Shit scary

AsiaOne had a poll on racial purity a while back and, well, see for yourself—


(Screen cap taken by Idle Days.)

I really don't want to make another post amounting to 'racism is bad, boo', so I'll leave it at that.

Speed Through Skill my arse

I'm on off today, thanks to the exercise my platoon was supposed to have being pushed to Saturday. If not for this, we would've had a long weekend due to Monday's public holiday, but I can't say I mind—long weekends are overrated, and besides, the normal weekend of today is the long weekend of last year (five-day work week, I love you so), so I don't see what anyone has to complain about.

It does raise the stakes for the exercise, though. It's one thing to merely return to camp five hours late due to someone's massive cock-up, but it's quite another thing to book out five hours late due to same. I can already think of a few likely candidates for getting their dipole antennae stuck in trees, having their radio sets tuned to the wrong frequency, setting up in the middle of a huge clump of trees and thus not getting comms, and so on. These are the people who will wind up bludgeoned to death with halyards (batteries attached to comms cord and covered in green tape) once back in bunk.

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As for the line exercise, here's what I'd meant to say earlier, but didn't have the time to.

Essentially, the point of the exercise is to lay a pair of cables across a distance of roughly 1.6 km (or it might have been 2 km; I can't remember exactly), communicate with HQ from the endpoint, camouflage and protect the line (by throwing it in bushes, burying it where it passes over soil roads, etc.), and reel it all back, in that order. This was done once in the day and once at night, with a few uninteresting variations between the two.

In the day, my detachment, misunderstanding the requirements of line-laying, bashed through the vegetation instead of just laying by the road as we were meant to. Anyone who has ever bashed will realise that there's a huge difference between bashing and walking by the road; this resulted in our third man having to return in the safety rover due to the strain. I and the other guy weren't strangers to bashing and managed to comms through well within the set time anyway, but the other detachments (who'd followed our path for a while before realising it was insane) didn't, and none of us could perform the second road crossing given the kevlar-hard soil and the fact that instead of sharp, metal arc-of-fire sticks to use for performing tiebacks and slack, we had been issued with blunt, wooden chopsticks instead. Also, one of the other detachments had their deployment packs connected the wrong way around (which wasn't their fault; someone else had done the connecting), and attempting to lay from them resulted in an entanglement the proportions of which made me want to cry just looking at it.

This same detachment had the terrible bad luck of mixing up drums with us when reeling back (our fault, really), so that they ended up having to follow our lines back through lalang, waist-high grass, potholes and water-logged ground. They still bitch at us every day about it. One thing in particular that stood out was their third man's account of his horror at realising that our third man seemed to have taken leave of his senses and done a tieback around a thick, thorny bush covered with red ants. He showed us his hands and it was like something from The Passion of The Christ. So this is what guilt feels like.

Oh, and my detachment lost the clip that holds the drum in place, and now the second man and I have to pay for the whole thing. We could split the costs among the whole platoon, as our course commander (who, by the way, was Very Unpleased with the whole thing) instructed us to do, but I guarantee that would not make for happy fun times with our platoonmates.

What I've been trying to say about EX Line Combine, I guess, is that we didn't have a very good time of it.

Cable guy

This week was cutting wire, stripping wire, reeling wire, unreeling wire, untangling wire, knocking chopsticks into the ground with rocks (wonders of technology!) in order to tie wire around them, and bashing through vegetation carrying 20 kg of wire on my back.

I am getting a little tired of being what is essentially a combat electrician.

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In other news, my dad has this card that allows him a certain number of free stays at the Mandarin Hotel, so that's where my family's going tonight. I'm not sure what the appeal is; I'd assume it's the whole getting-away-from-home thing, but doesn't it sort of defeat the purpose to bring your three kids along with you? Anyway, I'm bringing the Xbox with me so I can destroy my few remaining brain cells by playing the sometimes stupid but ridiculously addictive Phantom Dust for hours and hours, because I need to book in again tomorrow morning for guard duty and so I need to waste a weekend's worth of time in one day. Wish me luck.

Neither the Xbox nor Phantom Dust are mine, by the way (I spend too much money on buying CDs by bands with silly names to be able to blow $300 on a Halo 2 accessory); they belong to a friend with a puzzling tendency to only use his Xbox at other people's houses.

