So you’ve read about our international travel glamour. Well, here’s our local tale, plus a story that’s currently making the rounds. A couple of weeks ago, we had a bright idea. We needed to stop at a couple of places in Singapore and thought we had figured out the best way to do it. First, grocery shopping. Then, on the way down to the next destination, we’d stop at our local station and J would trudge home with the shopping, put everything away, then come back, while I waited at the station platform with the kids.

We considered it a win-win. The kids wouldn’t get so hot and tired (and did I mention grumpy?) walking in the midday tropical sun, J moves quicker by himself, and I sit down in some shade, people-watch, and work out some plot points in my head.

When J finally got back, we headed to our next stop and things were going swimmingly, until we tried to exit the station. OVERSTAY, the exit station said. Wha-?! No! So we walked to the Customer Service desk and it was explained to us.

The Singapore government, in their wisdom, has designated a maximum of 20 minutes travel time between 3 stops. This extends to 30 minutes between 4 stops, and so on. And we had busted that maximum. The penalty is SG$2 for each passenger. Little Dinosaur is on a child’s pass, and usually pays half price, but she got the $2 penalty as well. So a bright idea of ours ended up costing us $6. We would have been better off sitting at the local McDonald’s sipping iced lemon tea.

I suppose it’s to stop loitering. Ask any tourist and they’ll tell you that all Singapore train stations are frighteningly barren after a train leaves. But it’s also an indication of the general way the government treats its people. There’s a stick-and-stick approach that Singapore takes, to a limit that no other Western-style government seems to. (Although, with the legislative door open thanks to the War on Terror, that’s changing.)

It’s part of the political/administrative culture here, a pervasive patronising paternalism that sees foreigners banned from something as silly and entertaining as the Complaints Choir–a bunch of people living in Singapore who sing about what’s wrong with the city-state–because it touches on “domestic affairs”. The video at Asian Offbeat is a bit difficult to understand, so here are the lyrics:

We get fined for almost everything / Drivers won’t ‘give chance’ when you want to ‘change lane’ / The indoors are cold, the outdoors are hot; / And the humid air, it wrecks my hair / Those answering machines always make you hold / Only to hang up on you

When a pregnant lady gets on the train / Everyone pretends to be asleep / I’m stuck with my parents till I’m 35 / Cause I can’t apply for HDB /
We don’t recycle any plastic bags / But we purify our pee

*chorus:
What’s wrong with Singapore? / Losing always makes me feel so sore / Cause if you’re not the best / Then you’re just one of the rest

My oh my Singapore / What exactly are we voting for? / What’s not expressly permitted / is prohibited

When I’m hungry at the food court, I see / People ‘chope’ seats with their tissue paper / To the aunty staying upstairs: / Your laundry’s dripping on my bed sheets / Please don’t squat on the toilet seats / And don’t clip your nails on MRT

Stray cats get into noisy affairs / At night my neighbor makes weird animal sounds / People put on fake accents to sound posh / And queue up 3 hours for donuts / Will I ever live till eighty five / to collect my CPF?

*chorus

Singaporeans too kiasu! (so scared to lose) / Singaporeans too kiasi! (so scared to die) / Singaporeans too kiabor!(scared of their wives) / Maybe we’re just too stressed out! (even the kids)

Old National Library was replaced by an ugly tunnel / Singaporean men can’t take independent women / People blow their nose into the swimming pool / And fall asleep on my shoulder in the train

Singapore’s national bird is the crane (the one with yellow steel girders) / Real estate agents’ leaflets clogging up my mailbox (en bloc, en bloc; en bloc, en bloc) / Why can’t we be buried when we die? / No one wants to climb Bukit Timah with me

*chorus

There are not enough public holidays / My neighbor sings KTV all night / Wedding dinners never start on time / My hair is always cut shorter than I want / Channel 5 commercials are way too long / Why do men turn bad?

*At first it was to speak more mandarin / Then it was to speak proper English / What’s wrong with my powerful Singlish?

