cheanderella’s blog

Overheard a conversation between two mothers at dinner yesterday. M1 has a baby girl approaching two years old, and M2 is pregnant and looks like she’s due to deliver soon.

They were chatting the usual girly stuff, except since they are mothers, they revolve around the motherly stuff. Things like which is the best nursing bra (Triumph apparently has the lousiest because it fails to keep shape after being washed and worn for a month), what milk to feed the baby (fresh or breast or powered), where is the best place to get prams and maternity clothing (US budget store Target has nice and chic stuff for a fraction of the price), and so on.

But what was most interesting was when they got to the subject of names. They were all discussing the Chinese names they’ve picked for their kids, the symbolism etc, when M1 asked: “You’re not spending any time thinking about an ‘English’ name for her?”. And M2 replied: “I’d rather spend my time thinking of what to buy and what to pack for my hospital stay.”

It just struck me how de rigueur it is to have a Christian name nowadays for kids. Every single kid I know (directly or indirectly) has a Christian name. And when a couple is pregnant, one of the first thing they think about are names, and sadly, it is now the English name that they spend so much brain juice on, researching that Michael means who resembles God and so on. It does not quite matter that most English names have biblical origins and the parents are fair from being one of the Christian God’s flock.

There are more Richard Lims, Samuel Tans and Sandra Gohs aplenty. Whatever happened to good old Lim Keng Swee or Goh Chin Chye or Toh Bee Leng?

If such naming convention is to make it easy for the Caucasians to pronounce our names, I question the need for us to bend over backwards to cater to them. In the process we lose our heritage because something as simple as a name lies at the very root of it. And the funny thing is, the more enlightened Caucasians think we are more unique when we use our Chinese names.

Maybe it is just me, I remember a time in my primary school when I thought it was the “coolest” thing ever to have a Christian name, to the point of inventing one for my own and refusing to answer to any name but that chosen name. Thank goodness, that fad lasted for a grand total of two years, and I soon reverted back to my good old trusty name which my dad spent hours pouring over manuals to pick and select one. There was some imprecise science of how all the five element of the world (metal, wood, water, fire, earth) have to be balanced in the characters that make up the name, as well as how the number of strokes will make it a balanced name and bring good fortune or not.

And how beautiful is it when you can break down the characters of the name and each symbol has a meaning. And all this, at the rate we are going, will be lost. Because once there is an English name, nobody ever uses the Chinese one.

Maybe this is what globalisation means - a world full of Toms and Dicks and Harrys.

It’s funny how as we age, we get less fit, probably because we get more lazy and less active.

Went by the monkey bar the other day and got on it. And realised how unfit I have become as I cannot even move a single step, just hung on the first bar without being able to progress. And once upon a time, I was agile as a monkey, swinging to and fro easily without breaking a sweat. And arm strength was never my forte.

Good thing is, we’ve managed to keep up with all the training to climb Mount K. We have been climbing stairs almost every day. And my legs have stopped aching, that must mean for something.

To keep it up till end of the month!

Just realised something, I can see the Marina Bay Sands SkyPark, the cantilever portion that is open to the public from the common corridor in front of my house.

Spent Chinese New Year this year mostly at work because the first casino has finally opened in Sin-City, on first day of CNY!

It just amazes me how many people are willing to go throw money at a place where it is widely known the house will always win. The queues, the queues, they snaked around the block and some. Granted, on the first two days, many of those queuing in to take a gander are foreign workers who are off and curious about the latest attraction in town. And guess what, for once, it is absolutely free for them, as they did not have to pay the entrance levy fee slapped on to discourage Singaporeans and residents to enter the gaming den. All the more they should go. For once, they have one up on the natives of the land.

But guess what, the locals came, in the dark of the night. After their CNY obligations were fulfilled, the swarm turned up. The number of those who had to pay the $100 to go in has more or less balanced out the non-Singaporeans and residents by now.

What is shocking is the amount of money they raked in. Our dear Minister Mentor just announced last night that the casino raked in $3.5 million in the first day of operations and another $3.7 million in the second day. That means $7.2 million in two days! Although this was less than the $40 million estimated by a Channel News Asia source, it is still no small sum to sniff at. Which business can make so much in just a matter of 36 hours?

