Damn irritating

Why does everything have to take on such a didactic tone with you? Or maybe its just the role that forces your hand. That you let force your hand.

Is the Serenissima culturally barren?

Who says Singapore does not have a history worth recounting? As Tolstoy astutely noted, history is a little girl that one dresses up as one wishes. Every place has its stories, and this sunny island is no exception. We had our war heroes, we had political and ethnic strife, we had incredibly rapid economic transformation. As long as one is willing to listen, and as long as a good storyteller can be found, it is entirely possible to be regaled with a fairly colouful, even if relatively brief, history of Singapore.
Who says Singapore doesn't have a literature? For a midget country of about six million, the Singapore Collection in the National Library isn't too shabby. Maybe it is not so widely recognised in the mainstream English canon--if such a term still has any meaning in an age where English has become a global language and spawned local versions with their own literary canons everywhere--; perhaps its concerns and explorations are still limited to more local interests. But it is still a literature, concerned with aspects, no matter how narrow these aspects may be, of the human condition. Who knows, perhaps one day a Singaporean writer or dramatist or poet will break out of the local mould and produce a universal masterpiece.
The only reason why people would assert the non-existence of such integral parts of our cultural heritage is that they aren't willing to acknowledge them, because what they see doesn't quite fit their narrow preconceptions of what grand things like History and a Literary Canon should be like.

Towards Fahrenheit 451

Today, coherent critical thought is being increasingly displaced by the soundbite and the factoid (epitomised by Google), and earnest depth is losing popularity to the shallow efficiency of multitasking. We ourselves may very well be losing our depth of character and turning into pancake people.
We now live, as Hobsbawm wistfully regretted, in an eternal present, with no past and no future. A present where we have, by choice or plain old laziness, ceased to learn from those who have gone before us. (Hence, partly, the unpopularity of memorisation).
Doesn't the whole scenario sound somewhat like the dystopia Bradbury painted out in his work?

Strange new landscapes

Oliver Messiaen's music is ... strange. It's like incoherent fragments of melody and lyricism floating atop a vast, unfamiliar atonal sea.

Spot the Difference

How do you get from Rocky Hill to Ladang when the company hasn't indented enough vehicles to bring you along?

1. Pass your LBV, helmet and SAR21 to someone going by tonner, then go for a run. (That's OC.)
2. Hitchhike on a contractor's van. (That's Tiong, Mel and Reid, who, to be fair, did not have anyone to pass their GPMG to.)