People sit down during rock concerts / We have to pay for tap water at restaurants / ERP gantries are everywhere / But I can still see traffic jams on the road / All the bus stops have tilted benches to keep you off balance

*chorus

As you can see, once the writers of the lyrics got going, they really built up a head of steam. But at the foundation is a government attitude best typified by Singapore’s Minister Mentor and founder of the state of Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew (incidentally, his son is Prime Minister; make of that what you will), saying this about Singapore’s lack of press freedom (they ranked below Zimbabwe in the 2006 Reporters Without Borders annual rankings):

There’s nothing that you’d want to read which you cannot read in Singapore…

I think someone should put that on a t-shirt.

…to tell you that Liane Spicer, the author of an upcoming Dorchester multicultural novel, Cafe au Lait, has an interview with me up on her blog. Please hop along and have a read if this blog isn’t masochistic enough for you!

Most people are envious when we mention where we’ve lived and worked. I can understand that. There’s a wanderlust that I think is part of everyone’s psyche and we are perceived as a couple/family who do what a lot of others usually only dream about. I like moving around because, I think, I have such a low boredom threshold. Or maybe it was because I was an Army brat from the time I was born and just got used to it. But there isn’t as much freedom in it as a lot of people might think.

The first two months when you set down in a new country are incredibly stressful. Besides the quest for new accommodation, adjusting to a new grocery experience, schooling and finance pressures as you’re in banking limbo, there’s also clearing the stuff that you’ve carted along with you. We used our last move as a way of cutting down our possessions and over 60% of all our current possessions (by volume) are books. However, there was also a cute scooter we just couldn’t bear to get rid of. And this is where the receiving country has you by your secondary sexual characteristics.

You see, there’s always something in your consignment that you’re worried about…that you’re not sure whether you’re going to get charged for. When we moved to Australia, it was a PC that we bought a month before. (And, yes, we ended up paying AU$400 duty on it. Yep, just the one computer. I’m still as mad as heck about that.) When we moved to Singapore, it was our scooter.

At first we couldn’t figure it, because we thought Singapore Customs might want to get it cleared as soon as possible. We even gave them an inflated value for the scooter so we could just get the damned thing through. In retrospect, that may not have been a wise move because they kept coming back with more queries for the next 2 months. I don’t know whether they thought we had spray-painted a solid gold fuel tank on the bike, or stashed illicit drugs in the battery compartment, but they refused to budge. We wrote letters and emails to the Customs Service, provided the written registration details, gave them permission to carry out a full inspection on the vehicle (with us present), and directed them to websites around the world that contained valuations, all in an effort to bolster our case.

In case anyone is wondering why we didn’t get a written valuation from Australia, well folks, we couldn’t find a single motorcycle dealership willing to give us one. The reason given was that we bought the scooter in a private sale. The valuation, we were told, was private proprietary information only available to new and existing buyers from the shop in question. WHAT?! The value of a vehicle is proprietary information??!! Exhausted by various hurdles exiting Australia, we thought we’d just dump our statutory declaration and paperwork in the hands of Singapore Customs and be done with it. But the government wasn’t finished with our little scooter yet.

Two months later coincided with the 2% rise in GST in Singapore. I didn’t think much of it until, magically, a week after the increase went through, we got our Customs bill, based on on our original customs declaration. There was nothing we could do. Complain? To whom? To the government who waited 2 months so they could nab an extra 2% on duty? To an ombudsman? Who regulates the Singapore government? Are you nuts? The removal company told us to keep quiet and pay up or who knew what might happen if we ever wanted to move again and Customs had to vet our paperwork on the way out. Sounds a bit…unsavoury, doesn’t it? Well, I’ve got some news for you. ALL governments are like that, not just Singapore. If you move around a lot, you get used to it.

That’s the glamour of travel at an international level. I have a story for you at the local level too, but that might just have to wait until next time…

I try to stay current with the latest slang and abbreviations. I can understand, for example, “pretty fly for a white guy” (a little out of date, I know, but bear with me) and FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt). (Example of usage: “They get funding dollars by spreading FUD around.”) But the real problem comes when you think you know what something means and you’re wrong. Thankfully, the latest example of that has not resulted in me spouting off, uninformed, to other people, so I can breathe a sigh of relief and pass on the knowledge.

