I was struck with sudden inspiration today, not least because blogging has been mentioned pretty often in the news lately. First up was the dude who got taken in by his own police unit after making comments regarding the controversial arrest of a photographer taking photos of a flood. Then, not so much blogging, but the person who posted some very obviously metaphorical stuff on his facebook.com profile. Two unfortunate souls who said the right thing at the right time in the wrong place. Because of that, I find it very necessary to include the following paragraph.

All opinions and views are not made by the author. They were written by a) a monkey typing at random on a keyboard or b) words spontaneously forming online which materialized on this website, depending on your favourite probability theorem. Personally I'm for the monkey one, because this was the same monkey that produced the complete works of William Shakespeares, so I suppose this must be one randomly smart chimp. As such, do not take anything here, and in all past and future posts seriously and/or literally. Anyone who does so ought to have the chimp throw faeces at his face.

Ok, with that legality out of the way, I am free to ask. Is an off duty doctor allowed to comment on the practices of another doctor? Is an ex-teacher allowed to comment on the teaching methods of another teacher? If so, why can't an ex-policeman comment on another? Furthermore, not being in the field of event itself, his knowledge of the proceedings are probabily limited and not to be taken seriously at all, which diminishes the actual impact of his words on the fate of policekind(Just as my words are twice removed and thus contain half the impact(assuming linearity of words and impact)). Whatever fate has befallen on him has caused the event to touch him, in effect making him a participatory party in the event itself. Of course now that he is one step closer to the event, his opinions become that much more credible and correspondingly, popular, the argument being that his words have hit home so much so that the authorities have had to do something about it.

The second is just plain overreacting. Its not everyday that someone calls for the death of someone else. Frankly, it was quite humerous and if I knew how to spell that person's name I might just have posted it myself. Assuming that I was actually interested in the Olympics, Jr. I watched the men's basketball finals today, (one of the only free sports channel, the same channel in HD doesn't count as another channel) it was great until the rain splashing in through the plastic protectors caused the courts to become wet and slippery causing me to wonder if that was the same day as my Inter Block Games' basketball competition and the remarkable similiarity of events. Of course, it probably rained the whole of Singapore and many games were shifted due to the weather.

Finally, an interesting article caught my eye. http://wildsingaporenews.blogspot.com/2010/08/model-city-singapore-shows-symptoms-of.html
The article claims a quote from an 'urban expert', which compares Singaporean's demands for better public service to checking into a 5-star hotel. First of all, our public transport isn't even close to a 5-star hotel. Want great train services? Go to Taiwan, where I am still amazed that I have never had to wait for more than three minutes to board and they have cute little lines for people to queue so that we, who do not play rugby, will not have to enter a scrum whenever the doors open. Secondly, you'll have to read the quote first.

Urban expert Seetharam Kallidaikurichi said Singaporeans should be prepared to pay more for public services if they expect the government to meet their expectations.

"It's like you live in a five-star hotel. What happens? You just check in,
you get your bed ready, new linen given to you, you come down, breakfast is served for you... (but) you pay for it,"

This was made in response to nothing at all but I assume that it means that we can expect costs of public services to increase. And in that quote, he compared us wanting better public services to checking into a 5-star hotel. A 5-star hotel will not try to fit 6million guests into 4.9million rooms. Even if they did, they would certainly not have the chutzpah to build another million rooms, and then raise the price of each room because they are 'upgraded'. Economically, it works out too. An extra million travellers mean's an extra million travellers' money. There's no way that you can justify making people pay more for the same of level of service. The money you need to upgrade whatever you want to upgrade is in that million right there.

It has been a long and rather eventful year for ESESC this 2nd MC, and although I could have done plenty of things better, I am quite glad at how most of the things turned out. I've learned several lessons, such as to manage your expectations, and to, hmm, I guessed I've not learnt that many things after all. The experience however, is one that I am very sure will help me out in all future events I organize as well as life in general. There remains one fairly interesting twist though. Guess who my successors are, but two whom I have approached in the past to help me run my cell. How very ironic. Lucky I don't take things too personally, so I choose to see it as me having extraordinary foresight to spot people who will be able to contribute to the cell, as well as planting the seeds of thought into their minds so that they will be able to continue what we have done. I guess I incepted them?