Growing up

Thu, 17 Jan 2013
1 min read
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You know you’ve crossed a certain temporal threshold in your existence when you and your guy friends excitedly:

  1. Download – at a solemnisation lunch – a heart rate monitor app to check how healthy you all are;Instant Heart Rate Monitor by Azumio

    and

  2. Discuss – over Whatsapp – how the Philips AirFryer has gone down in price

    -“…from $300plus to $249!”
    -“Will it go down further?”

    AND THEN contemplate buying the damn air fryer.

    Philips AirFryer

And that’s not even mentioning the Chinese Chess while we were having drinks!

Wow guys - we've really aged.

Stuff you must read today (Wed, 16 Jan 2013)

Wed, 16 Jan 2013
2 min read
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  • A Hand Model Remembers Steve Jobs | The Bygone Bureau
    “The 1960s were the golden age of American hand modelling. Despite lithe fingers from the Ukraine and flawless Brazilian cuticles, we retained our stranglehold on the industry. Why? Because we had better moisturizer”.

    Choosing an excerpt from this article was damn difficult because there were too many hilarious gems like the one above.

  • 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage | Single Dad Laughing
    Quite a good list which makes sense, though my suggestion – if you want to use it for yourself: reverse the negative phrasing of the items so it’s more positive i.e. instead of “Don’t stop holding her hand”, change it to “Keep on holding hands” so that it’s easier to remember/more palatable for the human mind.

  • Silent treatment: Spin doctors go into damage control mode after disgraced MP Michael Palmer quits politics | Senang Diri
    “Indeed, it make take decades of obeisance, war stories handed down from one newsroom generation to the next, more rice bowls of journalists broken over time before one day, Singapore wakes up to a generation of running dogs – to borrow a phrase from Singapore’s first Chief Minister, David Marshall – who will not only eat out of one’s hand but will also beg and do tricks on command”.

    A plausible premise for an s/f text set in Singapore?

  • The private sector does not always deliver better value in public services | The Guardian
    “…the limitations of our addiction to private sector leadership models is most obvious when the two sides try and work together and the strained relationship is well-illustrated by the many fiascos over public-private partnership and crises over government outsourcing”.

  • What is “Society”? And Gay News | bread crumbs and candy cottage
    “Please, [Singapore] society has accepted many worse things than homosexuality. Remember the chewing gum ban in Singapore? Remember the building of casinos in Singapore? Society was against them but the government went ahead and now, nobody cares after chewing gum and Singapore hasn’t become a den of vice of mafia shootings and drug smuggling yet. The point is: the government MUST change laws first. Laws are instructive and tell people what to think”.

    Policy shapes culture, nowhere more so than Singapore.

Murmurs

Tue, 15 Jan 2013
2 min read
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No Pun Intended

So I was browsing through the National Heart Centre’s (NHC) website the other day to find out how to contact them, when I discovered that their newsletter is called… Murmurs!

How awesome is that?

That is, using the word “murmur” as a pun to refer to both a heart murmur (which is what the NHC specialises in diagnosing and treating), as well as to convey the connotation of communication (which is what the newsletter is intended for).

And if you know me by now, you’d know that meaningful and significant names like these pique my interest; it shows a deeper level of thought and sophistication, which I always appreciate.

(I’ve also had the doob-ious honour of naming some things myself, using the same principles of meaningfulness and significance.)

Another thing I like about the NHC is that it’s part of the SingHealth Group, which, in my humble opinion, has the most coherent corporate branding strategy I’ve come across thus far – check out the logos and the lettering of the hospitals and speciality centres in their stable of medical institutions.

BONUS:

Random but also within the sphere of nice words: did you know that a flock of starlings is called a murmuration?