Yogi Berra. Y’see, for a couple of years now, I thought it was some smart way of referring to Yogi Bear, like people pronouncing the Target department store as tar-jhay, to give it some ironic cachet. I mean, I could so imagine the Hanna-Barbera bear coming out with such gems as, “It’s deja vu all over again”.

I was wrong. Yogi Berra is a real person. He used to be a baseball player and manager, in fact. And he was renowned for twisting the English language into pretzels. Here are some more of his gems:

It ain’t over ’til it’s over

Never answer an anonymous letter

I usually take a two hour nap from one to four

When you come to a fork in the road…take it

I didn’t really say everything I said

When asked what time is was……” You mean now?”

On why NY lost the 1960 series to Pittsburgh: ” We made too many wrong mistakes”

You can observe a lot by watching

The future ain’t what it used to be

It gets late early out here

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be

If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them

If you’re interested in finding out more about the man, he has his own site, which has autographed photos, baseballs and, yes, books for sale. I just hope you’re suitably cashed up.

I’m just happy to help out anybody who isn’t as up on US cultural references as s/he thought. I hear the current US president is a big fan of baseball. Wonder if Berra is one of his role models…?

You can tell you’re slowly building up a circle of online friends when you start getting tagged for things. Hey, I’m not complaining! Maria tagged me for a meme, so here goes.

Six Random Things About Me

1. I have small feet, which has led several sundry people in the past to ask if my parents “bound” my feet when I was a child. Being Asian was the obvious tip-off. Not!
2. I dream in colour and about a third of my remembered dreams involve buildings and/or cities I’ve never seen in my waking life.
3. I worked in a shoe-shop for 6 years while I was at high-school/University and, in all that time, only ever had two customers with smelly feet!
4. In primary school, I wanted to be a nun when I grew up.
5. I wish I’d studied Economics at University.
6. I’m an atheist.

Oh dear, tagging six people with blogs. Okay…

a) Liane Spicer, who is my friend from other exotic equatorial climes,
b) Jordan Summers, who I hear is a sucker for memes,
c) Lyn Taylor, who is a kick-ass cover artist imo,
d) Gennita Low, who doesn’t know me from a plate of nasi lemak but who I’ll tag anyway,
e) Brynn Paulin, a fellow Total-E-Bound author, and
f) Rebecca James, who’ll at least have something to blog about when she starts up again … like, er, LAST WEEK!

The Rules

• Link to the person that tagged you
• Post the rules on your blog
• Share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself
• Tag six random people at the end of your post by linking to their blogs
• Let each random person know they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their website

Generations ago (computer time), Information Technology/Computing was the place to be. It seemed that if you had a degree in computing, a job was assured. And that was correct. While I saw teachers, airline pilots, dentists, struggle through recessions, I was inured to this because I worked in IT.

Then, in the late 90s, the boom-crunch cycle started to accelerate for those of us in the business. It used to be 3-4 years between boom and crunch. Now, it’s more like 3-4 months. I’m writing this because I recently found out about the oil company, Shell, sacking 3,200 of its IT staff this year. In an effort to cut costs by GBP250 million a year, Shell is essentially outsourcing its entire IT infrastructure. Both J and I have been through restructures, retrenchments, reassignments. You can call it whatever you like, but it all boils down to reduction for all concerned … reduction in salary, responsibilities, career opportunities. Sometimes it means nothing more than termination.

I don’t give a lot of sympathy on this blog, but my heart goes out to all the Shell employees who’ll be affected by this. Doubly so because this is a dumb-ass decision and time will vindicate all of us … but not before a lot of lives are thrown onto life’s rubbish heap.

There have been a few spectacular IT blunders over the past few years. Well, too many to name, but I’ll focus on two of my favourites.