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Oh yeah: I was at West Mall yesterday with this same friend when we were accosted by a pair of secondary school students performing a survey. It turned out to be about AIDS, a rather more interesting topic than I ever got to do a project on in school. The questionnaire was just as interesting—I have to say that this is the first time 14 year-old girls have come up to me in a public place to ask me about masturbation.

That's when I reach for my revolver

The new QLRS is out, and it's got a rather vicious review by me in it—

The British poet Maura Dooley praised Terence Heng's first collection Live a Manic Existence with a Cup of Sanity in Your Hand as "a tour de force... cutting but never bitter, Heng is a master... of the short urban lyric." Closer to home, Heng is known to admirers for his daring use of local as well as foreign vernaculars to explore such difficult themes as identity, alienation and love. Coming after a break of seven years, Heng's second collection of poetry From Where I'm Standing was one of the most anticipated local releases of 2004.

I lie, of course. I've never heard of Terence Heng and odds are that unless you're a scenester, neither have you. As far as I'm concerned, this is no great injustice, for From Where I'm Standing is a terrible book.

Reading it now, I think I may have been too blunt (though the version published there had already been toned down considerably from the original), but I suppose someone has to make up for the fawning review of a totally shite collection found elsewhere in this issue.

An offer we can't refuse

Wonderfully ambiguous headline in the Sraits Times today—'MM Lee on casino: Can Singapore afford to say no?'

And that's all I'll say about the casino issue, because it bores me.

Adventures in baggage-handling

Handler punished for donning camel costume

SYDNEY, Australia -- Qantas Airways Ltd. on Friday suspended a baggage handler who was caught on video opening a passenger's bag which contained a camel costume, donning the head and wandering around the airport tarmac.

The costume's owner, David Cox, said he was waiting inside the terminal at Sydney Airport earlier this week when he glanced outside and saw the baggage handler wearing his camel head.

"I obviously was flabbergasted, my jaw dropped to the ground," Cox told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio on Friday.

I've read funnier, weirder news stories—and if you read blogs, I'm sure you have, too—but that headline is just the ultimate. (Link taken from YJ, a bit later than usual—side-effect of staying in.)

The case for big publishing conglomerates

Unlike small press publishers, you will never see them select a logo like this one.

Brain-dead

I meant to spend today getting started on college apps, sorting out some of the issues with the Whatnot, maybe doing a bit of writing. Instead, I ended up reading this and playing this.

I blame the army.

Telecommunism

I happened to be at the Singtel website and couldn't help but notice the unfortunate choice of title for the Singtel newsletter's cover story of the month:


Coming to you soon, courtesy of Singtel: nationwide famine, endemic poverty and reasonable IDD rates!

Never leave home without it!

Wonderful thing of the week, via Brandon: Penny Arcade's Third Echelon Spy Manual. Read it now.

A vote for me is a vote for mercy killings

I thought the upside of going on course again would be that I'd at least have material for more NS posts, which would hopefully mean more links from Mr Brown, which would mean more traffic, and I am after all a publicity whore who desperately wants to be loved. I'm sorry to report, though, that the Signal course is the most half-arsed waste of time I've experienced in the SAF. I have hardly any interesting anecdotes to share, only three observations:

1) I really can't take sergeants seriously any more.

2) My platoon sergeant is always using expressions like 'roger him back', 'if your OC comms you, are you going to tell him "Sir, I don't know whether to wilco you or roger you"?', and so on. Nobody realises that this is funny.

3) A few months in the army subtracts sufficient points from your IQ to give a third of the platoon problems understanding concepts school children can handle. For instance, a watt is not the same as a volt, the ideal spot to use a radio set is not the middle of an underground tunnel, a piece of equipment labelled SPOILT is not the best piece of equipment to draw, and if you drop something on the ground from a height, there is a possibility that it might, you know, break.

DON'T PANIC

Up till now I've managed to blog once or twice every day, but tomorrow I'll be going on a six week Signal Operator course and will only be home on weekends until it's over. I should have something for you on Friday nights, Saturdays and Sundays, so do check back then.

I leave you with some better pictures of that bizarre tin of biscuits I mentioned a while back.


Cheers.

SMU students are different

My dad: (teaching a class on defamation) Lee Kuan Yew called Chee Soon Juan a 'congenital liar'. Does anyone know what 'congenital' means?

Some guy: (puts up hand) No, but I know what 'genitals' means!

Simon says: Singapore blogs > HK blogs

Singapore and Hong Kong are well known rivals. Usually Hong Kong has the upper hand. But when it comes to blogging Hong Kong is, let's be honest, woefully behind Singapore. Singapore blogs have bigger readerships, are more diverse and more interesting.

Why?

I don't actually agree with the premise. Bigger readership? Aside from she-who-shall-not-be-linked, Mr Brown and Adri (maybe Gabriel), I can't think of any with a readership higher than or on par with Hong Kong's biggest bloggers, even now that Conrad's disappeared. More diverse? Maybe. More interesting? It is to laugh. Between Simon himself, Hemlock and Fumier, I think Hong Kong has us all beat. (But, but, they're all gweilos, you say. So?)

Anyway, here's an excerpt from Simon's correspondence with mr brown that I thought was noteworthy, though not new. mb sez:

. . . I think we seem to buzz more because there is no real place for Singaporeans to speak their minds. Blogs offer anonymity and a chance to vent, rant and articulate thoughts that may get you in trouble offline. This is not to say that we live oppressed lives here. Most of us are quite happy and the perceived lack of freedoms is often over-stated in foreign publications. blogs and media. It's not that pathetic as it seems.

Most of us don't 'live oppressed lives here', true. Then again, most of us don't have problems getting married, if we wish, to the people we love, or seeing people like us in films (campy villains don't count). Most of us don't want to do performance art. Most of us have a chance at a job in the Air Force or in Armour. And most of us are free to comment on the issues that affect us without coming up against OB markers or 'not in the public interest' stonewalling.

Sure, I'm pretty unoppressed—but I'm not that political, and I'm Chinese, and I'm straight. It doesn't follow that someone who's communist or gay or Malay is equally 'free', or that because most people's lives are safely within the set boundaries, society as a whole is okay. If your feet are in the fire and your head is in the fridge, you are not, on balance, warm.

We could use more freedom offline but for now, blogs (and even, ahem, podcasts) are pushing the boundaries of tolerance, freedom of expression, and wit. Hopefully, this will spill over to the offline world too.
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If Singaporeans get used to speaking their minds online, then maybe, just maybe, they will also start asking for their rightful space offline too. Then it will be grand to have played a small part in making that happen.

Much as I would like to think otherwise, mb can dream on. Bloggers are safe for now because we're insignificant—yes, even mb. What's a few thousand readers a day compared with what the (government-controlled) papers get? (mb has his column in Today, sure, but self-castration there is a given.) If we had circulations of Instapundian proportions, there's no way we'd be able to speak as freely as we do now, at least on political issues.

An interview Alfian Sa'at gave some time back seems relevant here. In it, he says the government's allowed him free reign 'despite certain anti-establishment sentiments'

Because they know that I have a very low circulation and there are not many people who read poetry at all. I only reach a very selected audience and it's not like my poems are being published in The Straits Times which has a mass circulation. A lot of people were asking about how I deal with the paradox of, on the one hand, I am raving against censorship and the on other my poems are being so blatantly anti-establishment and yet they are not being censored. So how do I negotiate that?

My answer: I'm small fry.

The same, I'd argue, applies to blogging today. The day an openly (not necessarily exclusively) political local blog hits the real big time, or practical efforts are made on the back of the blogosphere to assert our rights ask for our privileges in meatspace, will be the day the 'political website' laws start to get enforced on blogs. I'd bet my ORD on it.

Sofa King anal

The Scotsman reports that a furniture shop's poster with the slogan "sofakinggood" was banned today. The Advertising Standards Authority banned the poster stating it could be viewed as containing swearing and "was likely to cause serious or widespread offence".

Link yoinked from Brandon.

Death and fines

From Seth Godin's blog, via LancerLord:

Singaporeans should feel quite at home in Newcastle.

Baffling

Overheard in the cookhouse:

NSF 1: 'Why is porn contraband ah?'

NSF 2: 'Got AIDS what.'

I guess they were talking about gay porn.