Human Traffic

I almost never go out to town on the weekend anymore. There's little point in going nose to nose with everyone swarming out of their towering ants nests we call HDB apartments and into the trains where you can barely get a seat on anymore...certainly not on a Saturday! I used to be able to get on an uncrowded train on a weekday before 6pm from City Hall to get home from work. After 6 of course, the trains would be jam packed with office drones heading home. Now you can't even find an unpacked train at 3pm!! Its ridiculous! I was going home at 3 on Friday afternoon and i could barely shuffle on to the train at City Hall...where have all these people come from in the last 8 years? Would someone mind telling me how on earth we're meant to fit 6 and a half million people into this country, let alone the overcrowding 4 and a half million that now live here. Its fine to keep building upwards but that's provided all those people stay indoors and never go anywhere. Given the lack of apparently meaningful things to do in this country, aside from shopping or wandering aimlessly NOT shopping in the cloned malls across the island, people are obviously out and about and its decidedly unpleasant having to jostle for personal space.
The powers that be tell us that its no different in places like Tokyo where people are crammed into trains like sardines. Well, all well and good but why the hell would I want to BE a sardine?

Environmental Hypocrisy

I read an article in the Straits Times today that Resorts World at Sentosa, the self styled Integrated Resort, otherwise named CASINO is planning to bring in whale sharks for its oceanarium. They claim that they 'will be loved and will receive top-class care'. Umm, exactly who are the people providing this care? Are they top class Oceanologists? Are the zoologists? What qualifications do they really have that qualifies them to provide 'loving top-class care' to an unknown number of Whale Sharks? Are they world renowned whale shark experts? Or are they Tampines fish farmers, hastily recruited by this casino to tend their over sized aquarium? And as, the SPCA has rightly asked...for whose benefit are we bringing in these gentle giants? Does keeping a whale shark in captivity really promote appreciation of aquatic diversity? How does one measure this? Or is it the same silly reason that over sized aquariums give for keeping animals that shouldnt be kept in captivity in the first place?
Here's the clincher though...Resorts World has launched a 'marine life fund' and has stated that shark's fin soup will not available on its menu....EXCEPT to high rollers. I guess everything, ultimately has a price!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_sharks

Nurturing Talent

Enough already with the table tennis celebrations!!! If we really want to win a medal without outsourcing it, we have to remember that developing and nurturing talent takes a long, a very long time...generations sometimes, and probably combined with some pretty nifty genes. See how long it finally took the Jamaicans to win a Gold? Even Afghanistan won a medal...and it was an Afghan who won the medal! Another thing we need to do is to completely change our mindset with regard to sport. Remember Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences? not everyone is academically endowed. Maybe we should move away from the obsession of attaining academic achievements for individuals who are more gifted in other areas. Think about it...would Michael Phelps or Usain Bolt have been straight A 'O' Level students?

A Sporting World

So now the Olympics are finally over and everyone's gone home...some to Parades and more medal presentations...will their necks ache after wearing those medals all the way from the airport across town and straight into another presentation? Athletes are maybe $750 000 richer for playing a sport they were bought over to play in the first place....and the story goes on.
So whats with the Olympics these days...it was only 2000 years ago that all you ever got was a laurel wreath around your head and maybe free food for a lifetime...or something like that. One wonders if the local discus maker would sponsor an athlete for a million drachmas to advertise his product!! Sporting was kinda pure...way back then. Then again, women and non Greeks weren't allowed to compete...so maybe it wasn't so great..they were missing out there.

So flash forward 2000 years .... gold medal winners are the most marketable people on Earth suddenly advertising watches they never wear, food they never eat and possibly clothes they wouldn't be caught dead in. And all this so that the general everyday ne'er do well with no concept of his own identity can parade around saying "Hey Michael Phelps wears Nike...so do I...so gee, I could be a rough caricature of Michael Phelps!!"

So now we've even stopped depending on our own athletes to win medals for the countries they're born to...okay maybe that's not so bad if you migrate to a country for the sole purpose of migrating to that country. If you're specifically brought over and given citizenship so that you can compete and win a medal for that adopted country, doesn't that smack somewhat of desperation? So now we have Brazilians playing beach volleyball for Georgia, Chinese table tennis players in Canada, Australia and Singapore, Jamaicans in Canada etc etc. Maybe we should stop making the Olympics about countries competing against each other. Maybe we should go back to the old days of jousting where the contenders walked in with their own personal coat of arms? Maybe that will silence the idiocy of countries claiming that they 'won' the Olympics because they won more medals than anyone else or because they won more Gold medals than anyone else or because they won more team events than anyone else.

What happened to the good old joy of competing for the sake of competing? For the pleasure of running down a track for the sheer enjoyment of it. Maybe for some athletes that's all it is. I hope it is! There must be some hope for the world!

First Thoughts

A good buddy of mine encouraged me to put my thoughts down on 'paper' as I continuously rant to him via SMS. Thanks to Superretrenchedman, I'm finally getting my 3am thoughts into something readable! Watch out for more posts over the next few days!