Number one, China. Do you remember when China was the Hot IT Destination? When companies wet their pants waiting to “penetrate” the giant Chinese market? At that time, both J and I were managers with large IT companies and, at the weekly meetings, we both (independently) used to tell our employers the same thing: China is a trap. The culture and way of business is different. You’re stepping in their territory which puts you at a disadvantage. Chinese companies will take whatever you do, replicate it and undersell you under your very noses. You don’t have enough people who know the language and you can’t trust the blanket loyalty of those local staff you hire. Given a choice, we said, invest in south-east Asia, where you’re a bigger player and are more likely to have more influence in negotiations. In south-east Asia, governments will want to work with you; in China, they’ll want to analyse then compete against you on the world market.

Blackberry wanted to enter the Chinese market. Lots of angst ensued as RIM tried to negotiate penetration protocols with the Chinese government. Tried, failed, tried, failed. It finally succeeded in getting an okay date for the middle of 2006…only to find the Chinese got there first with their—get this—Redberry. J and I laughed so hard we pissed ourselves. It didn’t stop there. Patent disputes, trademark suits. What did RIM expect? A level playing field? In China? Now we’re finding that companies are slowly backing away from the behemoth. Oh, they’re putting a lot of spin on it, but it seems they’re finally using some of that caution that was so absent when they were thinking with their “little heads”.

Number two, outsourcing. I don’t get it. Even economics professors are touting the benefits of outsourcing. But how can it possibly be profitable? In the money sense, you now have at least two companies having to justify the one budget, and all the companies involved want a profit. They want profit, they want growth. In the medium- to long-term, this can only mean a ballooning of expenditure, even if the initial Powerpoint presentation looked damned fine and contained many impressive animations.*

Okay, say you outsource to some mob in the Asian sub-continent, as Shell are doing. Costs are down. But so is customer service. There are technical, infrastructure, cultural and language difficulties. And as much as people like to bash the Asian outsourcing, even if you choose a Western company, you still have problems. The time to problem resolution is greater. Efficiency and productivity, naturally, falls. As more than one commentator to the Shell news notes, jobs for customers that used to take a quick 5 minutes will turn into 6 months of contract negotiations and project specifications, with appropriate cost/time/resource blowouts.

And how do you effectively manage such situations when Shell’s management is sitting several levels above (and geographically away) from the coal-face workers? But, then again, why should top management care, as long as they pocket their insanely large end-of-year bonuses? And you just know what each level of the ensuing bureaucracy is thinking: “I don’t need to oversee the expenditure directly. I’ll just hand it over to my good friend over here and he’ll do it. Oh, after I’ve taken my cut, of course.” Outsourcing, human nature and creative accounting. It’s a combination that goes together like lamb and garlic, bacon and eggs, or roti and curry.

It’s my belief that the same thing will happen with outsourcing as is happening with China. That is, the rosy spectacles will fall off and companies will start to wonder what the hell they were thinking for so many years, and start building up their in-house expertise again. In the meantime, though, how many workers will be destroyed?

[Firstly, sorry for taking so long to get to the Comments. I didn't know I had them! I've fixed the appropriate options now, so they should appear as quickly as they used to.]

It’s been a very interesting yet tiring series of days for me. I meant to do some more writing on “The Turk” (my current wip) but got caught into a long series of hopscotching articles that led from structural engineering to global monetary systems; from electromagnetism to a recently released book called “Liberal Fascism”.

I am not a fascist. Quite the contrary. And that makes it doubly important for me to read and understand the opposition. But the result of all that somber self-education is a form of mental shell-shock and I was somewhat happy to have, in the end, stumbled across a light-heavy 1941 article by a woman named Dorothy Thompson, and published in Harper’s magazine, that still followed the general mood of my ponderous journey but happily offered to shoulder some of the burden itself.

Dorothy Thompson was an American journalist, expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934. Harper’s printed an essay by her in 1941 entitled “Who Goes Nazi?“. It’s a kind of parlour game, she tells us. A mental party exercise to analyse the attendees and guess who would “go Nazi”. She says, for example, that:

Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind.

It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation–the
generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called “lost generation.”

Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work–a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected.