There’s a big problem at SK’s workplace.

Mina has deducted Arjun’s pay because qile has written bad things in her blog.

Mina is considering firing Arjun, unless qile stops the nonsense.

I still need to exercise more and work out more. Not sure if I will fulfill this resolution again. Must find the time!

Time to exercise, time to sleep, time to spend with family, time to play, time to blog. Actually, maybe my new year resolution should be to find more time.

One of my favourite webpages to browse when I am absolutely idle and want to do something brainless is Victoria Secrets, specially the sleep section.

I just love the old-fashioned nighties, especially those with little ribbons or dainty little embroidered bits or eyelets in delicate girly shades like white or pink. I just love them, no specific reason.

Haha, I am one of those who loves her jammies and I must sleep in them. Just doesn’t feel right tucking myself in bed with just regular T-shirt and shorts, which is the regular attire of many friends I know.

Blame my mum, she was the one who inculcated in me this love for pjs, for since I was a little girl, I must change into a set before I am allowed to go to bed.

Am heading home soon to change into another set tonight and wait for sweet dreams. haha.

On our last trip for the year. To Vietnam and Cambodia. I’m knackered, spent the whole day at work, and now it’s time to KO.

Tomorrow’s flight is at an ungodly 6.45am, which means check in two hours early, plus waking up, getting there. You get the idea.

Time for my beauty sleep. During this period, check my travel site for updates, which I will do whenever I can get internet, preferably free.

Ok, if I don’t share this, I will bust.

Shin Min, pg 4: Ris Low named on the CNN’s list of 25 most influential people in Asia

Of course, it would come with spread of pictures. Geesh, how is she influential? Don’t think I’ve started seeing people wearing “RAD” strutting down Orchard Road, nor have they been sporting “Zip-bra preens” and “leopard preens” paired with “khaki green”.

Some times, I cannot believe the stuff that make “news”!

Went to the Body World Exhibition on Saturday which was both interesting and disappointing. It was quite something to see all the bodies stripped of their skin to reveal all the network of muscles, ligaments and blood vessels underneath. And the bodies on display came from real subjects who decided to donate their bodies to greater good.

It felt like something that will benefit medical students more though than the general public who were mostly there to gawk. The way the bodies were preserved through plastinicination (I think that’s the correct word for what was done) was amazing, but also somewhat gruesome. Worse, there were all the strange poses that the bodies were put into, en pointe as dancers, or stretching out as a basketball player, or more. I had the sense that it was something not quite necessary, and faintly mocking.

Since the exhibition was at the Science Centre, we paid the additional $1 to get a combined ticket to the Science Centre which I thought would be quite fun. That cannot be further from the truth. Gone was the Science Centre of my youth and childhood days, replaced by a lot of new fangled “interactive” elements which I fail to see will add to learning. There are all kinds of video games which seem to me like the arcade and do not seem to generate much learning except for having fun, which the kids obviously do. Then there are the other stuff which involve lots of buttons and electronics, one flip side of which is anxious and quick childish fingers poking at them mean the electronics don’t survive very well, with at least a third of these so-called hi-tech and interactive games out of order.

There were some residual exhibits left from my school-going days, the display of the tornado, the Jacob’s Ladder, and I cannot remember what. All the rest was just a swirl of colours and text, which is overwhelming to me but reek of “kids like visuals and busy colours so that’s what we are showing”. Whatever happened to the simple magic of science, those childhood experiments of making a volcano out of plasticine and pouring baking soda into the “crater” to make it “erupt” and other simple stuff. Those were all gone.

I came away from the Science Centre with a headache due to the busy display boards and a strong sense of dissatisfaction. It has become a hollow centre of pretending to teach about Maths and Science with all the gadgets but no soul. No kid I saw bothered to take two seconds to read the instruction panel before launching into that game and tiring of it before moving on to the next. The whole purpose of learning exercise had been lost there.

All I can say is that I will not willingly step foot into that for a long time to come. Even if and when I have kids of my own, I am not sure that whatever I can teach them at home will not be superior to the stuff there.

Not too sure if all that is just a sign of age, that I am growing older and less in touch?

It’s only since I’ve started looking for property that I realise how dirty it is.

The most “amazing” was a phone conversation I had with an agent. She advertised to have a unit for sale, which I called to ask about. As we were discussing, I found out that this was the same unit I had already seen. However, the big glaring difference is the size!

The size of this unit advertised is 10% bigger than the first unit I viewed, which the first agent told me is a smaller one.

Strange, I probed, address is the same. How can the size be different. This agent claims the owner cannot remember the exact size so she put down an approximation which, she claims, is lower.

This is downright false advertising. Amazing, wonder if it is meant to cheat people who are hoping to buy for investment and are willing to buy something without laying eyes on it first.

Geesh, the kind of crooks you will have to come up against just to buy a house. And they do not even do much, show you around the place, try to extol the virtues of the place but probe them a bit more and they will not be able to tell you more beyond what was readily available online. And for that privilege, they earn 2% commission on the selling price.

That is not even worrying whether they are representing your interests, whether you are the buyer or seller. We’ve decided that for private property, the agents would tend to side with the sellers more as they are the ones paying the commission, but ultimately, I think their numero uno is still - themselves.

Real friends don’t call each other only when they need help. And note, the calls usually come late at night and there is not the least hint of apology for disturbing a friend so late. The attitude is one of “Well, I know he/she doesn’t sleep that early”.

Then there is the shameless request for help on this or that. Worse, the friend doing the favour has to, some times, go out of his or her way to render assistance. That is usually done without asking for anything in return. But, it doesn’t mean the person asking the favour just take it as his or her due, does it?

And note, the help is almost always a one-way street.

I can’t stand the behaviour of such users. People who call themselves friends to the other but are not friends in the true sense of the word.

I have only this to say to them: Out, leech, out!

Argh, just found out that we’d missed out on the leonids meteor shower that was supposed to peak at 3 to 5am Singapore time today. One of the best places to view the shower is apparently in Asia!

The thing is, I didn’t read anything about it in my own newspaper, the national broadsheet. This kind of interesting news should have been highlighted, no? Only time I could recall seeing anything related to this was in one of the Chinese evening papers, Shin Min or Wanbao, which had a short write up about how Jurong is the best spot to catch the meteor shower on Wednesday.

Anyhow, nothing can be done now, now that we’ve missed it. How sad. I’ve never seen a meteor shower in my life.

My only memory of seeing a shooting star was at a class chalet which we rented to celebrate the fact that we’ve taken our O level exams. A few of us were just lying on the beach chatting and staring up at the skies when I saw a streak. That was it. No time to make wishes or anything, but still, it was a memorable occasion.

I’ve googled for any discussion of the event for the last half an hour or so. My only consolation is that the people who made the effort didn’t see much. Sigh, at least they tried.

When will there be another time for such sightings? I think I may be old and dead by then. Sigh.

Just opened out mailbox today and there was an innocuous flyer slipped in by a tuition agency.

Singapore is full of these tuition agencies and plenty of kiasu parents willing to pay an arm and a leg to make sure the little tyke gets on ahead of life ahead of his peers. Just go to United Square and you will see aplenty.

Still, I cannot help by feel appalled at this brouchure that advertises tuition for Mathmatics starting from K1!!! Geesh, Kindergarten level 1 is merely 5 years old? What tuition does a kid need at 5 years old? At that age, the only Mathematics you learn is 1+1=2 or 2+2=4. And even for that, kids require tuition?

Then there are all sorts of other tutorial programmes offered at this centre including tuition for the Mathematics Olympiad. I thought the point of those are for the talented kids?

Still, this is a very good field to get into here, in this country where parents are crazy about grades and pay anything.

I’m not yet a parent, but please, god, don’t ever let me turn into one like that. I wonder whethre by the time I become a parent myself, they would have progressed to having tuition sessions for kids when they are still in the womb. We might as well start ‘em young, right?

I think I should start drawing up a list of food that I like and the places where they do these dishes decently.

