Daily Discourse – Our local media

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I wonder, how do you feel, when you were misquoted? How would you feel when your work is reproduced without even so much of a note to ask for your permission?

Yet recently, 2 of my friends suffered this. One of them got quoted twice – the first time just a section of his post, and the second time, another post in its entirety. On both occasions, there was no notification that he was being quoted. He wouldn’t have known if not for comments left behind by readers. (Not linking to this friend as he has declined to be identified.)

You might be thinking that this is yet another case of bloggers taking it for granted and just reproducing another bloggers’ post. But it wasn’t. It was done by papers of our local press! When did they get the idea of getting articles of blogs to fill up the space on the papers?

This is how I felt about it: You have your flower pots along the corridor outside your HDB flat, and one day, a flower bloomed and then someone just snip it away without even so much of saying “Thank you!” or asking whether you would mind at all. However you want to justify it – i.e. it’s in a public area and all that jazz – the minimum amount of courtesy is still expected! (Furthermore, even helpers in a dessert shop asked permission before they took photos of the tiger on my t-shirt, when they can just do it and I won’t know any better!)

And if you think that’s the lowest our local papers can sink, you haven’t seen nothing yet.

A friend who was interviewed, got misquoted when the article went to print. And that, in spite of the tape recording being made during the interview! (Her account here.)

It makes one wonder, just how qualified are our so-called journalists? Just who the hell train their editors and this breed of journalists anyway? In fact, it even begs the question, are they even qualified at all? And even if their journalism qualifications is not in question, one wonders whether their own comprehension and listening skills is that bad too! Seriously, they need to go back to elementary school!

It is no surprise I have stopped reading our local papers other than the RECRUIT section. And it is no wonder why I have yet to regret the day I ended my ST Online subscription.


Clarification: This isn’t a post directed at the Straits Times though it was the one which misquoted. It was another paper which quoted the other friend’s blog post, however.

Oct 5 – F1 Hangover (II)

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Apparently, they ‘dolled up’ the Merlion for the F1 event but they haven’t remove ‘the decorations’ until now. Just like all that rubbish that’s left over after the event, which I read recently, was still being cleared.

And what do I think about the decoration? Freaking ugly. This is the equivalent of dolling up your daughter as an ah-kwa and then trying to sell her as one at Changi Point. And you wonder… what’s the point?

Sep 29 – F1 HangOver

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This photo (see below) was taken somewhere near my office along Collyer Quay on the evening of Sep 29th, 2008 – one day after the Singapore Grand Prix.

I called it the F1 Hangover – a lingering headache. As motorists are unaware of of the road closure of the stretch after Fullerton to the Nichol Highway is still not cleared, all of them were forced to make a turn into Battery Road for a detour resulting in the congestion in this photo. I wonder just how much more fuel is wasted and how much more carbon dioxide is dumped into the atmosphere as a result of this.

Personally speaking, I am sick of the fact even almost a week after the night race is over, there are still people who talked about it and there are still news on the matter. From some guy calling the race track a circus because of the lack of overturing opps… overtaking opportunities to another blaming their gear box problem on static discharge which is caused by our MRT trains passing under race tracks.

Now, just fxxk off and die ok? Singaporeans haven’t even talked about just how much inconveniences you fxxkwits have caused for everybody over the days leading up to it and the day after it. And have they fined that fxxker who threw his gloves into the Singapore river yet? Look, fxxkwit, that’s going to be our reservoir in the future and I don’t take it very well when some bad ass F1 driver foul up my water supply. He should be fined and made to do CWO along Orchard Road. And ya, fine him in Euros but make him pay in Singapore dollars too.

Electricity Tariff Revision – October 2008

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I have been fairly muted regarding this matter even when the percentage increase – almost 22% ($0.0538 per kilowatt per hour) – has definitely shocked and riled everyone. This is up from $0.2507 for July – September 08, which means we pay $0.3045 per kilowatt per hour from October – December 08.

Understandably, it drew a wave of protests. Some bloggers have even called for the opening up of the energy market in Singapore to keep Singapore Power honest.

I would have been reasonably outraged previously whenever I hear about tariff increments. And if you asked me why I am cool now that is because when I posted the post titled ‘Friday Morning Craps’, I already had the idea that while energy tariffs may appear to rise in tandem with crude oil prices, they might not rise in the same proportions.

On top of that, our energy production is by naturally gas. And though the prices will be affected by that of crude oil, I suspect it would already have mitigated the effects somewhat. Anyway, I just didn’t have the figures to prove it… and all I did last Friday was pull whatever figures out of the Internet to make my point.

So I was trying to look for some hard facts to prove what I have been thinking about all along and I discovered that Singapore Power have published all their press release on their website since the year 2000. You can just go there and click on newsroom to check it out.

They have what I was looking for all along right here (see below). I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions.

That being said, it doesn’t mean I have to accept this rise lying down. On a separate discussion with another blogger, we talked about other possible means to lower our energy consumption level, not only at the household level, but at the national level. It is our opinion that whatever we pay for per kilowatt per hour in household usage, some of that amount would have been used to cover all that public lighting we enjoyed.

So looking beyond solar energy – which we agree may cost a bit to implement – we talked about the reduction of street lighting which we felt is too much especially when the cars have their own headlights to illuminate the road ahead of them. We even mentioned that if it costs too much to remove the lamp posts already in place, then we might need to look at a way to have alternate lights powered up on alternate days. In effect, it would also save us a lot of money in maintenance, since we would have fewer light bulbs to replace. On top of that, new roads built should have lamp posts spaced further apart. Fewer lamp posts to maintain would also save us a lot of money in the long run, no?

