Basket.

Okay OLD PHOTO RUSH!


4E:




Graduating in 2002,




about to enter NS at the end of 2004,




about to finish NS in October 2006. No photo for yesterday because we fucking got rained out.


A01C:




In 2003 (shit, this photo is seriously fucking old),




at prom end-2004,




in 2005 where all the guys have bloody recruit hair,




at Christmas 2006 when (almost) everyone has been freed. For 2007 refer below.


RJC HISSOC:




HISSOC Exco 2003-04.




Archives Exco with Kwok and our august founder. Kwok is of course dashing as usual and the pose was his idea, by the way.




A far better photo.


Miscellaneous:




Winston back when he was still cute. Alternative caption of "Why the fuck can't I ever look like I enjoy having my picture taken?"




Yihong, Winston, me and Abiel (at the last moment). Graduation day, if it's not already obvious.




Fuck, I hate being short.




The very last time I wore all-white.




Golden-haired Winston at prom, almost exactly two years after the shot above.




Bonus shot of Zihao pigging out on cake one fine Chinese New Year's Eve.


And that's just a small fraction of the unbelievable amount of silly photos I've accumulated over the years. Honestly, some of them I have no idea as to the origin. I don't even know the people inside. What witchcraft?

Perhaps more another time, when I feel like it.

Rumours that this space will no longer be updated are without factual basis. Life has simply been a tepid routine over the past couple of weeks. At least teaching threw up new, although not always (or often) pleasant, surprises most days.

I've been thinking about the last time I actually laughed at a newspaper comic, and I realise that it has been a goodly number of years. In fact, our newspaper comics were probably never funny - just that once upon a time I was unthinking enough to find mirth in them.

Casting an eye on the Life! section on any given day of the week (Sundays excepted), we find the (allegedly) funny pages a polyglot collection. We have Non-Sequiteur, Bizarro, Baby Blues, Peanuts, Stone Soup, Foxtrot, Get Fuzzy and Garfield. Two are already re-runs (Foxtrot and Peanuts) and one is written by, in my opinion, a complete hack who tries and fails with equal consistency at being amusing (Bizarro). Garfield was, sadly, last funny about a decade ago (I'm old enough to remember its glory days) and Stone Soup is at best tepid. That leaves as the best three Non-Sequiteur, Baby Blues and Get Fuzzy - the only ones able to get an occasional chuckle out of me.

On Sundays, our selection is broadened. At least weekend Foxtrot is something new, Zits is pretty good, Lio always delivers traditional but excellent absurd-situational humour and Sherman's Lagoon rarely fails. But crap like The Fifth Wave (an extremely cheap Far Side knockoff), Pickles (which rarely has a joke at all, never mind a half-decent one), The Wizard of ID (what the fuck is that trash) and our very own painfully unfunny Chew on It are mere wastes of space.

If anything, The New Paper is even worse at it. Weekdays offer just three strips, The Concrete Jungle, Dilbert and Calvin and Hobbes - whose author stopped creating new strips in 1996. Beside these comic strips is a very dubious humour section often consisting of rehashed jokes that began making their rounds via chain email when email was the new digital medium. On weekends, we get, oh joy, For Better or For Worse, which once upon a time was actually fairly decent but is now sappy and limply unrealistic.

All in all, it is a dire collection. At least Cathy, perhaps the worst comic ever created (nothing is good about it. Not the art, not the dialogue and definitely not the pitiful attempts at humour) is gone, but that sort of consolation is tantamount to telling a deaf-mute with painful cancer that at least he doesn't have AIDS. It doesn't fucking help one bit.

What I find most infuriating is actually the re-runs. Especially Peanuts. I know it was a popular comic, and still is, but I've never seen the point to it. I have never found it funny, it has never touched me, and I have never ever been able to relate to it. And I have been coming across (note: not actually reading) Peanuts since the early 1990s. I'm not American and I never will be, I find baseball one of the stupidest sports ever invented with American football a close second, I do not fly kites and am not interested in doing so ever and I find little point in a dog pretending to be various historical pastiches. Nor has the simplistic art ever impressed me. In short, I've never found Peanuts a good comic. And yet, for fifteen years now it has been in the papers. When the fuck is that going to change?

Calvin and Hobbes, on the other hand, is a slightly different case. Because I love that comic. I grew up reading it and I think it is a great loss that the creator has decided not to produce anymore. It was a truly great comic strip that could be slapstick-funny, ironic, sardonic and touching. The last strip, in particular, is uforgettable (it was the one I posted for New Year's this year). But to see it continue every day in the papers is a glaring sign to me of SPH's laziness. I am not exaggerating when I say that I have read every single Calvin and Hobbes strip ever publicly published. There are not that many, unfortunately. Yet rather than find fresh material, SPH simply recycles by now at least decade-old strips. It is appalling, ad unbecoming of basic journalistic standards.

Garfield, though not re-runs, is a similar case. It is another comic I grew up with, and I have to say that Garfield strips these days are a very pale copy of what they used to be. While old strips used to have very varied settings with actual interesting developments and visual humour, Garfield these days usually consists of Jon posing an insecure personal question to his cat and Garfield giving a weakly witty comeback that is occasionally a pun. It is utter crap, especially compared to what it used to be. The creator just seems to have gotten lazy and is coasting on the undoubtedly immense profits from nearly thirty years of unbroken popularity.

Then we have the utter abominations. Bizarro fucking sucks. It makes me really angry to think that people are making money off it because it is so crap that only Cathy is worse, and that is saying quite a bit. Pickles rarely even contains a joke. I don't even know how they get away with that. Likewise the Wizard of ID. Chew on It offers occasional poor satire and very little real amusement; but TalkingCock is miles better. For Better or For Worse - less said about that, the better. I guess I will stick to webcomics.

While I understand that newspaper comics tend to have more restrictions placed upon them than webcomics, the gulf is still incomparably vast. S*P is head and shoulders above even the very best our newspapers can offer, although that isn't actually saying much. Sad to say, it is much better drawn, too. Scarygoround does a superb job of the traditionally British impossible-situations-in-mundane-small-town-life absurdist humour, and PBF fills surrealist needs. None of the newspaper comics offer anything even close.

Then again, I wonder, who the fuck reads newspaper comics anyway?

Yes, that is a cowboy hat I am wearing below, which I decided to let remain on my head, which is an act of silliness I usually only tend to indulge in when there is a considerable amount of alcohol flowing through my veins (none that day). I guess I was too happy.

I have discovered that I have a very solid reputation as a bookworm because people automatically assume I'm actually reading something at the moment. Not technically true - my habit is to read more than one book at any given time, picking each one up randomly when it strikes my fancy. It can take anything from a couple of days to half a year or more for me to finish a book, because my attention span is irrepairably erratic, the result of years of frenetic nocturnal multi-tasking. For the record, I'm currently on something of a civil war binge, with one work on the English Civil War and one on the Spanish.

For the record too, personal update for everyone who wishes to know but still doesn't: I will not be returning to teaching next term and currently I earn my keep through teaching tuition. It is likely that I will get a job in July which I will continue to do in the mid-long term, after starting school. It is highly possible that I will return to teaching on the next long university break; where, I do not yet know but a return to Whitley I will not rule out. Call me a masochist.

And I realise that's actually the first time I've mentioned the school name here.

In any case it has been a very peaceable June, a good break with many gatherings and much catching up done with more to come. Hope that everyone now knows what is going on with me, but that can only mean our supply of small talk is strangled. More on that, another day.

What else can I say? I love this bunch.

Honestly I think it is absolutely wonderful that ex-classmates remain close, bonded by countless treasured memories, inside jokes and the shared myriad experiences of two whole years amidst the travails of an education system fast disappearing into history.

It was truly amazing. It still is. It will continue to be.

In the papers today: yet another report on terror, a dangerous new trend and even more reasons why we should be running scared. This time, a well-educated lawyer turned to religious extremism after being negatively influenced over the Internet. He has since been arrested and detained under the Internal Security Act.

As usual, the article focused on how this is a serious and disturbing new trend all good Singaporeans should be wary of, rather than reassuring us that it was an isolated incident (almost certainly the case) that has been swiftly and efficiently dealt with. Sadly, this is not unfamiliar these days, when governments the world over seem to prefer to concentrate on inculcating fear into their citizens, rather than genuinely working on meeting the needs of the people.

Our government is emphatically not an exception. The Internal Security Department, euphemistically referred to as an "intelligence agency" in public dispatches, is Singapore's secret police. It is responsible for dealing with domestic threats against our sovereignity, and the infamous piece of legislation it is charged with upholding is the Internal Security Act. A holdover from the days of the Emergency, this archaic set of regulations allows arrest without a warrant and indefinite detention without trial - blatant deprivation of civil liberties. For well over half a century it has been unnecessary but kept in place, being used to snuff out (dubious) threats to our well-being from time to time; most recently, of course, against the Jemaah Islamiyah militant group.

It is the common practice of authoritarian governments to claim that they are merely protecting the people, and that a price to pay must be the loss of certain basic human rights; only that these are often labelled "privileges". The Ministry of Home Affairs has itself claimed to be "protect[ing] [the] people [of Singapore] from the threat of terrorism" (MHA White Paper - The Jemaah Islamiyah Arrests and The Threat of Terrorism, published Jan 2003). The reasoning is simple: the more afraid the people are, the more willing they are to give up the rights they are entitled to, and thus all the more power to the government. The basic rule of governance is all but forgotten: governments exist to serve the people.