And so she goes, one by one, around the various people at her hypothetical gathering and dissects them. Have a read of the article. While I don’t agree wholeheartedly with all of Thompson’s analyses, I do agree with her more than I disagree. I think she leaves out, for example, the Deceptive Do-Gooder, but I can’t work up the energy to progress this thought right now. Maybe later. Reading her smooth style of writing, you feel you are being spoken to by a friend. And so the last paragraphs are all the more telling:

[T]he frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success–they would all go Nazi in a crisis..

…Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t–whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.

If something in you resonated to what Thompson wrote, go to her Wikipedia entry and scroll down to her Quotations. You’ll find more food for thought there.

I can’t believe how wonderful it feels to have moved the blog to its new digs. It’s like moving from a cramped apartment to a house. I like the way the links to blogs I read are now relaxed and comfortable in their own space. I like being able to present my blogs as one article instead of having readers press “More”.

There are still a few things I’ll probably tweak with this template but, for now, it suits my purposes well. I like the sleek look and it loads quickly. What are your thoughts?

POSTSCRIPT: I’m blogging at Star-Crossed Romance today. Go over and get a dollop of thanks from me!

Firstly, just an update. Dr. Nolte replied to my email and, since I don’t have permission to reproduce her reply in its entirety, I’ll just say that she was eminently gracious (then again, she hadn’t read my blog!) and allowed that she would pursue the differences between women’s and men’s health in the near future, and thanked me for bringing up “a very interesting point”. (When I get a bit depressed about one person can do to change anything in this goddamned world, I may just pull out her email and rest my eyes on it for a while.)

But, of course, just when I think the world is taking on a slightly rosier hue, along comes the RWA. Are they seriously vying for the Most Stupidest Writers’ Organisation In The Galaxy Award? Up till now, I thought the SFWA had that one sewn up, but the RWA obviously doesn’t want SFWA to get a clear run at outright, indecipherable stupidity, and so we have this.

Now, it all boils down to Cassie Edwards, so if you don’t know what I’m talking about, best go to Smart Bitches for the original series of articles and Dear Author for a less server-thrashed analysis of all the commotion. Two points, if I may:

• Some people are saying that this is Sarah and Candy going after Cassie Edwards because they’re meangirls. Well, neither of them found the original problem. It was a friend, who was given a selection of books, who decided to do some searches on suspect paragraphs and then clued the Bitches in.
• Everyone on the author’s side—fans, publisher—talks about “paraphrasing”. Paraphrasing is when you take text that belongs to someone else and put it in your own words. Edwards did NOT do this.

But then the RWA waddles into the fray.

Okay, I’ll come clean. After the e-publishing debacle last year, I really really wanted to let my RWA membership lapse. But the problem was that the chapters I was part of gave me a great feeling of belonging (Outreach in particular), which is a precious thing when you’re halfway around the world. And so I thought I’d give them another chance … at least until my membership came up for renewal. But it appears that the RWA are just determined to push me out of the organisation.

In a letter to members about the Edwards debacle, they said that while:

… RWA does not condone plagiarism or any type of copyright infringement … [awooga, awooga, CYA alert!] … [Cassie Edwards] allowed her membership to lapse four or more years ago. If guilt is admitted or established, RWA will take appropriate steps with regard to the Honor Roll listing … The president was asked to give an expert opinion on the issue based solely upon information available in internet blogs. The president does not have enough first-hand information to adequately assess the allegations.

You know how I love ripping these things apart! So let’s see if we can get this straight.

One. Cassie Edwards left four years ago, so don’t bug us about it.

Two. “If guilt is admitted or established”. Not that WE are going to do anything about it. We’ll just wait until divine enlightenment falls from the sky, and only then might we get off our arses and make a further statement.

Three. “The president was asked to give an expert opinion … but does not have enough first-hand information”. Because the president is a deaf-mute who is not a writer and, furthermore, is unable to communicate with anyone.

The RWA is supposed to be an organisation that advocates for romance writers. I think the proper thing to do would have been to say: “The RWA takes accusations of plagiarism very seriously and, with this in mind, we have contacted the originating source for these discussions and requested that they hand over all information associated with this matter as urgently as possible. The RWA will be convening an emergency panel to independently assess these allegations and will make a report to the general membership within 30 days on this matter.”

