Hilarious real life conversations.  Today and yesterday.

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I just applied for a passport for Jed.  Today I received a call from the Immigration & Checkpoints Authority.  The caller asked for "Jed Lim XX XX", to which I said I was the father.

"What is your name ?"

"Melvyn Lim."

"Are you the real father ?"*

"Yes", I said.

"Then who is Lim XX XX ?"

"That’s my father - his grandfather - he’s dead."

"Who is Tan XX XX ?"

"That’s his grandmother - my mother - she’s alive."

"OK I will check and call you back."

* Note : A colleague said my reply should have been "that’s what my wife told me".

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A colleague said after lunch yesterday that he had to rush off to cash in his insurance policy.  To which another colleague remarked "did you just kill your wife ?".

Now that I’ve finally found some time to update the blog, Photobucket is giving me problems (more particularly, a "javascript void" issue - try clicking on the "Login" button to begin with).  At this rate, I might switch to another photo hosting site.

Becoming a father might be traumatic enough for some men, but for a friend who recently became a second time father, he had to deliver his baby at home too!  Not to make light of his situation, but when news of this reached me I couldn’t help but think of the delivery scene from the movie, The Back Up Plan.  (Don’t bother watching it other than for maybe this scene, I think it sucked).

Incidentally, I hear that mum and baby are doing fine.  Not sure about the friend though …

These two happy songs, variations of the same melody from Jason Mraz, make me want to relive my childhood days (on Sesame Street) and go on a holiday !

I have to confess to liking the Sesame Street version better, in some ways. Aren’t there days when you feel like walking up to the boss, and telling him with wide-eyed childlike innocence that “I wont stay inside no more no more I cannot wait to go outdoors …”

I read on Straits Times online, an article on a petition against censorship — "Censorship Isn’t Working : Regulate Instead". 

Petitions and online forums intrigue me, because they are one of the few avenues in which Singaporeans openly express their opinions, and also because they have been accused in the past of having been manipulated to inflate online signatures or participants.

I was also intrigued that Singaporeans are for once calling for more regluation instead of less.

Now doubly intrigued, I googled "Censorship Isn’t Working : Regulate Instead".

And was surprised to see that the third link, after the Arts Engage the group responsible for the petition, and ahead of even the Straits Times article, pointed to AWARE, the Association of Women for Action and Research.

AWARE has in the past been accused of allowing itself to be hijacked for causes that had more to do with conservative Christian objections to homosexuality at one end and, at the other extreme, liberal gay and lesbian rights, than with women.  (In brief, several conservative Christians took the view that AWARE was being used as a platform to advocate for gay and lesbian rights, and got themselves elected into the AWARE Executive Committee, in order to steer AWARE back to its original causes.  This prompted a backlash from, I suppose, people who felt that a society should not be hijacked by conservative Christians with a common objection to gay and lesbian rights, and I assume advocates for gay and lesbian rights, who convened an extraordinary general meeting to vote them out).

The link to AWARE left me truly intrigued.  How are arts and women connected ?  Is AWARE now being hijacked by anti-censorship advocates ?

The AWARE article on "Have you said NO to censorship" doesn’t disclose why AWARE has any interest in the issue of censorship of the arts.  It doesn’t, for example, suggest that such censorship prevents women from freely expressing their opinions through art, or that it affects the liberty or livelihood of women in the arts industry.  It does, however, invite readers to sign the petition by clicking on a link at the bottom of the page.  Furthermore, I note that "Have you said NO to censorship" is unlike the other articles on the same page which deal with issues that are more clearly related to women’s concerns, such as eating disorders, helping someone deal with domestic violence and sexual harassment.

So I don’t have answers to the questions I’ve posed above, not that it really matters to me (since I’m male), other than to say that there appears to be merit to the allegations that AWARE has allowed itself to become a platform for causes other than women’s causes.

It’s been sometime since I’ve blogged. 

Partly because I was preoccupied with a major work project which saw me travelling in and out of Vietnam and India, and which finally (sort of) ended in December. 

The other reason is the PC which died and which was only recently replaced in late December, after a long period of disciplined waiting on my part for Windows 7 to be launched, and for the December PC fair in Singapore.

Hopefully I’ll get round to writing more now that things are a little more settled.

If the recent photos I’ve uploaded onto the blog have been looking a little spiffier, it’s thanks to a new toy which I acquired not so recently, courtesy of a colleague who took advantage of some exchange rate differences to get himself and me a new SLR at a rather handsome discount while in Seoul.  (I heard that prices have since been adjusted and no, the camera wasn’t a gift I had to pay him).

Other than taking pictures of Jed and Josh, I haven’t really had the time to put the 50D, or the lens which my former colleagues gave me on leaving my previous job, to good use.

Until we left for our Chiang Mai family holiday last week.  Pictures of those should be coming up next.