After decades of fending off domestic and international challenges to the ISA, the Singapore government was presented with a godsend in the form of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. The graphic live images of a devastating assault on the financial heart of America silenced the critics and left our government quietly triumphant. In the new global climate of fear, similar legislation was to come into place in the liberal democracies of Western Europe and America. At a stroke, 19 young Arab men reverted the world to a state of fearful calm reminiscent of the Cold War; worse, as the enemy was far more intangible and yet potentially far more dangerous than Soviet SS-20s. The ISA would be here to stay.

Shortly thereafter, its existence was further justified with revelations of a plot by the JI to attack key targets, including Western embassies, in Singapore. Despite the amateurishness of the conspiracy, MHA concluded that there was a serious threat to our national security. Further arrests in 2002 lent weight to the perception. A siege mentality began to form, which since then has continued to take shape and harden. This latest report is just one more example.

Whatever happened to governments working to meet the basic needs of the people? It seems to have been replaced, particularly in recent years and especially in the last century, with creating bogeymen to cow populaces into quiet submission. Our government is not alone in this regard - anti-terror legislation throughout the world has resulted in the curtailment of civil liberties. Governments, instead of reassuring their people, are encouraging their fear. This is not good governance; this is abuse of power.

George Orwell, in 1984, saw it all coming: the totalitarian government of Big Brother has created an implacable opponent, Goldstein, using this image to instill fear and obedience in the people. The parallels are obvious: the shadowy threat of world terrorism is Goldstein - it may or may not be a clear and present danger, but WHAT IF IT IS? Most people would rather not take the chance, and this is where governments step in, tell them how serious it really is and they should always be on their guard, and that the only ways to deal with this monstrous threat is to give up more power to those who rule them.

What we currently have, then is a global regression of freedom. The fall of the USSR in 1991 was supposed to be the End of History and the triumph of liberal democracy. Yet it seems that governments these days are simply incapable of ruling by the proper principles of governance. Instead of working for the people, they are increasingly making the people work for them. Political leaders of today have little real contact with those they rule: as Paul Johnson points out, government in the 19th century was a remarkably open affair. Successive Prime Ministers of Britain went for solitary morning strolls around London, tipping their hats at common men in the street; Thomas Jefferson personally received callers at the White House and welcomed letters personally addressed to him - to which he wrote his own replies. These days, we cannot imagine anything like that happening. Governments have universally grown into vast, bloated bureaucracies, out of touch with those they are supposed to govern, and as a result losing sight of the fact that their main preoccupation should be with serving the people as well as they can.

The maintenance of this facade of a threat can get farcical. Local examples abound. Just this year, a family missed their holiday to Australia because of an innocent remark that just happened to include the word "bomb". An airport security officer even told her she could go to jail for using that dreaded b-word. Ok, let us test that out:

BOMB.

BOMB. BOMB. BOMB. BOMB. BOMB. BOMB. BOMB.


Right, that ought to earn me a few years inside. In my opinion that officer should have been sacked for gross incompetence, and the entire staff of that section given a good upbraiding. Instead, a proper public apology through the press was not even issued. So now those responsible for our safety can get away with plain stupidity? Well, I sure feel safe now! Oh but wait, that isn't the point, is it. Maybe the government is smarter than I thought.

In addition, heavy sentences are routinely levied on those who make bomb hoaxes, most recently the Canadian who was jailed 44 months - which is more than three-and-a-half years. Whatever happened to ensuring the punishment fits the crime? Is that not one of the basic tenets of justice? Three-and-a-half years in jail for causing no harm to anyone, although plenty of inconvenience - it is completely ridiculous. But it certainly helps with this whole climate of fear act.

Anyone would be foolish to deny the existence of a real threat. But governments are overreacting. Disturbingly, this could be deliberate. In the meantime, we continue to drift further and further away from genuine good governance.

It has been a tiring week as I attempt to piece together all responsibilities and obligations, including having fun. Fortunately, I have been successful thus far.

Dinner with Cheng Tju was part of the fun, amidst the somewhat familiar environs of Ghim Moh - only somewhat familiar because the place has changed a lot since we went to school there. The most regrettable casualty of changing times was the McDonald's, where many a memorable moment was spent over 25-cent ice-cream cones, but all the old hawkers favourites were still present. Not that we went for that, picking zi char instead and washing it down with iced Carlsberg.

Better than the food, of course, was the conversation, as we swapped variegated experiences, anecdotes and opinions. Half the table were teachers of some form or another so there were plenty, because school tales are always the funniest, from either perspectives of the classroom.

It was certainly an excellent ending to my work week, although I have to spend the remaining days to come securing my future education. We are all born tied up in red tape, and I should start learning the terms of my contract because I never have an answer for people who ask.

No June posts? Well, let's remedy that.