That’s what I expect from a professional organisation. Instead, we get a mealy-mouthed “not enough information”, with an added quote from RWA President Sherry Lewis (in an AP article) to the effect,

It’s not clear-cut to me … You can see similarities in the passages, but I’m not qualified to make that assertion.

Not qualified? Is there some PhD in plagiarism that you need before you can compare two paragraphs of text? The response from the RWA smacks of nothing more than ponderous yet terrified damage-control. Where is the fire of advocacy? Where is the passion for the written word? Was there even any to begin with?

Sherry Lewis is herself the author of several books, including the “Time Passages” series (An Echo in Time, Time to Dream, Whispers through Time, Only Time will Tell). My initial thought was, well we’ll see how she feels when her work is lifted word-for-word, but is that really what we’ve been reduced to? That it’s only when someone has come along and poked us in the eye with a sharp stick that we realise it’s a bad thing to do to other people?

On the other hand, you can’t argue with over 10 million books in print. Because, as much as we rant and rail, we already know who’s going to win this one, don’t we? With that in mind, I think I’ll just go get my copy of “Heart of Darkness” by Joseph Conrad (published in 3 parts in 1899), do some global search-and-replacing, set it on an alien world, then publish it as my original work. I mean, if I’m successful, it’s not like anyone can touch me, right?

Reuters reported on an annual medical survey recently, that ranked 19 of the world’s industrialised nations on the scale of 1 to, obviously, 19 on deaths through treatable (that is, deaths that “could have been prevented by access to timely and effective health care”) diseases. The list includes things like stroke, some cancers, diabetes, heart disease, some bacterial infections and complications from common surgical procedures.

Now, that’s a pretty serious topic, handled by Doctors Ellen Nolte and Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Because you’re probably curious, France topped the list and the USA came last (falling four places in 10 years). The Senior [EDIT: Vice] President of one of the bodies that funded the study, Cathy Schoen, said:

It is startling to see the U.S. falling even farther behind on this crucial indicator of health system performance … The fact that other countries are reducing these preventable deaths more rapidly, yet spending far less, indicates that policy, goals and efforts to improve health systems make a difference.

This is no surprise to many Americans. But, just to show that humour can be found in even the most serious of issues, Reuters obviously decided that they needed some sound bites from one of the researchers, and Dr. Nolte ponied up to the telephone. What is it about scientists and the bleeding obvious these days? Nolte said:

[T]he large number of Americans who lack any type of health insurance — about 47 million people in a country of about 300 million, according to U.S. government estimates — probably was a key factor in the poor showing of the United States compared to other industrialized nations in the study.

Probably was a key? Oh, it gets better. Bear in mind that this survey was all about the general population’s access to health care:

I wouldn’t say it (the last-place ranking) is a condemnation, because I think health care in the U.S. is pretty good if you have access. But if you don’t, I think that’s the main problem, isn’t it?

Bwaahahahahahaha. That’s like saying it’s wrong to mention that certain laptops shouldn’t be used because of exploding batteries, because in the laptops that don’t have exploding batteries, the laptop works really well. You can read the full Reuters article here.

And, in fact, please do, because I noticed something else at the end of the article’s first page. Namely,

In establishing their rankings, the researchers considered deaths before age 75 … [finding s]uch deaths accounted for 23 percent of overall deaths in men and 32 percent of deaths in women.

Now, that’s no laughing matter. Another way of putting it is that, across all the 19 industrialised nations, 40% more women than men die from preventable disease. FORTY. PER. CENT. Isn’t that just a tad…oh crap, what’s the word I’m looking for here?…oh yeah…SIGNIFICANT?

I’ve dropped Drs. Nolte and McKee a line and mentioned this. If they get back to me, I’ll let you know.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s not only in medicine that the USA is falling. It’s not pheromone-crazed snakes on a mutha-f*ing plane, people. It’s only dying mice. Awwwww.