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Wednesday, April 30, 2008

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.

Labels: Food for thought, Freelancin' living, Life in the internet age, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:50 PM

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

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!

Labels: Kitty corner, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 7:40 PM

Sunday, April 27, 2008

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?

posted by Tym at 11:17 PM

Thursday, April 17, 2008

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

posted by Tym at 8:18 PM

3 comments | Trackbacks

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

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

Labels: Freelancin' living, Life in the internet age, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 10:22 AM

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:55 PM

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

Labels: Singapore stories, Words words words

posted by Tym at 5:45 PM

Sunday, March 09, 2008

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

posted by Tym at 1:14 PM

Thursday, March 06, 2008

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

Labels: Food for thought, Singapore stories, Twitteresque

posted by Tym at 11:45 PM

Wednesday, February 27, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 9:26 AM

Tuesday, February 19, 2008

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

posted by Tym at 10:39 PM

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

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

Labels: Food for thought, Life in the internet age, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:58 PM

Saturday, January 26, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 12:18 PM

Sunday, January 20, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 10:39 PM

Wednesday, January 16, 2008

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

Labels: Freelancin' living, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 3:51 PM

Tuesday, January 08, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 8:36 AM

Sunday, January 06, 2008

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

Labels: Singapore stories, Words words words

posted by Tym at 10:59 PM

Monday, December 24, 2007

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

Labels: Life in the internet age, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 9:03 AM

Friday, December 21, 2007

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

Labels: Life in the internet age, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 6:28 PM

3 comments | Trackbacks

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

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

Labels: Books books books, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 12:07 PM

Thursday, December 06, 2007

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

Labels: Geek girl, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:15 PM

3 comments | Trackbacks

Sunday, December 02, 2007

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

Labels: Freelancin' living, Life in the internet age, Nightlife, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 6:00 PM

Saturday, November 24, 2007

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

Labels: Kitty corner, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 10:45 AM

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:35 PM

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:38 PM

Wednesday, November 14, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:06 PM

Saturday, November 10, 2007

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

Labels: Gender agenda, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 5:17 PM

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

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

Labels: Pop culture, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 10:52 PM

Monday, October 22, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories, Words words words

posted by Tym at 12:12 PM

Sunday, October 14, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 4:00 PM

Tuesday, October 09, 2007

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.

Japanese vending machine drinks - in Singapore

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

Labels: Domestically challenged, Food for thought, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:09 PM

8 comments | Trackbacks

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 9:08 AM

5 comments | Trackbacks

Sunday, September 02, 2007

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

Labels: Geek girl, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 10:28 PM

Monday, August 20, 2007

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

Labels: Gender agenda, Once a teacher, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 12:48 AM

5 comments | Trackbacks

Sunday, August 19, 2007

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

Labels: Life in the internet age, Singapore stories, Twitteresque

posted by Tym at 5:34 PM

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 1:54 AM

Thursday, July 19, 2007

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

Labels: Pop culture, Singapore stories

posted by Tym at 11:01 AM

Wednesday, July 18, 2007

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

Labels: Singapore stories, Wordiness

posted by Tym at 6:54 PM