Doubly smoked

A woman (in red blouse) smoking away while standing outside the building. It was quite hazy that day. I suppose they are used to this.

Barrage 2

This is the real Marina Barrage (Singapore). It serves also as a dam to harvest drinking water.

Barrage 1

Scale model of the Singapore Marina Barrage mechanism. Yeah, photography was not permitted, but what the heck, everybody was doing it (taking photos), which made the rule redundant anyway.

Shock and awe

Talk of shock and awe - the Singapore government is using shock tactics to engineer citizen behaviour. Actually it has been doing so for some time now. This picture is now pasted all over town - in public access areas such as bus stops, subway trains, etc. now. It shows a hand full of hideous slimy creatures that will feed on our hands and anything you touch, if you don't wash them regularly. That's one way of fighting the Influenza A H1N1 virus now plaguing governments and human health services the world over.

Wash your hands regularly!

Blind-sided

Who is the daft person who allowed this window advertisement sticker to be put up on every glass window in this MRT (subway) train. This person must never have taken the train before, or if he/she did, could always find a seat that could comfortably see through this transparent 'binocular' holes.

For the rest of us long-suffering commuters, especially those who are tall and standing, we just cannot see outside the signs in the train station that tells us which station we are at. We'd have to bend, stoop, peep and whatever else necessary to find out where we are. And given that we tend to stand so close to people who are seated, there is a high chance that we would be sticking our asses into these people's faces as we try desperately to find out whether we have reached our destination.

Why am I seeing a lot of these things which shows that the people responsible are rather unthinking?

A Full Moon

The Chinese celebrate Mid-Autumn with a festival called the, err, Mid-Autumn Festival. It is also the period when the Earth's Moon is visibly the brightest and roundest in the sky. Well, this year, the Singapore Meteorological people told us that the moon will be nearest the Earth (and thus appear roundest) at around 11.30am today, the 7 Oct 2006 and not the 6th Oct 2006 when the Mid-Autumn Festivals falls. Well, the moon did appear this morning, bright and round in the morning sky. Unfortunately it couldn't be rounder or brighter because of the thick haze caused by smoke that has drifted over from the burning forest fires raging in the Sumatran island of Indonesia.

But its better than nothing. Enjoy!



A little closer...



That's the closest my camera phone can zoom.

Them dar haze

Sengkang Town was shrouded in smoke this morning. So much so that instead of opening the windows in the morning, I had to leave to closed. These pictures show the haze situation in my neighbourhood: