Huat your head ah!

That’s the name of the Face­book group ded­i­cated to doc­u­ment­ing all the ugly things hap­pen­ing at RWS. It’s kinda new, so maybe you might want to join and contribute.


Win a pair of tickets to Kumar: Stripped Bare & Standing Up (Re-run)

Update: The con­test is now closed It was some time in the 90s, when I came back to Sin­ga­pore for uni hol­i­days and my friends told me there was an act I had to catch at this place in Bugis. It was rude, raunchy and it was like noth­ing I’d ever seen before. I loved it,


Overheard at SMU

Some­one alerted me to a Face­book page called “Over­heard at SMU”, and appar­ently, there are sim­i­lar pages for NUS and NTU. Among the entries posted on that page are gems such as this: If this is true, Stu­dent 1 should be tried for sedition.


Singapore’s last resort island

So Resorts World Sen­tosa opened its many doors to 75,000 peo­ple over the CNY hol­i­days, and judg­ing from the things I’ve heard, it hasn’t been pretty. They’ve been charg­ing Sin­ga­pore­ans and PRs $100 a day to get in, so that they’ll only get the right kind of peo­ple at the 500 tables. And I heard


Singapore’s more like China than China

It’s been as busy as we’ve expected this Chi­nese New Year, and with Kai nurs­ing a new cold (how many do babies get in their first year?), we were expect­ing even less sleep than usual, and we were right. That’s not to say we haven’t been enjoy­ing time with our fam­i­lies and rel­a­tives jet­ting in from


The other WTO

I imag­ined a joke about some­one telling another per­son that he works at the WTO, and the other per­son asks, “Wow, how long have you been in Geneva?”, and the first per­son asks back, “What do you mean, Geneva? I work in Toa Payoh.” Peo­ple laugh at our obses­sion with toi­lets — and how as


Our Ang Pow Collector is ready. Is yours?

Kai, Naomi and me wish every­one a New Year of peace, joy and hap­pi­ness. To help your­self along the way, don’t drink and drive, don’t overeat, and don’t gam­ble away your Ang Pows at the 500 tables open tomor­row at the RWS casino.


There’s that R-word again

No, the other R-word. I don’t really care about Pas­tor Rony Tan and his idiocy — he’s of the same cloth, as far as I’m con­cerned, as the evan­gel­i­cal pas­tor in the U.S. who once made his point against migrants from non-English speak­ing back­grounds by famously declar­ing that “if Eng­lish was good enough for Jesus,


Singapore’s Oskar Schindler

They either never taught us this in his­tory lessons, or I just wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion. Thanks to a con­trib­u­tor on sammyboy.com, I found out that one of the heroes of the Japan­ese Occu­pa­tion in Sin­ga­pore was Japan­ese. Shi­nozaki Mamoru was a press attache with the Impe­r­ial For­eign Ser­vice and was assigned to Sin­ga­pore before the


Don’t eat endangered animals this Chinese New Year

Give shark’s fin a miss — you’re really eat­ing chicken stock and car­ti­lage any­way. Don’t lis­ten to peo­ple who say all those sto­ries about fish­er­men cru­elly slic­ing off fins and dump­ing the shark back in the sea are false. You tell me, what do they really do with the rest of the shark? (OK, fish