Swine Flu

No, I didn't design it. I got this through the email and thought it is bloody funny. Heh.Many people have been saying that Singapore is over-reacting to the swine flu. We are checking everyone at the airport and those who have been to Mexico are either being sent home or to a special quarantine centre. They are under home quarantine orders until further notice. Visa restrictions are imposed on Mexican passport holders. You can argue both ways actually; whether Singapore is being cautious or over-reacting. But it seems as if the swine flu is dying down so the argument is likely to be a moot one.

Speaking of which, Singapore is at alert orange. After orange, is red. And after alert red, is alert black. I think if we do come down to alert black, we should just stockpile arms to shoot those zombies walking on the streets ala Resident Evil and store canned food ala The Road.

A place for Tai-Tais

I had one of those unsatisfying expensive dining experiences again. I can only say there is nothing in this place that would make me go back again. Ever.

Supposed to be the next big thing in Singapore. Will. Go. Bust. In. A. Year.

http://www.diningcity.com/singapore/Spruce027/index_eng.jsp

I should start giving out my own prizes soon for this type of restaurants that charges so very much for so very nothing. There were seven of us. We had three starters to share, a main each, another two desserts to share and then coffee all round. It costs S$41 per pax. For S$41, one would expect something extraordinary. But that something never came. Everything is ordinary. I had their "famous" Spruce Burger which I kid you not, tastes almost EXACTLY like a big Mac only it costs S$19. I mean, their Spruce Burger comes with mustard. I like mustard. I eat my hotdogs in New York with mustard. But it is an universally accepted rule that the only reason we put mustard in hot dogs and burgers is because they are inedible. Frankly, if you have to liberally sprinkle mustard in your famous burger, you don't deserve to ask S$19 from your customer.

I know I am in trouble when the place is packed with tai-tais. It is another universally accepted rule that tai-tais have absolutely rubbish taste and are suckers for anything that costs a lot but tastes exactly the same as your nearest McDonalds.

And the best thing is that the waitress, who was nice, asked us "if you have a big appetite, one should go for the pasta!" With all due respect to Spruce, that is absolute nonsense. We gave a long hard stare at the miserly plate of ravioli when it was served, hoping that it would transform magically into a big plate of pasta. But alas, it did not change its shape or size. I could eat three of those plates of raviolis without even blinking. We concluded that the waitress is extremely shortsighted and mistook us for a group of tai-tais who are full after eating a spoon of grass.

Doom. To. Go. Bust. Within. A. Year.

The Good and the Confusing

My expenses claims which totalled into gadzillions of dollars (ok, a bit of exaggeration but still bloody big - almost equivalent to one month's pay) and went back to January has finally been approved. I was beginning to fear that my claims had disappeared into the administrative blackhole which all taxi and entertainment expenses go into. I can imagine a graveyard where dead/rejected/misplaced claims went to rest. The cold moon was up in the night sky, throwing its unfeeling light over the graveyard. A rejected taxi receipt from NTUC Comfort fluttered forlornly in the distance while suddenly the black soil erupted and a dead dinner claim from Jan 2007 started to claw its way up and demand to be reimbursed.

I am now flushed with a bit more money than usual. So I felt like splurging again. Problem is that I have run out of stuff that I need to buy and I do hate buying stuff which I don't need.

Oh, one thing that bugs and confuses me no end is this whole rojak poisoning thing.

Granted, the impact of this food poisoning case is tragic but the reactions from media and public are as usual, knee-jerk and stupid. Some moron wrote in to ST and claimed that he was an expert in food safety and by looking at the picture of the stall, the stall should not have been operating. Then he lamented on Singapore's no wash hand before meals culture. And then, as if ST wants to be extra stupid with chili sauce, it runs an article that says 33% of Singaporeans did not wash hand.

You know, this is the part that always bugs me. As if washing hands before eating rojak or other food will prevent the person from falling into coma and dies. Pardon my Singlish, but can everyone be less stupid or not? Everybody uses utensils nowadays, even eating rojak. Scientifically, I just can't see the link between washing hands and dying in a coma induced by poisonous rojak.

If Singapore is unhygenic, then pray tell, how would anyone describe Laos and China? Devastating dirty? Unbelievably filthy? Many Singaporeans don't wash hands before meals because it is a relic from the past. Most of us are from poor families so when food is presented on the table, you run and grab and eat it before it bloody disappears. People from many cultures (African, Islamic, IndoChinese) engage in communal eating with their hands, passing food on common plates to one another.

It is an isolated incident. The rojak must have contained chemicals that can down a whale and in our case 139 people. Washing hands is not going to do any good.

I am glad I am not an economist / kids

I like to keep abreast of the developments in the financial crisis. Make no mistake, this crisis will be with us for a long time. This report from ADB comes to me yesterday:


Growth in Asia's developing economies will hit the slowest pace this year since the 1997/98 financial crisis, but the world's fastest growing countries may rebound in 2010, the Asian Development Bank said.
The forecast for 2010 was however contingent on a mild recovery in the global economy, and this was far from certain, the Manila-based ADB said in its annual Asian Development Outlook released on Tuesday.


Aaargh. Garbage and intellectual drivel.


I have been telling everyone who cares to listen, that supposedly learned and educated economists don't know what they are talking about. And this report from the Asian Development Bank essentially proves it. If ADB is a doctor, it will be saying the following to a patient:


"Oh, don't worry, the cold will get slightly better next week. Provided of course, you are not DEAD from infection tomorrow."


Duh.


Ok, I am not economist-trained but I know trouble when I read it. For those who don't keep track of the 6000+ articles that are churned out daily by the international media, this is the cruz of the problem now. The unholy mess starts in the US and it shall end there. What the US is doing now is pumping cash into the economy to kickstart it through a whole lot of initiatives. Stimulus packages, bailing out banks by buying up billions of toxic assets, cutting interest rates. You name it, the US government is throwing it at the mess. It has been six months since Sep 08 when Lehman Brothers bite the dust and nothing has worked so far.


So what do you do when nothing works? Print money, of course.


The US government has already printed US$1.2 trillion to buy bonds, mortgage-backed securities and other kind of garbage which is essentially worthless but just had to be saved. This sum of money has slowly trickling down to the US economy. We haven't seen the effects yet.



The Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of the US is $14 trillion. So the government just flooded its economy with about 9% more in currency in just one year. I am not saying the government shouldn't print money but as a general rule, you should try to at least make sure the rate of $ printing is equal or just a bit higher than your annual GDP growth. In the case of the US, the economy has only been growing at 1.5% a year. So pumping money at 6 times your annual GDP growth is basically asking for trouble. Money will be worth lesser and lesser and inflation will go up. One hopes that the US makes a speedy recovery because in the long run, inflation will catch up sooner or later.

Now let's talk about kids.

I don't understand parents. And I don't understand kids. Kids annoy me because 99% have bad manners. And parents contribute to the problem . . . no, i should say parents are the source of the problem. They treat their children like messiahs reborn and always have a handy excuse at hand to explain away their children's bad manners. For example, I have a 10 year-old nephew who is the darling of everyone but has the manners of a thug. The parents explained it away as competitiveness and boyish aggressiveness. Rubbish. The kid is a mess and he has already been in detention classes countless times for fights and bullying. He is heading for juvenile detention center soon.

Parents. Some people are not fit to be parents. Sometimes, they just can't help but to project their own fears and concerns onto the kid. E.g. my friend who married a foreigner had a boy. God knows what happens to the father but my friend is raising the toddler alone in Singapore. And because the toddler is shy with outsiders, the mother is in a mad rush to enrole her two-year old son into some stupid interactive classes for toddlers because she is scared that he will grow up to be a loner and could not socialise. She wants him to be articulate, vocal and all that nonsensical garbage. She is a bloody fool, even though she is a friend.

What's wrong with parents nowadays? I don't get their problem. I would love my children (well, i hope never to have any) to be quiet, shy, contemplative, considerate, sit in the corner and play the stupid piano/sew socks, polite, listen carefully to elders and most importantly of all, shut the hell up. Since when did we want our kids to be loud-mouthed bastards who walk around thinking he/she is the King of the Mountain?

Sometimes, I wonder whether these parents ever grew up themselves. Everything for the parents is a bloody game or contest, isn't it? Compete who has the brightest, prettiest, articulate, head prefect i.e. perfect kid. It is like playing an online Pirates game where one feels compelled to constantly upgrade its ship from a little cute sloop/pinnacle to a bad ass frigate or 96-gun Man-o-War simply because . . it is good for showing off to friends and there is actually nothing better else in their life to do. Admit it, there is nothing else in their life to do anymore so they have to focus all their energies on their kid and make it their show-off trophy.

