There's hardly a unifying theme in many of my posts nowadays - mostly because I never meant to have one. ;p

1. At the rate that the National Stadium is being "rebuilt", I suspect it might not be till 2020 that we'll have the new National Stadium. I say this because, unless my memory fails me, I attended the "closing ceremony" of the National Stadium when I got back to Singapore last year. In fact, I even blogged about it... But a year on, the National Stadium is still hosting the Singapore vs Brazil match! Surely we must have another stadium with sufficient capacity, capable of hosting such an event... or maybe not. Or I'm sure we could set up a football match on the World's Largest Floating Platform - then we'll have the World's Largest Floating Football pitch - which will no doubt bring in another 's worth of tourism money into Singapore!

And at a price of $60 per ticket, it's quite steep and a far cry from what we used to pay to see the Malaysia cup ($6/8 for adults was it?) But as the gahmen tells us, go only if you can afford it! Guess I'll be giving the match a miss then, or I'll just watch at some kopitiam - for $60, I could get myself wasted silly on cheap Tiger beer.

2. One of the things that I found "Uniquely Singapore" when I got back, was how horrible Singapore drivers are. Sure, we all know that - the newspaper even had quite a feature on it last year (check the Sunday times archives), but don't we all contribute to this "horrible-ness"? Ask yourself when was the last time you've cut into an available gap in the next lane in a traffic jam, only to realise that the lane you came from was faster (and thus you cut back again). Or when was the last time you honked at passengers crossing the road, instead of slowing down (fine, they were jaywalking, but what do you stand to gain by honking?). Or simply, how often do you check your rear-view mirror, to see if you might be road-hogging?

As I was reading the "bonus materials" in Freakonomics (most of it from the blog at http://www.freakonomics.com/blog), I found one article which kinda resonated with my feelings on driving in Singapore. It's titled "Making Profits from Incivility on the Roads". If the Singapore traffic police would do the same, perhaps the fines will offset some of the many taxes we currently pay.

3. Which brings me to talk about Freakonomics. As a numbers sort of person, I can identify with many of the things mentioned in the book. One of which is on "Irrational Fear". In this chapter, Levitt & Dubner discuss how our judgement may be marred by irrational fear sometimes. They used the example of how, as a parent, you might not let your kid play with another kid, when you know they have a gun in their house, but have no qualms if the other kid has a swimming pool in the house (but no gun). Sure, this might seem "rational" initially, but the number of children who drown in swimming pools are much more than the number of children who die as a results of gun-shootings.

It's up to you whether or not you subscribe to the reasoning given in the book, but it's worth reading nonetheless, if you haven't already (and once again, I'm probably the last person on this earth to read this book... ;p)

The end.

Labels: Books, Muses