Tuesday, February 01, 2005

5 Great Things about Singapore 1

Of course everyone has been speaking about how great Singapore is as a place to live, work and play in. From your friendly welcoming Merlion to your happening Restricted Zone, so happening that you have to pay to go in, there are countless things which we can boast about. I have just listed 5 of the myriad of things we can all be proud of.

1 Best Airport in the World

Changi Airport has been voted time and again as the best airport in the world by various leading magazines and such. Singaporeans can be proud to have such an achievement.

Of course, with the best airport in the world, not only can we leave the country in comfort and efficiency (on average a grand total of twice a year), we can actually travel all the way to the airport to dine at its overpriced restaurants. If that is not enough, students actually have an alternative place to do their revision in public, rather than the boring standard old fast food chains. But of course, the best part of having 'No 1 Airport in the world' is to go to airports in other countries and criticise every flaw they have and proclaim that 'fortunately our Changi is the best in the world'.

Indeed, when we have such a great airport, all the shortcomings and struggles we encounter in our actual everyday life in our workplaces and homes are dissipated when we think about Changi!


2 World's First Driverless MRT Trains!

Any self respecting Singaporean should take the NEL since it is a state of the art, highly revolutionary piece of technology that is being used to ferry people from the previously inaccessible north east. Amazingly it has no drivers, so there is the novelty of being transported by a driverless vehicle! This is of course something that has been a secret desire of everyone since childhood.

The fact that such an automated system is exorbitant compared to a standard manned system is not a big issue. The important point is that they save on having to employ drivers, except that now they may have to hire more technical staff to overlook the system.

I can now boast to everyone that I have sat on a driverless train and lived to tell the tale.

3 Protection from Bad bad things!

We are very well shielded from the evil things in the world, such as boobs and more boobs. This is because we have R(A) shows which basically bans minors below 21 from watching any show that has a hint of a nipple in it. This is absolutely essential because they are the most evil objects ever known to mankind, although about half the world's population have them and they are actually used to nurture the young. Decapitation, gun violence and other stuff is not as evil because they are not sensitive issues. Seeing a guy get his head lobbed off is not as bad as seeing boobs.

So, when you are 20 years old, it is alright for you to have sex, which is legal, but not see boobs on the big screen. One is also mature enough to kill people (as an army conscript), because, ultimately, 'see no evil' does not extend to actions.

4 Speak Mandarin Campaign

First they told us that it is good to speak English because that is a universal language. Now they are telling us that it is 'cool' to speak in Mandarin because it is our mother tongue, our native language, and therefore we will understand our roots better. And oh, because China is rising as a world power so it will benefit us economically.

Yeah, of course mandarin is our root language, but not hokkien, teochew, cantonese, hainanese, hakka, and the other dialects. Those are vile languages only renowned for its foul vocabulary. They must be banned!

We can now pretend that we love and enjoy speaking/learning Mandarin because of our 'cultural roots' as a pretext for learning the language to benefit economically with China's ascent to power.

5 A wide variety of media to choose from

Oops, I forgot that Mediacorp and SPH have merged. Oh well, we still have a wide variety of channels to choose from, except that they all offer the same fare, mainstream propagandist material aimed to make model citizens of us. Wow, not only are we entertained, we are educated as well! How's that for multipurposedness!

Hmm, at least we have quite a fair number of newspapers. In descending degree of propaganda level they are ST, TNP, Today, Streats(now defunct – miss the weather girls :(:( NOT). I especially enjoy the way the same news are reported in each newspaper in virtually the same vein, probably because they all came from the same source. This is essential because if one forgets about a certain piece of news, he will be reminded when he reads the other newspapers later on! This is why whenever any controversial article is submitted to the Editor, it will be censored as it might cause uncalled for confusion. Wow, very thoughtful of the Press indeed!

7 Comments:

Blogger Darthsid said...

Brilliant.

Ever considered being a writer?

3:57 PM  
Blogger redrown said...

Thanks. Never considered being a writer as profession but for leisure, certainly:)

7:30 PM  
Blogger Daniel said...

Haha! Very tongue-in-cheek...
I love Sinkapore! :p

6:08 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Are you denying that it's been good to learn English because the angmohs aint gonna learn Chinese (Nor Hokkien, Cantonese, Hakka for that matter), and that it's now necessary to learn Chinese because we Chinamen have finally risen and the world is going to have to do business on China's terms now?

You seem to be scoffing at the gov for making these decisions when they were derided by many, though it's obvious that if you only know your dialect you wouldn't be relevant to a good proportion of the world's population now.

3:16 PM  
Blogger redrown said...

Anon, No way am I denying that it has been good and beneficial to learn English! In fact, neither do I think that learning Chinese (Mandarin) is a bad thing. What I am 'scoffing' about is the fact that we are being 'told' that Chinese is our mother tongue and that is the reason why we should learn it when the actual reason is clearly economic.

8:42 PM  
Blogger Agagooga said...

Actually I've seen a bare bosom in an NC16 movie before (Harold and Kumar) and a sex scene in a M18 movie (Alexander).

And PG movies nowadays aren't so violent - the more violent ones are now NC16 or M18.

Mandarin is also promoted for social engineering purposes. And Today is slightly freer than the ST.

2:29 PM  
Blogger redrown said...

Hey, Agagooga, nice to see you here. I have followed your blog for quite some time already...great stuff you have.

Agreed, the censorship rules are gradually becoming more lax, as compared to the strict no nipple rule followed a few years back (and of course not forgetting the R-21 boo-boo when they were first shown..heheh)

12:29 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home