Next, public corridor lighting. When you go for your clubbing and come back in the early morning, you will notice that all our HDB flats and light up nice and pretty. But is there a necessity in doing so? While it did concern us in our discussion that muggers may hide in the shadows to waylay someone coming home late or going to work for an early shift, there is no guarantee that one wouldn’t get mugged under bright light anyway since help is hard to come by.

Our idea is to have the corridor lighting be linked to the lifts, so when a lift lands on a particular level, the lights for that particular level will turn on. There should also be a manual backup for the resident to thump and turn on the lights should the lift’s sensors fail. In fact, we even go on to discuss how we can finance this because it would be ridiculous to ask for the people to pay for this. And guess what, the money is already there – the town council’s sinking funds – which they have happily used for investment. And considering the current market conditions, they might as well use the money in some infrastructure works to aid the economy.

I am not even talking about aggressively going green here. But basically, we have to admit we are not making enough effort on a national level to cut down our carbon footprint and we are also wasting a lot of energy. I suspect that maybe the reason why our electricity is one of the most expensive in the world.

So, if this is not a good time to do something about it, when will we ever start?

Black September

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This is perhaps once of the worst Septembers in my life. It’s been nothing more than one bad news after another.

Firstly, melamine contaminated dairy products in China caused harm to some 53,000 people. Some of that harm is permanent. I read that some babies will be subjected to kidney dialysis for the rest of their lives when they grow up. And this is not the first time we heard of Chinese food products that is hazardous to our health. Here are some other incidents I can actually remember:

  1. 2005 – My favorite canned fried dace with salted black beans was found to contain formaldehyde above acceptable levels. Frozen eel was also affected and for a period of time I noticed that many Japanese restaurants here in Singapore took everything with Unagi (eel) off their menus. (Formaldehyde is a preservative and embalming chemical that can cause cancer.)

  2. 2007 – Hong Kong’s Hygiene Authority detected chemical contents (nitrofurans metabolite) in Ma Ling’s canned luncheon meat. (Nitrofurans is a kind of drug derived from furan that is used to inhibit bacterial growth. Frequent ingestion of nitrofurans is poisonous and might even cause cancer or death.)

I felt so let down and disappointed because I grew up eating some of these Chinese food products. In fact, you can give me 5 cans of SPAM for the price of 1 can of Ma Ling Luncheon meat and I wouldn’t have traded it away. The reason being I have grown to love the familiar taste of some of these brand names and I felt sad because their products are now no longer available on the shelves in supermarkets.

Now, Chinese food products have become synonymous with ticking time bombs. You basically won’t know which one will be next. I am appalled and disgusted when I looked at the list of dairy products taken off the shelf here in Singapore.

White Rabbit Milk Candy too?! Damn those unscrupulous mainlanders who introduced this infernal substance into the milk. Is there nothing you would stop at just to make a few more quick bucks? Is getting rich so important for you that it doesn’t matter to you another fellow human being will be consuming this crap? Stop that bullshit about this being some kind of Western conspiracy simply because the same has been practiced in America or elsewhere… that argument is as good as it is safe to eat shit because you seen another animal ate it.

The Chinese consider years with the number ‘8’ are good because the pronunciation of the word ‘8’ in Chinese is almost the same as the word for striking it rich ‘发’. But to me that word also has the meaning of fungal Bloom in Cantonese [‘fatt mold’] which to me isn’t really a very good thing since you can’t eat your moldy stuff, can you?

I am convinced that my view of ‘8’ is the right one because in the past 10 years, both years ending with ‘8’ have been nothing but disasters. In 1998, there was the Asian Currency Meltdown. In 2008, we are confronted with this financial mess in the U.S. that has caused financial markets worldwide to fall as if down a bottomless pit!

Since early March this year when Bear Stearns went bust, one financial institution after another went belly up. Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Merrill Lynch, and Lehman Brothers. Even AIG, a famous insurance company, is threatened.

Now, investment banking is history in Wall Street – both JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley have become banks. But is this the end yet of the woes yet? Or is there really more to come? Just only a few days ago Wachovia was driven into the arms of Citibank and even now I read about the problem spreading to Europe. It makes one wonder at times if the light at the end of the tunnel is not actually an oncoming train. Just don’t be surprised that when you wake every other morning, you hear news about trillions of dollars wiped out in the financial markets overnight and yet another financial institution going bust.

If you think this doesn’t affect you, then you are terribly wrong. There is going to be lesser money moving around, or money is going to be moving around slower. Jobs are going to be lost because these financial institutions are going to cutback on spending. It is going to be harder to get loans and investments are going to fall which means that less new jobs are going to be available. Finally, if you have investments in unit trusts which you haven’t been looking at for awhile, don’t faint when you see that half of your money had been vaporised over the past 10 months!

I was thinking that it would be the last day of September 2008 would past uneventfully but it has one last ‘fxxk you’ for us all. The U.S. House of Representatives failed to pass the US$ 700-billion ‘bail-out’ bill and for us in Singapore, one of our main opposition figures, Mr. Joshua Benjamin Jeyaratnam passed away in the hours of the early morning.

Personally, I have seen Mr JBJ selling his party newspaper (when he was with the Workers’ Party) and then his books at either Raffles Place or the exit of the MRT near the Starbucks at Raffles City. It is to my eternal regret that I have never spoken to the man, though I did buy the WP papers off him when I was either a kid or a teenager.

There’s not much I could remember of the man, except the intensity in his eyes and that determined look on his face. While I have written my disagreement with his methods on some of my blog entries and also with some of the things he championed, I nevertheless respect the man’s tenacity and his ‘never give up, never say die’ attitude in doing what he believed is for the best for Singapore’s political landscape.

There will be some of us who will miss you, Mr Jeyaratnam. Rest in peace.

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