Daily, SK and I will have the “Where to go for dinner” dilemma. And he is always looking at me to name my choices because, according to him, I’m the fussy and picky eater. There are things that I will not eat, and if the dish is not well-known, I will turn up my nose too. “Very difficult to please,” says the man.

What to do? I am used to go home for dinner. My parents are the type who cook every day. There is always soup and rice and dishes for dinner, and except for the times when I go out to meet friends for food, the automatic response for me when it comes to dinner is to head home. There will always be home-cooked food waiting.

SK is a different story. He is used to eating out, his favourite haunts are hawker centres. And he doesn’t mind the MSG.

So now that we are together, there is a clash of food choices. He gets bored and tired of eating home-cooked food, I don’t knock off early enough to go home and cook. So it’s usually dinner outside. And although I know what I like and don’t like to eat, I am bad at locating them or remembering which restaurant or hawker does the dish exceptionally well.

Again it’s dinner time, and the question is where should I go for dinner. Tonight, I feel like steak. Let’s see.

Just went and caught that Glenn Goei production called The Blue Mansion yesterday.

All I can say is thank goodness it was a Tuesday discounted ticket.

The plot is weak, and as my colleauge J puts it, it is a murder mystery that failed utterly because the plot had only one suspect from start to finish instead of keeping the audience guessing.

The acting was overdone in the typical theatrical way, not the movie way of trying to present something as close to real life as possible. The dialogues of the characters were impossible. They delivered their lines as if memorising a script, and the speech was stilted. Tell me, have you ever heard a real person talking in complete grammatical sentences in an informal setting? Worse, they use fancy high-faluting words that appear only in Victorian novels.

It’s just one of those films that is just too in love with itself, acting, directing and script-writing, to properly entertain. Audiences like us are secondary.

Story that was in Associated Press. Quite an interesting thought-provoking read.

I just think after you die, you probably won’t care very much. Earth to earth and dust to dust and all that jazz, means there is not much of you left after a while so why not share the plot?

Just my own two cents worth.

By JILL LAWLESS

LONDON (AP) – So you think London, population 8 million, is crowded with the living?

There are many millions more under the soil of a city that has been inhabited for 2,000 years. And London is rapidly running out of places to put them.

Now the city’s largest cemetery is trying to persuade Londoners to share a grave with a stranger.

“A lot of people say, ‘I’m not putting my Dad in a secondhand grave,”’ said Gary Burks, superintendent and registrar of the City of London Cemetery, final resting place of close to 1 million Londoners. “You have to deal with that mindset.” The problem is a very British one. Many other European countries regularly reuse old graves after a couple of decades. Britain does not, as a result of Victorian hygiene obsession, piecemeal regulation and national tradition. For many, an Englishman’s tomb, like his home, is his castle.

That view is also common in the United States, which like Britain tends to regard graves as eternal and not to be disturbed – although the U.S. has a lot more space, so the burial crisis is less acute.

In much of Britain, reusing old graves remains illegal, but the City of London cemetery is exploiting a legal loophole that allows graves in the capital with remaining space in them to be reclaimed after 75 years.

Burks points to a handsome marble obelisk carrying the details of the recently departed man buried underneath. The name of a Victorian Londoner interred in the same plot is inscribed on the other side. The monument has simply been turned around for its new user – whose family, Burks says, got a fancy stone monument for much less than the market price by agreeing to share.

Since a change in the law last year, cemetery staff have begun the even more sensitive process of digging up old remains, reburying them deeper and putting new corpses on top, in what have been dubbed “double-decker” graves. They’ll be sold for the same price as the cemetery’s regular “lawn” graves – those in open grassy areas – or about $3,200.

Burks, a burly man who began working at the cemetery as a groundsman and gravedigger almost 25 years ago, said reusing graves will buy the rapidly filling cemetery six or seven more years of burials.

“We are doing our damnedest to make the cemetery more sustainable,” he said.

So far, no other cemeteries have followed City of London in reusing graves. Many Britons have an instinctive resistance to the idea of grave-sharing.

“I don’t even want to think about it,” said 29-year-old London receptionist Temi Oshinowo. “It’s not showing respect. It doesn’t matter whether or not the person has been buried for 25 years or 100 years, that is their space and you should give them respect.” Martina Possedoni, a 23-year-old saleswoman, agreed.

