The Food I Ate In Melaka Last Weekend

New Signs For Niceness

Good move? I dunno. It means we aren't gracious enough (clearly true) but also reminds us to think of other users who are a little more inconvenienced that ourselves. Not too sure about the word 'Priority' though. It tends to imply importance in a prestgious kind of way, as opposed to "women and children first".

The Reality Of Paying For TV

Each household in Singapore has to pay $110* a year for a Radio and TV licence. There were about 934,000 households in 2007**. That means MDA should have collected about $103 million taxes in that year.

At the same time there were 531,000 Pay TV subscribers** in the same year. With the cheapest plan on offer from StarHub set at about $25, these subscribers must have forked out at least an additional $13.3 million dollars a month. That's about $160 million for the year.

A large part of the Radio and TV licence goes to Mediacorp and other media owners for creating free-to-air programming. Mediacorp takes care of eight TV stations and 14 radio stations. Mediacorp also makes money from advertisers.

Enough facts, let the ranting begin.

I am not the first one to question the amount of money that goes into paying for a licence to watch TV and listen to the radio. The complaints got louder since Starhub with its cable TV started to fill out screens with more entertaining fare to keep us up at night. We all get 8 free-to-air channels. I am paying for an additional 42 channels on cable and personally, spend way more time watching cable programming than Mediocrecorp crap. So should we pay for the right to have TV in our homes, pay for free-to-air broadcasting and pay again to the cable TV operator? I know some of you don't even listen to radio anymore, and others don't watch TV because you get your fix from Youtube and other Internet media sources. If you don't use it, you shouldn't have to pay for it.

Someone's gotta talk about this more. Apart from makan, there's little else to do but watch TV and worry about $.

*http://www.mda.gov.sg/wms.www/devnpolicies.aspx?sid=185
**Statistics Singapore (http://www.singstat.gov.sg/pubn/reference/sif2008.pdf)

Ode To Plurk

I plurk
Dun work
All day
Click and play
Addicted
Already predicted
Timelined MSN on thread
Comment then mark all as read
With plurk, karma you earn
More and more you yearn
Some say crazy
Plurk till lenses hazy
It can be lots of fun
The work piles into a ton
What? 37 Unread?!
No replies, no cred
Ok, am not so obssessed
Occasionally I plurk I confess
Control is required
Managed fun is desired
Come visit my plurk page
Join, it's all the rage

Recent Snappage

Can You Put Your Faith In Your Humanity?

At the best of times, it is easy. When the chips are down and odds seemingly insurmountable, can you count on conscience and heart to do the right thing? Maybe you can. But what happens in a situation of panic where people wrestle with the possibility of horrible death? Throw this option at two tribes, one with 'common men and women' and another, caught criminals. Both have the option of saving themselves by killing the other. Will those in nice clothes, coiffed hair and shiny shoes do the right thing? What is the right thing? Can we trust those who have done wrong before, have they been rehabilitated enough? Which flicks the switch, presses the button, sends the blade sliding down? And why doesn't the other? Do we share the same ideas of right and wrong?

These are the questions proffered in the new Batman film, The Dark Knight. Haha. What a set up you're thinking, and all this from a film. At the pivotal moment in the film, the answer was yes and fortunately, humanity prevails the right way in the film. I shan't (think that is first time I have used that word in the blog) spoil the ending or how the film unfolds but beyond all the action and brilliant acting, it is a thinker's film. Or maybe I thought too hard about it that it became a thinker's film.

There has been a lot of thought that has gone on into what Batman is, wants to be and what the people Gotham think he is or should be. It is apparent that this complexity feeds the criminal minds in the new instalment, who proceed to take advantage of perceived reality and manipulate the good guys. This perceived reality goes beyond "oh who is behind the mask" arguments to fundamental identity issues that eat away at Batman's character and values, and also at the values the common people of Gotham believe in. The first bit we saw that in Batman Begins and the struggle continues here in this new film too. The second bit is fresh, and we are treated to the two faces (haha!) of who we can be as 'civilised' people - all in a short 15mins.

Go watch the film. Bloody brilliant. Frightening, entertaining. (I don't know if Heath Ledger did enough to earn a win, now that all this talk about a potential nomination for Best Actor is wafting about, but he deserves a good pat on the back for his portrayal of the Joker. Loved the uniform and wig, haha!)

