Tuesday

Monday was someone's birthday, but then he was learning to navigate masses of steel and aluminum along bitumen surfaces. So the lunch was on Tuesday instead, at Maxwell Food Centre. What a choice of place, but there was a famous chicken rice stall there. True to reputation the queue stretched all the way around the corner, and we waited around 15 minutes before reaching the front. Then we took another 5 minutes to find a seat. (Tissue paper packets used to chope seats are so very irritating. Grr.) The chicken rice was quite outstanding, though it could've been even better. The birthday boy commented that it was "over-rated". Possibly, yes.
After lunch we visited the Singapore City Gallery, since it was just next door and admission was free and both of us happen to be unemployed and therefore rather free at the moment. If you ever start to doubt that Singapore is still very much controlled by the Government, the Gallery is a good place to be reminded otherwise. Where else in the world does government plan and regulate land use so tightly, with such detail and thoroughness? Manhattan and the neighbourhoods of San Francisco arose entirely organically, and Europe's grand old city centres resulted more from historical evolution than government fiat, and both continue to be regulated with a light hand. Here, though, the whole environment, down to that bench in the park and the surrounding plants, is micromanaged by the government. This place is a SimCity on more than just a surface level.

State of the Desk

It's actually clear! It's the dawn of a new era!

Just see the difference from before ...

Balls to the Wall

Even with the murky waters of Cold War geopolitics which gave birth to and sustained the Wall in mind, and the tremendous social and economic dislocations that have accompanied the collapse of socialist economic systems and German reunification, we should still celebrate the fall of the Wall.

Because even though, in the poisonous atmosphere of Cold War mistrust, the Wall helped to avert a more serious confrontation between the USSR and the US, even though the US may have acquiesced in its construction and maintenance precisely for this reason, even though German reunification in the wake of its fall has been less than an unqualified blessing, it has always been fundamentally a stopgap measure born, at root, of misunderstanding, mistrust, miscommunication.
Miscommunication, misunderstanding and mistrust. Why should the East German regime have stopped free movement of people to, and from, the West, if it did not mistrust the West? If they did not want to restrict communication with the West? And such mistrust was born precisely out of miscommunication and misunderstanding between the superpowers, whose wariness of each other escalated out of all proportion into a worldwide shadow-play of power which left grotesque monuments the world over, of which the Wall was only one.
It was not only a monument to mistrust, but also a stopgap measure unsustainable in the long run. When there are such great economic and socio-political differentials as existed at the time between East and West Berlin, it is ultimately futile to try and stop the free movement of people in the direction of the differential. It's just like trying to stop a current flowing across a great potential difference, or, to take a slightly closer analogy, trying to prevent goods from moving to where prices for them are very much higher. It could be done, but you'd have to expend a lot of effort and resources in the process. So much effort, sometimes, it wouldn't make sense to try.
So even if the common portrayal of the fall of the Wall as being symbolic of the triumph of democracy and freedom over tyranny is romanticised and oversimplified, still we should see the event as a vindication of common sense and of free movement and open communication. Still something worth celebrating.

For All the Wrong Reasons

I never expected writing a cover letter to be so exhausting. Either it was a misguided decision, or I just need thicker skin.

Leaving a Mark

If you happen to pass the RJ Amphitheatre some day, you may notice the beds of pebbles in the concrete planters jutting in from the perimeter. More careful observation would reveal that some of them (much more than just the two samples shown above) have smileys drawn on them in correction fluid. That was the mark I've left on my school. He he.