Basket.

November is just about to roll around again, and the end of the year really beckons. While temperate countries have all these wonderfully poetic occurences like snow or leaves falling, Singapore just has rain. Lots and lots of lovely monsoon rain, accompanied by arcing lightning and clashing thunder that sometimes seems to come just a little too close for comfort.

Somehow, every end of year, I think of the phrase "The boys'll be home before the leaves fall". Does not seem like much when you first look at it - until you learn that it was a common phrase bandied about as millions of young men all over Europe marched unwittingly to their deaths in August 1914. A war that was expected to last a couple of months at the most turned into one of the world's worst armed conflicts, and ten million of "the boys" never went home at all. Look at it this way and the simple phrase is heartbreakingly poignant.

The end of every year, though, is already poignant. It is an ending, after all. Every year I've experienced since I gained the ability to remember events of significance has been unique and in its own way memorable. Some part of me, sometimes all of me, mourns the passing of each year, because it will never return and will live on only in a very human memory that will slowly deteriorate over time.

Not too quickly. Please.

The headline for this Monday's Straits Times should have read "SLAVERY FINALLY OUTLAWED - Maids to be treated at last as higher-order creatures than pubic lice". But that's not entirely accurate, because the one day off per month that maids will from next year get written as a clause into their contracts is not exactly enshrined in the law. The most they can claim if their employers don't give them their one day off in thirty is breach of contract - not a crimnal offence, although they can take their employers to court. It's not a strong enough deterrent to ensure full compliance.

But it's a step forward, nonetheless, although that it took so long and triggered a very public debate shows just how far Singapore is from being a gracious society. Some of the letters fired to the ST Forum in the course of this debate were simply disgusting. It's one day off in an entire bloody month; seriously, why is it such a terrible loss to you to give your maid one day off in thirty? You already pay them a pittance, but you will deny them even this? Most Singaporeans would. And people complain that Singaporeans always need the law (or something like it) to force them to behave well.

Appallingly, only 23% of maids get one day off per month currently, and less than one in ten a day off per week (if I remember the article correctly). One maid featured within the article was made to work 19 hours a day. I was horrified, quite honestly. Singapore prides itself on being a modern, industrialised nation, but this sort of behaviour from its citizens shows quite the opposite. Singaporeans think it is right to work their foreign domestic workers to the bone with insufficient rest and a pittance of a salary. Genuinely, forget all that fuck about not letting pregnant women have your seat on the bus - our awful treatment of maids is what shows us how long a way we have to go before we get to that elusive gracious society.

So now, something. One day per month. Still insufficient, but it's a start. Doubtless, plenty of employers are going to find a way around it, outright defy it or simply browbeat their maids into suffering silently. That's hardly avoidable. But this is the land where the right to vote was once labelled a "privilege", so why should I be surprised that one day's rest per every month is going to be the height of magnanimity for most maid employers?

Oh no, I fear I am once again giving in to DOTA addiction. Because that's what I spent the whole afternoon on. Although, it was only the second time in nearly three months. The problem is how much fun I had, which was quite a lot, and the other problem is how much it cost, which was also quite a lot. Heavens above.

A good number of issues going around in the news lately, mostly concerning education. One concerns prolestizying (or however the fuck you spell it, I seriously don't know, MS Word does not have it and I can't be arsed to check a goddamn dictionary at two in the morning) and the other that good old stalwart of everyday life in Singapore - examinations.

I'm not touching religion, because discussions on that subject always run the risk of becoming highly contentious. I guess that leaves examinations.

Namely, the yearly ritual in which "concerned" parents write to the Straits Times Forum complaining about how difficult the Maths and/or Science PSLE papers were. Despite the fact that their kids usually get A* afterwards anyway. Sigh.

This annual ritual is fairly new though. I don't recall any ruckus in my own year (1998) but I do remember 2000 as seemingly being the year it all began - with the infamous question: "1 + 2 + 3... + 97 + 98 + 99 + 100 = ?" 2004 was another famous storm, with a parent flinging about words like "murderous" in describing the Science paper.

MOE always responds the same way, which is that the paper was not of significantly different standard from past years, and that in any given examination, regardless of difficulty, there will definitely be those who do extremely well and those who fail.

I come down firmly on the side of MOE, simply because what they say makes sense. To the whiny parents, please listen. Although I understand it's not in the nature of most Singaporean parents to listen to anyone but themselves. It's silly to raise a hoo-ha just because your kid thinks he is not going to get 4 A*s and make it to RI/RGS/NUS High/etc top-ranking school, Integrated Programme orwhateverfuck. "I studied for the test, but I did not do well in it; therefore the test was unfair" is a fallacy. Just stop believing in it. Please.

It seems that since I finished my twelve years in the system, there has been a lot more whining by concerned parents. Earlier this year there was a flurry of letters complaining about how secondary school and especially JC students were over-worked and under-rested. It's not like that's a new thing, but I never saw so many people write in before.

Some were being just silly though. "My son gets home at 7pm, oh how cruel is fate" - 7pm was bloody early for me (and most of us) when CCA was in full swing and standard when it wasn't. The same father then talked about S Papers as if they were something compulsory, and blamed them for making his son get home late. Guess what, Pops, S Papers are optional. If they are taking so much from your son, drop them. Simple as that. He then ended off his complaints by saying his son usually sleeps at midnight, sometimes later. Well, personally, I never slept at midnight - always later. And I'm sure plenty (if not all) of you lot did too.

My message is: Quit whining. Yes, the system is fucked up. Yes, students are over-worked and under-rested. No, your exams are not rigged. Deal with it. Like the thousands of students and their parents who came before you did.

I went on dispatch today at 8.30am and returned only close to four pm, because the damned van broke down twice and left us stranded like fish out of water only perhaps we were lungfish because we didn't need to get back into the "water" urgently, you see, lungfish have these "lungs" which are not like gills and let them sta-

Uh, got a little carried away there. I don't always publish my train of thought but that's exactly what it was when I was thinking about how to open this post. I think I've said this before; I have problems beginning and ending essays of any kind. Once I can get started everything is great, until I have to end. Then they suck once more.

A quick enough week this was that for once left me a little breathless. The class blog set the tone last weekend with unbelievably frequent updates which I could and did follow in the office. I'm not the busiest, but I run about the most, to be more accurate. What did I once say about being careful what one wishes for?

In any case, it's mid-October already. November and block leave beckon. And I find it a little funny (in both senses) every year just how many people were born in this month. Perhaps the products of (Lunar, too) New Year's parties that got just a little too wild?

I will now make full use of free cable Internet to post from camp, courtesy of your parents' (and mine) tax dollars.

The Sunday Times yesterday interviewed the woman who reported the racist blogs. She did it by calling 999... which is not what the emergency number is made for.

And no one seemed to care. For years, the police have been telling the public not to misuse the number. Now, they have not one but two perfect examples of people doing just that (this lady and the person who reported the Buangkok MRT white elephants) and no one is batting an eyelash. Everyone's simply too obsessed with the bloggers and the obvious great harm they have caused to our harmonious civil society.

Nor does the woman seem to know or care that she abused the emergency hotline. The way she spoke during the interview, it was the most natural thing in the world to do. I think she ought to be hauled up for misusing 999, which is also an offence. Because an emergency number is just that - a number you call only in the case of emergencies. Like if someone is being slashed to death with broken beer bottles, or you've just been robbed, or there is this monstrous python in the storm drain outside your house which will soon enter and choke the life-force out of you. While the racist comments were a grave threat to national security, they were hardly an emergency. It's not like they are going to spark off this disastrous mass race riot in the next minute or what.

The white elephants? I don't even want to talk about what a silly use of the number that one was. Or what a waste of police resources the whole damned investigation was. Then again, our policemen don't seem to have much to do on days when people don't strangle each other and scatter butchered body parts around Singapore.

Seriously, punish those who have done wrong. All of them.

Practically everyone knows how he looks like, but how many actually know who he is? I've genuinely been wondering for a while.

I speak, of course, of Ernesto "Che" Guevara, the Argentine trained doctor turned revolutionary guerilla, who was captured by Bolivian troops in the jungles of Bolivia on this day in 1967. There is hardly a person who has not seen his famous image, splashed on t-shirts, posters, wall paintings and various other memorabilia all across the world. The image is not reproduced here because the original photograph, taken by Cuban photographer Alberto Korda at a funeral service on March 5, 1960, and thousands of variants can easily be found with a very simple Google image search.

Certainly a remarkable individual in the history of the 20th century, Guevara may be the representation of Marxist-Leninist ideals in its purest form - an individual who truly believed in the cause he fought for most of his life, and fatally dedicated to spreading its perceived benefits across most of the newly-independent, impoverished and undemocratic Third World of the 1960s.

Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna was born on June 14, 1928, into an upper-middle class family with strongly left-wing views (ironic how so many Communist leaders have bourgeois roots, isn't it). A sickly child prone to severe asthma attacks (asthma was to plague him all his life), he nonetheless grew into a fine student and athlete, graduating from the University of Buenos Aires with a medical degree in 1953. While still a student in 1951, he and his friend Alberto Granada, a biochemist and political radical, had taken a road trip around South America. It was on this trip that Guevara observed and experienced first-hand the poverty and powerlessness of the masses - and decided that the only remedy for widespread social and economic inequalities lay in revolution.

After completing his studies in 1953, Guevara travelled to Guatemala, where the leftist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman held power and was attempting left-wing social reforms. It is believed that here was where Guevara acquired his famous nickname due to his Argentine roots; "che" is a Spanish interjection commonly used in speech in much of South America, roughly corresponding to English exclamations like "hey!" or "wow!". In a vocative sense, it can also mean "friend", roughly corresponding to the English "mate", "dude" or "pal".

A 1954 CIA-backed coup overthrew the Arbenz regime, and it was this event that cemented Guevara's view of the United States as an imperialistic, oppressive bully insuperably opposed to the treatment of South America's endemic socioeconomic inequality. It also strengthened his conviction that Marxist ideals were the only answer to such problems, and violent revolution the only way to put these in place.

Guevara fled Guatemala after the coup and ended up in Mexico City, where he met Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, exiles from Cuba after a failed revolt against the dictatorial right-wing regime of President Fulgencio Batista in 1953. He quickly joined the Castros' "26th of July Movement", and returned with the brothers and 80 other guerillas to Cuba in November 1956 to again attempt revolution.

The expedition landed in swampy southeastern Cuba and was promptly attacked by Batista's forces. Only 15 rebels survived, but they fled to the inaccessible Sierra Maestre mountains, where they slowly gained strength and support against Batista's corrupt government. Guevara rose to become one of Fidel Casro's closest aides.

It was he, then, who won the decisive encounter of the Cuban Revolution, capturing the city of Santa Clara in 1958. Batista was forced to flee the country, and the rebels took control, entering Havana on January 2, 1959.

Guevara played a prominent role in the new government, initially overseeing the purge of political enemies, including many former members of the Batista regime. Later, he became Communist Cuba's effective Finance Minister, guiding it on the socialist path along with Fidel Castro. He wrote extensively during this period, mostly on ideology and the tactics and strategy of guerilla warfare.

Prior to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, Guevara was part of a Cuban delegation to Moscow that endorsed the placement of Soviet nuclear missiles on Cuba. He believed that the missiles would forestall American action against Communist Cuba - which had reason to be worried because of the failed American-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. He reportedly told British reporter Sam Russell after the crisis that if the missiles had been under Cuban control, the Castro regime would have fired them.

After April 1965, Guevara dropped from public view and then vanished altogether. The reasons for his disappearance are still vague, and are attributed variously to the failure of his Marxist economic reforms, a split within the Cuban government (between pro-Soviet and pro-Chinese factions) and a personal split between he and Castro. The second-mentioned seems the likeliest, for the Sino-Soviet split was then at its height and Guevara's orientation towards the PRC's brand of Marism-Leninism was causing problems for a Cuba that was becoming increasingly reliant on the USSR for aid.

It was only later discovered that Guevara had in fact gone to Africa to aid the pro-Lumumba, Marxist Simba movement in the then newly-independent former Belgian Congo. The revolt was suppressed by the Congolese army and white mercenaries, and Guevara left the Congo with a band of Cuban survivors after spending seven hardship-filled months there. He decided that he could not return to Cuba for "moral reasons" and spend the next half a year living in Dar-es-Salaam, Prague and the GDR. He eventually only returned in order to prepare a new expedition to foment revolution in Latin America.

This was to take Guevara to his final stop - Bolivia. After unsuccessful attempts to rouse the Bolivian masses, Guevara was left with guerilla band of just 50, mainly native Cubans he had brought along with him initially. Abandoned by all the allies he had expected to aid him, he waged a long, lonely campaign in the thick Bolivian jungle as the Bolivian army, assisted by CIA operatives, sought to hunt him down.

On October 8, 1967, they finally managed to surround Guevara and the remnants of his band in the vicinity of the village of La Higuera. The guerillas put up a fierce resistance until all were killed or wounded, and Guevara was captured after being shot in the legs. He was taken to a dilapidated schoolhouse in the village and held overnight, his execution already ordered. In the early afternoon of October 9, 1967, the guerilla leader was shot several times by a Bolivian army sergeant and expired at the age of 39. On October 15, Castro admitted his death and declared three days of national mourning in Cuba. Guevara's remains were only exhumed and positively identified in 1997. On October 17, 1997, they were laid to rest in a specially-built mausoleum in the city of Santa Clara, where he had won the decisive battle of the revolution thirty-nine years earlier.

Undoubtedly one of the best-known figures (if only by his face) of the past century and even today, Guevara was the ultimate revolutionary. He gave up a comfortable life to fight for ideals he genuinely believed in, and was loyal to his form of Marxism-Leninism to the very end. It was his steadfast belief in, and willingness to fight for his ideals, that eventually led to his death - it is a naivety of sorts, one can say.

Power may corrupt most - it did not Ernesto "Che" Guevara. He deserves admiration for that.

I turned 19 during the week, on Tuesday the 4th to be exact. How the occasion was celebrated has already been detailed below. I'll look at putting up the pictures we took.

This week was otherwise the most ordinary week I've had in a long time. It was a long, unbroken grey streak of office work, the tedium of sitting in the office only relieved by the tedium of sitting in a van en route to dispatch. But it's still the best way to serve out conscription.

I would write more if the world would give me more to write about.

Ah, October. My favourite month and traditionally to me the beginning of the end for the year, here once again.

A gang of close friends tried and dismally failed to surprise me with a birthday cake and candles today. Their plan floundered due to a miscommunication. I think we've all spent too long in the SAF, because this is curiously reminiscent of how things usually go in the army. But honestly, it was a very sweet gesture anyway, and my sincere thanks to you lot for taking all that effort, as well as for the lovely little present.

More on the events of the night. I thought it would be a dinner with Winston. Once he turned up with Keng Piang, I began to suspect something was up. Then he asked for a table for five when we only had three, and refused to tell me who else was coming. Hmm. Then Zihao and Yen Yeong turn out to be the missing two people. Completes the puzzle for me. But the clincher was when we ran into Winston, who had ostensibly gone off to meet a friend, later - holding a cake, no less. By the time Yen Yeong asked me to accompany him to the toilet, I knew what it was all about and what was going to happen the rest of the evening. And so I played along.

Unfortunately, while they failed to surprise me, they succeeded in smashing cake into my face. Twice. The result? One pair of spectacles that was a bitch to clean and some priceless photos for them to laugh at for all eternity. Man, it was worse than being dunked at Sean's house last year. At least that was cooling.

Despite that, this was one of the best birthday celebrations I've ever had. I'm honestly touched. From the bottom of my heart, thank you all ever so much, guys. You people are wonderful.



AND I WILL HAVE MY VENGEANCE UPON ALL OF YOU. ONE DAY. JUST YOU ALL WAIT.