Of child actors and Singaporean behaviour
It’s been a while since I blogged, so I guess this gives me the right to be as kaopeh as I want to be!
First of all, let’s kaopeh about stomp.com.sg, a local weblog where citizens can live their fantasies about being a journalist (citizen-journalism at its very best eh), take secret photos of people doing allegedly “illegal” things, and then MMS or email their photos to said website, for fame and fortune, though the concept of fame and fortune may differ from person to person.
Props to SPH (or whoever was smart enough to come up with this relatively ingenious idea of tapping into an almost unlimited, or probably 4 million +/-, citizen-journalists, who were willing to “work” for no monetary benefits, cpf benefits, or employee benefits), for coming up with something like that, where the 4 million +/- kiasu people in Singapore get to put their latest 3G camera/video/lasergun/nuclear missile launcher/machine gun/sex toy phone through its paces, snap photos (legal and illegal) of people and cry foul over their actions.
Examples? 3 teenagers sitting down on a crowded train, 2 sleeping and 1 engrossed in his/her story book. Caption? “Teenagers refused to give up seats for standing elderly/injured/handicapped/lame/pregnant/downright kaopehkaobu”. Said photo is usually accompanied by a rather delightfully written paragraph such as, “I was on the train this morning and it was very crowded oh gnoes. I saw 3 kids sitting down and one pretended to sleep. Oh the horror of it all. There was 102934840 old pregnant women with only 1.5 legs standing as the train jerked and shuddered and derailed. Yet the 3 teenagers did not offer their seats to the needy. What kind of education is the Singapore education system giving our teens nowadays?”
I surf through stomp.com.sg occasionally when I’m angsty and bored and generally have nothing to do, simply to marvel at Singaporeans’ ability to find fault in anything seemingly innocuous.
Ok wait, maggi and smokes time, will kaopeh again later.
