All kinds of schools are starting to pop up in the sunny island of Singapore.

*Very sunny in fact. Everyday when I go for lunch, I step out from the shade provided by my office building and into the sun and I swear, I swear, I hear a sizzling sound. When I was little, I used to take a magnifying glass and burn ants and other insects with the focused beam. The hunter has become the hunted.*

Design schools especially have suddenly begun to spring up like Polly on a sugar diet and a pogo stick. Call me old school but I am of the opinion that 90 percent of the 13 year old students who enter these alternative study schools would end up future-less alumni.

How many really successful fashion designers can you name from here? Ashley Isham? That’s one. The tailor at Bukit Timah Plaza? Not counted. Continue Reading…

Golf is a sport in which a player, using several types of clubs, hits a ball into each hole on a golf course in the lowest possible number of strokes. It is one of the few ball games that does not use a standardised playing area; rather, the game is played on golf “courses”, each one of which has a unique design and typically consists of either 9 or 18 separate holes.

Golf is defined in the Rules of Golf as “playing a ball with a club from the teeing ground into the hole by a stroke or successive strokes in accordance with the Rules.”

The first game of golf for which records survive was played at Bruntsfield Links, in Edinburgh, Scotland, in A.D. 1456, recorded in the archives of the Edinburgh Burgess Golfing Society, now The Royal Burgess Golfing Society. It has become a worldwide sport, with golf courses in the majority of countries. Continue Reading…

I was just talking to Sab about Nirvana the other day and how the band has been the inspiration of much of the junk that is passed off as rock today. Back when I was little, I used to have a walkman and used to buy casette tapes to play with my Aiwa walkman. I remember, the first casette I ever bought was Nirvana’s Nevermind. (I had Weird Al’s spoof too!)

There was an MTV countdown or something on the top songs of the 90s. The top five had Backstreet Boys! Then again, they weren’t that bad. They weren’t that bad at all. Anyway what was the number one song on the chart? You guessed it - Smells Like Teen Spirit. Anybody knows what that song is about? An albino, a mosquito… Yeah, Yeah… Continue Reading…

I wish I was 12 years old again. Back when Blackburn were giants by virtue of Jack Walker’s (RIP) greens and had the most feared strike force in Shearer and Sutton (SAS they called it). I liked them. I think I still can name most of the team. Let’s see… Tim Flowers, (the unpassable) Colin Hendry, Ian Pearce, Jeff Kenna (never rated him), Tim Sherwood (El Capitan!), the wingers Jason Wilcox and Stuart Ripley, and of course Shearer and Sutton.

Liverpool were great too. By great I mean stylishly dressed on cup final day. On the field, they were unpredictable. I remember sitting through some games where Liverpool would have all the possession and yet not get anywhere near the goal. Their defence was also suspect to say the least with the likes of the Babbie doll and Scales. Jason Mac was usually too busy attacking to bother tracking back. After all, wingback does have ‘wing’ in it. Continue Reading…

The sub-prime mortgage fiasco was the main topic of many a business conversion last year as well as this year. Signs are pointing toward the continued downward spiral of the American and worldwide economies and an outright recession is not a distant possibility.

Already, some leading banks are laying off staff and there have also been casualties.

On the individual level, those ‘victims’ of this mortgage mayhem have obtained not only a house that they cannot pay for, but also bad credit. Continue Reading…

Girls like diamonds. A lot. I first learnt this when my dad got my mom some diamond earrings. She was happy then and also when my dad got her the exact same pair when she proceeded to lose the first one. Lovely.

Of course, I don’t have the spending ability that my dad has. So I’m always looking for a bargain. Zirconia, to me looks exactly like a diamond. Then again, I can in no way be considered an expert in diamonds.

Girls, on the other hand, seem to have this innate ability to tell diamond from zirconia. I don’t know why, maybe their retinas are naturally more receptive to the refraction index of zirconia or they have a zirconia detector wired into their heads. Continue Reading…

I’ll be travelling to Germany later this month to attend a fair. Normally, it should be spring by the time I arrive in Frankfurt, but the weather this year has been nothing short of freakish.

In Singapore just last week or so, there were hailstones. Small ones they might be but hailstones in a tropical climate is unusual to say the least. In Amsterdam a few weeks ago, it was snowing. In Cologne, also recently, the temperature was recorded was a sub zero one.

I like cold weather but not the kind where there’s a chance of you turning into a popsicle. The last time I encountered this kind of weather, I was stuck in a hotel room with an ancient heater that only had a one metre diameter influence. I was cold and I was sick and even under three layers of clothes and two blankets I was miserable. Continue Reading…

Channel News Asia reported today that tropical Singapore was hit by hailstones yesterday! This peculiar phenomenon occurred between 3.15-3.45pm local time.

The report states that the hailstones were the size of 5 cent coins and were seen mainly in Bishan, Toa Payoh and Ang Mo Kio.

Rosie Hoe, a witness to the hailstones in Bishan, said: “We tried to take photographs but it doesn’t show on our cameras. So, they were calling their friends and all to come and see. So, there were actually quite a lot of people here.” Continue Reading…

Cliche: “Girls, can’t live with them, can’t live without them.” How true.

Most, if not all people, are attuned to thinking that we are the centre of the universe. Well, centre of the universe we might not be, but centre of our own attention we definitely are. In terms of problems, people generally only care about our own, but of course sensitivity dictates that other peoples’ problems also take a place in our capacity for consideration. Many girls, however, do not have this ability hot-wired into their pretty little heads.

Guys, don’t you just hate it when you are talking about your problem and halfway through your rambling, your girl cuts you off and starts off on herself. You know what, I’m not really interested in hearing about someone else’s fantastic life when I’m talking about my own. But, being the gentleman, you let it go because there is no sense in pursuing something so small. No point making a mountain out of a molehill. Continue Reading…

I saw a trailer of a local show a few days back. It was the one with Fann Wong playing some gangster chick and marrying some skinny pock marked sissy. The two minutes or so trailer was quite funny actually, especially the part where the skinny guy was teaching the debt collecting subordinates how to splash paint on doors correctly.

Loan sharks are not just a conjurement of reel fantasy, they really do exist. Of course, I’m not a ‘heartlander’ so I haven’t had any first hand experience with any yet.

FYI: Loan sharks are illegal money lenders. Usually syndicated, they are known to ‘decorate’ the doors of lendees who fail to close their debts with pig heads (I wonder what they do with the rest of the pig) and (red?) paint. Unreasonably high interest rates have also been suggested. Continue Reading…