian people like me. If I lean back into the (comfy-but-stout) armchairs, I have to raise my arms a little to work at my laptop. I imagine that could get tiring for anyone who needs to do some major typing.

I wasn't at all hungry, so I didn't try the menu. But if the cafe's raison d'etre is to serve neo-nomads like me, it seems to be on the right track. There's even a Nokia Nseries/Eseries display where customers can wander over and fondle new phones.

We'll see what Adri thinks when she gets here.

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, Geek Terminal

My very first Hindu wedding

In which I did not understand a whit of what was going on, because I failed to do a little educational Googling before showing up this morning.

At any rate, it was as colourful as I'd expected, despite the drizzly weather, and the videographer, just like his fictional counterpart in Bend It Like Beckham, firmly instructed the bride as she got out of the car, "Don't smile ah, don't smile." I wanted to chime in with the rest of the line from the movie: "Indian bride never smile! You ruin the bloody video!"


No video was harmed in the making of this married couple.

The rites were pretty, the legal solemnisation ceremony that followed banal and flat in comparison. And because I was sitting in the midst of a number of guests who were government employees, I started wondering who were the poor government employees who had to draft and finesse those civil marriage vows in the first place.

In future, I'll remember not to heap my plate so high at the lunch buffet because the stuff I like (potato curry, prawn vadai, papadums) are mostly carbohydrates after all. Good thing I went shopping after that to work it off.

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Things I wanted to Twitter yesterday

... but didn't have the time or internet connection to.

$83.94 for a new remote control for the airconditioner??

Despite all the construction and new traffic, pockets of Portsdown Road are still very pretty.

Nothing like almost choking to breathlessness on a miscplaced gulp of water to add a little perspective to one's day.

People who screw up one's dinner (namely Suzie's) should offer at least a free dessert to atone. (Sun With Moon Cafe, if anyone wants to know. Good food and service, except for the part where they screwed up).

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I've got jeans!

Which is an achievement worth blogging because while I have at least three pairs of jeans that are still in serviceable condition, my recent (inadvertent) weight loss means that what was once snug now is hanging-off-my-butt. And the current crazy work schedule didn't exactly put me in the right frame of mind to go shopping after work, even though I am in town pretty much everyday.

So today: a deliberate trip to Far East Plaza, where the clothing shop in the basement immediately to the right of the descending escalator opposite Gelare is now officially my favourite place to get jeans in Singapore, because the retail assistant (whom I suspect is also a co-owner or the owner's wife) not only immediately offers genuine assistance when you walk in, but is extremely astute at picking out jean styles and sizes to suit your person as well.

It was pretty much a verbatim repeat of my last visit there:

Woman in the shop: Can I help you? Looking for jeans?
ME: Yes.
Woman (immediately pulls something off the rack): This is our latest. The cutting is very nice. Want to try?
ME (looks it over briefly): Can I get my size?
Woman (sizing me up, literally): I think this one can fit you. Go and try.

So I do, and the jeans fit perfectly, and five minutes later I walk out of the shop, a happy customer.

The only difference being that I bought two pairs of jeans today, because the woman was so prompt and helpful.

The rest of Far East Plaza was a bust. Where has Womb gone?

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Technorati Tags: Singapore, shopping,

Two degrees of separation (or not even)

In which I whine about how Singapore is Too. Damn. Small.
Among my current clients, I count:

• The best friend's ex-boyfriend from way way back.
• Someone who went to school with Wahj way way back.
• The old government department I used to work for, including people who used to be my bosslets and colleagues a few years ago.
  

Only the last instance was a case of me knowingly taking up a job with people I already knew. The first two were pure and somewhat serendipitous surprises.

Familiarity is fine and dandy (which is partly why I took the job with my former department), but I would also like to meet some new people, please!

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Technorati Tags: Singapore

Monday morning to-do

I need two character referees who have known me for two or more years, who must be Singapore citizens and not related to me.

And, obviously, who don't mind being thusly named in a government form.

It's not as easy as it looks.

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Prophetic much?

Who said this in 1970?

Life is not just eating, drinking, television and cinema. ... The human mind must be creative, must be self-generating: it cannot depend on just gadgets to amuse itself."

Well, obviously, I'm screwed.

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