“It’s like a second home and it’s weird to think a stranger is in your home with you,” she said.

It’s an attitude that frustrates advocates of grave reuse. Julie Rugg of the Cemetery Research Group at the University of York in northern England jokes that Britain’s problem is that “we weren’t invaded by Napoleon.” Countries that adopted the Napoleonic Code have been reusing graves for almost 200 years.

“We just need to get on with reusing graves,” Rugg said. “Grave reuse gifts back to us our Victorian cemeteries to use again.” Britain, a crowded island, has long battled to find room for its departed residents. Over the centuries they have been packed into mass graves, tucked into churchyards and laid out in sprawling cemeteries. London is like a layer cake of the dead: Victorian upon Medieval upon Saxon upon Roman.

Construction workers frequently find remains dating back centuries. Workers building venues for the 2012 Olympic Games have unearthed 3,000-year-old Iron Age skeletons as well as Roman and Medieval artifacts.

For centuries Londoners were buried in churches or small churchyard cemeteries, but when the Industrial Revolution brought a population boom, the existing spaces couldn’t cope.

Alarmed at the perceived health risks of overflowing graveyards, the government passed laws starting in the Victorian era that banned urban churchyard burials, outlawed exhumation without government permission and established large municipal cemeteries.

Unlike the cramped churchyards of yore, these Victorian cemeteries were green, park-like spaces that soon became tourist attractions as well as final resting places.

London’s most famous, Highgate cemetery, attracts thousands of visitors a year to its tilting tombstones, crumbling crypts and the graves of everyone from Karl Marx to “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” author Douglas Adams.

Opened in 1856 on the edge of Epping Forest in east London, the City of London Cemetery is the largest municipal graveyard in Europe – 200 acres (80 hectares) of tranquil avenues shaded by chestnut, lime and plane trees. Its residents include Victorian worthies, 1960s-era soccer star Bobby Moore and Catherine Eddowes and Mary Ann Nichols, two victims of Jack the Ripper.

It hosts 1,000 burials and 2,500 cremations a year, but Burks says that if it does not reuse old graves it will soon run out of space.

He and other burial advocates hope the government will take the initiative and overhaul the law, making the reuse of graves – currently only permitted in London – a nationwide practice.

The government is in no hurry to do so. Justice Minister Lord Bach told lawmakers earlier this year that while “the case for reusing old graves had been accepted in principle … this is a sensitive issue that needs to be handled delicately.” He said there were no current plans to expand the practice.

Meanwhile, others are looking for alternatives to burial. Cremation has been encouraged by the authorities for a century as a clean, space-saving alternative. It’s also much cheaper – cremation at the City of London Cemetery starts at $440, while the cheapest adult grave is nearly $1,600.

As a result, Britain has one of the world’s highest cremation rates – almost three-quarters of the population chooses to be incinerated rather than interred.

The future-looking are touting resummation, or “flameless cremation,” a process that uses an alkaline solution to dissolve bodies. But it is not yet recognized in British law.

Still, many religions – including Muslims, Jews and some Christian denominations – strongly favor burial over cremation and the number of Britons who want to be buried remains steady at more than 25 percent.

Burks firmly believes that burial has a future.

“A cemetery like this,” he said, looking around at a tranquil scene of grass, trees and marble headstones, “can be used for generations.”

You just have to watch this! They are dressed for the occasion in “leopard preens” and “zip-bra preens”.

Just read the SPCA website and there are various things in it that make me feel both hopeful and terrified for Mou-Mou.

In the section on “Surrendering an animal”, it statest: “Any animal given up to the SPCA may be put to sleep in 24 hours.”

Which could mean she has been put down by this morning 10am.

But then again, something else gives me hope. Those which make the cut for the adoption gallery will get to stay there until they are adopted. And demand for toy breeds suitable for HDB flats (i.e. under 40cm height) outstrips supply. The website said also that these toys can be adopted as fast as within one or two days.

Keeping my fingers crossed that she will be able to find a new home. Sigh. It’s just sad.