Well, boo hoo. There is no such thing as a perfect kid. Just look into the mirror and ask whether the person looking back is perfect in the first place. Admit it, you suck as a person. So cut your kid some slack, make sure he/she grows up to be a kind and fillial person and not a glue sniffing thug/SPG slut and consider it a job well-done. I applaud a parent for raising a good and kind child, and not because the child is the champion of the debating class, a doctor / lawyer or one of the Masters of the Universe.

Oh, and my friend and I can destroy any 96-gun Man-O-War with my snazzy Corvette and his souped up Frigate. It is not how awesome is the ship; it is ultimately how you sail the ship.

Life's coincidences

I was about to get ready for bed when I decided to tidy up my bookshelf a bit. My old Thai exercise book dropped out of the shelf and out of nostalgia, I decided to give it a flip. On the back page was a list of classmates' names that I had scribbled down, possibly because I was dead bored in class. This was almost six years ago, mind you. Studying Thai in Bangkok was possibly one of the better times of my life.

One of the names stood out because the person actually scribbled down her address in Bangkok. Her name was Amy Brenneman and the last I heard, she designed clothes and had her own clothing line. So life was good for her. I recalled that Amy was very cool and she was always keen to know more about Singapore.

Out of curiousity, I googled her name and the following page comes up.
http://www.sjsratline.com/iWeb/www.sjsratline.com/Blog/FC657418-09F6-4869-8600-906819093F20.html

The appeal was in March 2008. Amy and her husband and daughter were in an elevator in a Thai apartment when the cable snapped. Yeah, the cable snapped and the elevator dropped five stories before crashing. And my friend was five months pregnant. The baby was safe although from the sound of it, Amy pretty much broke every bone in her body. She was smiling in the pictures though, so I guess she was some tough lady.

From the sound of it, she needed some financial help. Her clothing line has stopped. So I am probably going to email her sister to see whether I could get in contact with Amy again.

Times like this make me glad I wasn't staying in some broken down apartment in Thailand.

Watchmen and Pics of Indian Village

Isn't this a cool poster? Taken off Scifimoviepage.com. I need to get one of these posters to hang it up in my office.

Watchmen is hands-down, the best movie in 2009. Ok, so I am stretching it a bit since we are only in March. But given that Transformers 2 is going to be the worst movie in human memory (remember you hear it first here) and G I Joe looks like it is just a typical action movie, there does not look like any movie in 2009 that could better Watchmen. Unless they can come up with Rambo V in 2009 which involves John Rambo solving the global financial crisis by killing all the bankers, property and insurance agents in Wall Street and Shenton Way (OMG, I totally reserve all intellectual property rights on this storyline), there is no better movie than the Watchmen 2009. Visually stunning, wonderfully-developed characters and an intriguing storyline and finale, the Watchmen is second to none, first among equals. The movie shall usher in an epoch of creative movie-making, love and world peace. Ok, stretching a little.

Speaking of world peace, I passed by a typical Indian village in Bodh Gaya. I am not sure which is worse-off; a Lao village or an Indian village. Both have buffalos walking lazing around (hey, I wonder how is Daisy doing outside my house in Laos) and poor villagers either sleeping or doing their chores slowly.

This is like so typical of a village. Buffalos sleeping in close proximity to the villages.

Dirt path going into the village.


People can actually sleep outdoor in the heat.


Indian woman in saree wondering what I was doing.

Small shops selling things nobody is buying. Typical.

Ala Cabonara

I just had the worst carbonara in the Universe. Supreme proof that shit food can be served in the poshiest of environments. The carbonara was hard and clumpy like some failed experiment from a blind man's kitchen. The wine was also suitably cheap and nasty. The place was packed with rich people who seemed to be enjoying themselves on bad wine and lousier food. Conclusion: a person's taste seems to be inversely proportionate to his wealth. One of those rare times that I am glad that I am not rich.

After I came home, I surf the net immediately to verify what ala carbonara i supposed to look like. Yeah, I wasn't wrong. Ala Carbonara is supposed to be creamy, not clumpy with hard bacon hidden somewhere. Here's one from weightwatcher website.