A Presidential Take On A Bob Dylan Classic

Make sure you watch everything in all the scenes, it's all hilarious!

Classic JibJab!

Hold On To Your Horses, Trouble's Brewing Ahead

Ever heard of the theory of "if-we-talk-about-it-often-enough, it-will-happen"?

Well, it's happening again, and 'it' is trouble in the Middle East. The world powers-that-be believe Iran is going to make nuclear weapons from the uranium reactors it has. Iran says it is not going to do that. The US and Israelis went ahead with military exercises in the Mediterranean which some say was a simulation of an attack on an Iranian nuclear power plant. This week, Iran tested Shahab-3 missles which have the capability to strike targets as far away as India and Greece, and threatened to close off the Straits of Hormuz if attacked. All this gesturing and trash talk. Goodness.

Still the way everyone is talking about this 'crisis' is "We are trying to prevent a WAR!" with dramatic emphasis of the final word, as opposed to "We are trying to prevent a war" said calmly, politely and seriously. Someone official will soon come around to say that a war with Iran is an extension of the "war on terror" and hence, necessary. Or have they already? Goodness gracious.

Nobody wants a war, especially this one. It will be bloody disastrous and potentially be a precursor for WW3. Granted that Mahmoud Ahmedinejad has openly called for the extermination of Israel and Israel has been found lying about its own nuclear capability (and they have a lot of big, powerful bombs hidden in the desert), a war between these two foes will only serve to make things worse between Muslims and the West. There could potentially spawn trouble across iraq, Iran and Afghanistan on a scale quite unimaginable. The price of oil will skyrocket into the $200s, the world economy will falter, more families will lose sons and daughters on foreign soil, extermists everywhere will take action, everyone else will be on edge and upset, the UN will prove useless once more, your job could be on the line and the world will be farked.

That's the bad news for this week. Stay tuned next week when we discuss how Swedish porn could help Singaporeans make more babies.

Privilege vs Right - Knowing When To Give Way

On my way to work on Friday, I got off the train as usual at Tanjong Pagar MRT to the sounds of a man shouting on the platform. He was in a wheelchair, and was addressing the crowd that was in and around the lift. They were not giving way for him to enter the lift. He continued to speak loudly and gesticulated for the able-bodied commuters around him to use the stairs and escalators. I told a Train Security attendant what was going on and her reply was "He should wait, there are many customers, you know."

I think commuters and officials have forgotten why the lifts were installed in MRT stations in the first place - to give the handicapped access to public transport. Built to provide a smooth exit from stations to adjacent buildings, as in the case at Tanjong Pagar, able-bodied commuters have come to take advantage of this convenience too. However, they forget when to give up this privilege or even ignore the needs of the handicapped. Worse still, the response from the Train Security attendant implies that right of use of these these purpose-built facilities rests with able-bodied commuters.

Looks like we have a long way to go when it comes to being gracious and putting the needs of others before our own.

Primary Barbeque

You slice them up and throw on the fire. Give them about 5 mins on each side. Then chomp down on them juicy sweet morsels of fruity pleasure. The Italians have a pasta sauce made from grilled red peppers. Yeah I like peppers. This was at Farah and Iggy's Cat and Dog Show.

More pixes at my Flickr.

Get To It You Lazy Ass

Procrastination is not good. But the funny thing it is easy to fall back into the P-trap. I dunno why. Well maybe I do. The classic cause is laziness. When a job seems too overwhelming, it seems all too easy to pass the buck or tell oneself that starting can wait another day. The fear of venturing up the mountain of Start Now.

This reminds of the time I put off doing my A-Maths homework during the June holidays of 1990. I remember cramming 8 chapters of work into a similar number of exercise books (remember them!) in one week. (I had a mad teacher who made us do every question in the 10-year series. She was mad but we all came out the better for it.)

This few days I have slept late because of a particularly wordy project at work that I have been 'researching and reading' about for a while. Those are euphemisms for 'putting off'. So I had to get going on it on Sunday and yet wanted to watch the Euro finals early Monday morning and yet had to drag the tired feet and eyes to work for an abundance of regular to suffocate under the guise of happy employment. I managed to batch out the deliverables. 3/7. Now 4 more to go.

There was a poster I found in one of the hostel rooms in NTU. Just white text on a red background. "The secret of staying ahead is starting now." Can't deny the wisdom of a poster.

Ok, ok, ok. Get to it.