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Monday, Feb 16, 2015 - 21:52 SGT
Posted By: Gilbert

Headlong Rushing

Last Saturday saw the hamsters occupied and this year's Marina Run, which was nearly never gotten to, after multiple repeated attempts to book a cab at five (but to be fair, it was probably their shift change). Did wind up with an entertaining chap, who sang along to a seemingly endless selection of English oldies. Upon discovering the reason for my trip, he mentioned that he had run twelve marathons himself, before he literally took something to the knee. Unfortunate.

Well, he was nice enough to cut me a small discount, as were my siblings for patiently waiting. The 10km itself wasn't too troublesome, as I did the usual first two km as per normal, before alternating between jogging and brisk walking. Completed it in about 1:35, in keeping with my estimate that any training would be a loss in total time spent. Shame about the long wait at baggage collection, though given how the harried volunteers had to ask for descriptions ("What colour is your backpack?" Most of the time: "Black."), perhaps much larger tags left hanging out could help.


Passed by some familiar spots


The experience reminded me about the news some days back about a guy in Detroit who had to walk 21 miles (almost 34km) to work every day. If you had imagined that his days would have to be an endless cycle of wake up, walk to work, work, walk home, sleep, you'd be right; well, the public sprung over US$350000 for the poor man to get a car, which seems to have brought him a whole new set of concerns.

Locally, there has been a similar outpouring of donations, though given that this is Singapore, the issue was not the distance. Instead, the uncle in question was conned of some S$400000 over fifteen years, with the excuse that... he owed the government money. Well, not that that was completely untrue - just that it got collected by unauthorized personnel.

This critical point was hammered in with gusto in a recent Parliament sitting, with distinguished incumbent ministers in an uproar against the Workers' Party town council "giving residents' money to friends", and dropping oblique hints about hari-kiri, which should be considered in light of their own totally legal AIM setup, and their own platform for the last general elections of "we're sorry, give us another chance".

Unsurprisingly, next to none of these observations found their way to the mainstream media, with the incumbents' soundbites taking pride of place, which has led some of the more cynical to predict that new elections are close by, and the more outspoken to have a field day. And, in yet more completely unrelated news, we've slipped three more places, to 153rd out of 180 countries, on the global press freedom index. But, as a redditor said: Freedom 是什么? 可以吃的吗?



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