Walked Over

Oh yeah, Mr Huxley? I’m in a Starbucks with a “vintage edition” of your book that cost $18.99 even though the original content has long since passed into the public domain.

The last few days have been a world of pain.

I went for that little surgery of mine (tonsillitis, as far as my insurer is concerned), and now the upper palate of my mouth has been brought slightly further forward to the front of my mouth, and a wire has been sewn into the bottom of my tongue. The doctor had told me there would be no speech impediment involved, but I find myself worrying about the loss in tongue-flexibility. At worst, it’s going to be a permanent lisp–oh the stereotype.

On a liquid diet so far, because chewing anything makes me see spots and small swallows is about all I can manage. If nothing else, my lovehandles are slowly receding–if I can keep up the diet another month I’ll be able to see a six-pack. At least, until I revert to fried eggs and spam for dinner again.

Just a note for the future–the insides of your nose are sensitive enough to detect the fluoride they put into our tap water.

Daddy bought my hospital bed number in 4D and won a couple hundred bucks. He should have gone with my roommate–his bed number was the top prize. Figures–he had a heart-bypass.

Turned out to be pretty good for something that cost less than $200.

I recently joined the National Library Board’s “Friends of the Library” programme as a volunteer. So far, I’ve gone for the orientation briefing and helped out with one story-telling session/lesson.

Things I have learned:

1. Kids love volunteering with the library. Some of the Secondary school kids I volunteered with last Saturday informed me that they have to perform a compulsory 30 hours of community service a year. The library is a great place to volunteer for them as it is relatively easy, clean and effortless compared to old folks’ homes or flag days. Plus air conditioning and free food almost every single session.
2. Other than the kids who need to fulfill a quota, adults really love volunteering with the library. There are over 15,000 volunteers according to the Volunteer Programme IC, of whom evidently there are several hundreds who perform over 15 hours of service a year. Top contributor last year did several hundreds of hours of service (to be fair, she is retired).
3. Because of the glut of volunteers, library volunteer sessions tend to be very easy. I spent last Saturday with seven – eight other volunteers helping out with a story-telling session/lesson for the 10,000 Fathers Read! programme. From the attendance sheet, I think there were supposed to be more, but some didn’t show up. Still, there were more than enough of us to go round–only about three people were really required. Still, given that it’s a volunteer-thing and that there’s no gurantee that the people you ask for will show up, I guess the redundancy is a good thing.
4. Our public library is very well-funded. The National Library Board gets a cool $180 million a year from our Budget. Which is why there are so many programmes about to encourage literacy and reading, and also the fancy new buildings and shiny new machines. (to my surprise, in terms of percentage, we spend relatively little on our library–only about 0.1% of GDP compared to South Korea which spends 0.31%, and the UK which spends 0.2%).
5. Given its budget and size, library volunteers are frankly unnecessary–but I’ve think one of the reasons for the existence of the programme is to draw Singaporeans to become more involved with the NLB and help provide some kind of informal personal outreach. Hell, they’ve got me blogging about it so that’s got to be worth something.

On a somewhat related note, the guy doing the story-telling and giving tips was Roger Jenkins, a professional story-teller (I wonder how you end up with that job) who was really good, considering he managed to get a bunch of kids all excited and happy with nothing other than his voice. I don’t think he even had any props other than a tasteless star-adorned vest. Although I kept thinking “Leeroy” thoughout the session and imagining him telling some kind of fantasy story involving some idiot charging in at impossible enemies. He didn’t, but I was somewhat surprised that his stories featured quite some amount of violence (to an anthropomorphic chicken). I guess I’m just a wuss.

Bizarrely, he chose to end the tips on story-telling session with a story about “baby snake” and “baby frog” who become friends and teach each other how to slide and hop, respectively, but are torn apart by their parents who insist that they are mortal enemies (a little one-sided towards the snake’s side, I should think). Then he started talking about how important it was as parents to teach our kids to love rather than to hate, and to look beyond superficial differences so that we could all get together, muslims and jews, blacks and whites, indians and chinese. I almost thought he’d go for “Israeli and Palestinian”…

Whoa. Pushing the envelope for cultural relativism and racial harmony at a kids’ story-telling session? Heavy. The predominantly-upper-middle-class parents looked a bit stupified. I wanted to laugh, but I figured it would be a little bit rude, especially since it was a pretty good way to teach valuable life lessons to little kids. Also probably would have made future volunteering a bit difficult.

In any case, I’m actually considering a career with the library, which explains the volunteering. As far as I can tell, it seems like a pretty nice organisation, though I’m a little uncertain if I could fit into the backdrop of female motherly-figure-types.

Bought a new htc magic, trying out the efficacy of Wordpress apps. So far the largest impediment is the touchpad…

We’re removing the upper-age limit for organ donors, it seems. Now, even those over the age of 60 can expect their bodies to be recycled upon death. Why the Ministry of Health thought this was necessary eludes me. Surely elderly organs are not particularly suitable for transplants? Or perhaps there just aren’t enough young people in Singapore dying in ways that can allow for body-part-reuse?

In any case, I had no idea that we were recycled quite so… efficiently.

From Channel NewsAsia:

The amendments approved by Parliament in March this year is expected to increase the number of organ donors by about 10.
This would mean some 70 patients could potentially benefit from the move.

That’s an average of seven organs per donor? That seemed like a lot, until a wikipedia search for common transplantable organs and tissues:

• Bone
• Bone marrow
• Corneal
• Face
• Hand
• Heart
• Heart-lung
• Kidney
• Liver
• Lung
• Pancreas
• Penis
• Skin
• Spleen
• Uterus

So it turns out that we’re only transplanting at less than 50% efficiency here and we’re not even taking into account things like Islets of Langerhans. So uncharacteristic of our little technocracy.

The Economist’s 2009 Liveability Ranking is out (though it costs $250 for a long peep).

We scored 54th out of 140 cities being ranked, according to AsiaOne, losing out to the usual suspects like Hong Kong and Tokyo.

So we’re (according to Mercer) the 13th most expensive place to live in the world, but only 54th in liveability???!!!

Oh Singapore, when will I stop making sucker bets.

Me: Must you always touch my things without asking first? Now it’s gone! And I had a lot of important stuff on that hard disk too!

Her: Like what?

Me: … stuff! Important stuff! Like photos!

Her: Photos…? You mean, like these?

Me: … never mind.

So silvr’s flickr feed features a photo of me:

Someone saw fit to quote:

Wow, you’ve captured someone truly lost in thought!

Yeah, I was really lost in thought about that one. Thoughts like “when am I going to get to have dinner?” and “this bus sucks.”

The twentieth anniversary of the Tiananmen affair is over (at least here in GMT+8).

It got little coverage in Singapore (big surprise), but the western world has been whipping itself up into a pretty froth about it. They even managed to dig up some new photos of Tank Man.

Whilst it certainly is a terribly tragic affair, I’m rather disturbed by the tone of the reporting. Some of it borders on the “how can we allow this brainwashed evil empire to survive???!!!” kind, replete with “the-chinese-government-and-their-sheeple-can-kiss-my-ass” type comments. It’s terrible to be at the receiving end of liberal smugness–no wonder the American right-wing hates them with a vengeance.

It doesn’t help that the Chinese government, which must have the worst PR team in the world, decided to try to cover up the whole affair with complete media blackout, internet blockage, and frankly pathetic umbrella tactics.

They might as well as have painted ”此地无银三百两“ in huge red letters all over Tiananmen Square.

It’s simultaneously sad and ironic that Hong Kong, that gleaming metropolis of materialism, has to stand in for China’s conscience.

It’s not fun being on the apologist end of a discussion about tyrannical governments. I’m taking a break from reddit for a couple days until this blows over and I can go back to lolcats and pun threads.

The past few days on reddit I have argued that the Chinese were surely not so stupid and naive, that surely the memory of this shameful event burned, if dimly, in their hearts and that the day would come when the salves of time would finally soothed the pain enough to allow a suitable memorial to the matyrs of the past to be honoured (albeit, my reddit arguments are phrased more in terms of “LOL STOOPID IGNORANT ‘MERKINS”). Because I do believe that.

And yet, today I was to be treated to a huge slice of irony cake.

At lunch, scantly an hour earlier, my colleague, seeing an article about Tiananmen in the Straits Times, asked me what it was all about–”why are they digging up this stuff from 20 years ago?” She had completely no idea. A brief explaination later, she called her geomancer to ask for a good date for her wedding. Because traditions are important.

Oh, irony cake–so soft and smooth. If only you were not so bitter.