Bohemia Bunny

The Funnerology Principle

Monthly Archives: January 2009

Playing Jack and Jill

This morning I went for a climb up the tallest hill in Singapore. What good luck that it’s just in my neighbourhood, so I can pop there, climb it, and get back in time for lunch.

Approaching the Hindhede entrance of Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, my companion and I encountered a mama monkey, with small wrinkly baby hanging onto her front. We gave her a wide berth so she wouldn’t feel threatened, and continued past the Le Wood condominium into the nature reserve proper. Le Wood is practically right at the border of the nature reserve. It must be so cool to live there, plenty of shade, birdsong and monkeys…

The initial approach up the hill, after the visitors’ centre, is a toughie. It’s incredibly steep, which makes for a good, challenging uphill climb. It’s all I can do to walk up, even though some extremely fit individuals were spotted running up. Hardcore, brother. As we ascended, earlier birds were seen descending the same path, backwards. Makes sense, after all it’s quite demanding on your toes and lower legs if you descend forward. Plus the steepness can be visually intimidating.

After the steep part, which I managed only because there were interesting infoboards along the way for me to read while catching my breath, is a less steep path that winds its way up to the summit. If you want to get there quick, you can take the staircase that bypasses the loop in the path and gets you there along a straighter trajectory, but I’ve always found stairs to be harder to conquer than hillslopes.

So up the hillslope path it was. If you like to head off the main path, there are several trail routes marked out along the way, where you can get even closer to nature. I stayed on the main path, and eventually came to a clearing with a radio transmitter tower.

What an anticlimactic arrival. We had reached the summit.

163.63m above sea level, and a shady, peaceful trek up. You could probably ascend and descend the hill in slightly over an hour. I reached the summit at around 10.45 am so it took probably less than an hour to ascend, and even less to descend because it’s downhill.

A Caucasian man with a greying beard at the summit offered to take a picture of both my companion and I together, which was really nice of him as we didn’t even ask him! I saw he was holding a camera and thought maybe it was quid pro quo, so I asked if he wanted help with his, but he declined. Fancy that! A random act of kindness!

As we prepared to descend, an elderly lady asked us for assistance with her mobile phone. Someone had called her and she wasn’t wearing her spectacles, so she couldn’t read the number on the screen. I saved the caller’s number to her mobile phone, but we didn’t have a pen to write the number larger for her, so she approached another bunch of young people, one of whom did have a pen. I hope she found out who her mystery caller was – skali turns out to be wrong number. -_-;;;

During the descent, I tried going backwards. It’s indeed more comfortable, because you’re not constantly arresting your own downward momentum as you would when facing forward. However, it doesn’t make for a speedy descent, and I was eager to get back to level land and have my rewards of gelato from the Frutta la Viva café down the road from my place.

I had the strawberry gelato, by the way. Very yummy.

Pictures from December 2008

I took a large number of pictures in December, because it was Christmas and I went somewhere nice and I also went home. All of which means lots of photo ops for me!

Christmas tree put up by my housemate.


Can you see how brightly the moon shines?


This and following 2 pictures were taken at HortPark.


It’s a dead pigeon… ew.

This is a macadamia nut in its shell!


Sunset with fluttering flags back at my old school.


Foggy morning on the highway.

See the full album for more pictures and captions!

All photos were taken with my Nokia N78. After putting up with lousy VGA-quality snaps for so long, these are really good cellphone pics.

Is Straits Times inviting guest journalism?

If you read the Straits Times on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, you might have seen this article on the Le Cordon Bleu cooking school in Paris. Someone wrote about his novel family holiday, which was a cooking course at the renowned academy. So far so good, right?

Apparently, not so when that “someone” is a top civil servant – permanent secretary, in fact. The readers of The Online Citizen criticised the writer of the article for, at best, being out of touch with the grassroots, and at worst, flaunting his wealth at a time of financial crisis.

I won’t comment on these opinions – I have one of my own. And instead of questioning the appropriateness of the civil servant’s actions, I want to ask the Straits Times people instead: Is this article supposed to be an example of guest journalism or something?

You see, to the best of my knowledge, the civil servant is not a journalist on the payroll of the Straits Times. He’s not a syndicated columnist. So pray tell, why does he get his own byline on an article that’s prominently featured in a leading newspaper? The only answer I can think of is that he was invited to share his experiences with the common people, the hoi polloi, whose closest experience to Le Cordon Bleu will be eating the chicken dish.

I find this disturbing, because the media should be separate from the state, and this not only blurs the line, it’s practically suggesting that the newspaper and the government are working hand-in-hand. Is the Straits Times a government mouthpiece? It can’t be true, perhaps I’m just being paranoid.

To give both the newspaper and the writer the benefit of the doubt, maybe it just so happened that the editors wanted an interesting lifestyle story, and this was it. But you can’t ever assume that the readers will interpret it the same way. The negative comments from members of the public already show that the readers can’t separate the writer’s job from the article. You cannot expect us to take the writer at face value as just “someone who had an interesting experience”. Indeed, I can’t either.

To clarify, I’d have been fine with the inclusion of the article if it had been written by one of the Straits Times journalists. At least then, one could always say it was an assignment to humanize the people in government. But for it to be written by the civil servant himself, when he isn’t a journalist – it smacks of being a vanity piece.

Updated January 12th:

Thanks mr.udders! Finally I have achieved my dream ;_;