" "It’s true that we guys get whiny thanks to NS,” said Corporal (NSF) Choe Sai Kang, who is also contemplating an A*Star scholarship. “But that’s all you can do when you encounter stupidity and can’t do anything about it because if you do, you’ll kena DB. Anyway, if we’re whining about A*Star scholarship conditions even after doing NS, what does that say about A*Star except that they’re more condemned than the SAF? I guess that’s Singapore for you: they want us not only to face up to stupidity, they want us to like it too.”

Those who can’t bear changing their sex, have opted to change their nationality instead.

“After taking two years of shit for my country, not only is it not appreciated, I’m told they’d rather have foreigners who have never endured a single day for Singapore,” said Mr. Mohd Cabut bin Negara. “I wish I’d known earlier. If so, I’d have emigrated long ago so I can be the kind of person that Mr Yeo wants for Singapore.”

Meanwhile, a spokesman for A*Star has said that the hoopla has only proven Mr. Yeo’s point that Singapore men are whiny, thin-skinned girly men who can’t take unpleasantness.

“Yeah, right,” said Corporal Choe. “I really accept that criticism from someone who threatens to sue obscure bloggers for defamation." " |

Two exquisite translations.

"Ode to the Lemon"

From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.

So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth's breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit,
the minute fire of a planet.

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

Pablo Neruda |

Patti Austin Saturday. She sang Ella's songs in the main, and sometimes she almost hit it. Eerie. Not the scatting, those were just a leetle contrived, but in the bouts of belting, and even more so in the ballads. And when she sang it her own way she was quite marvellous, chocolatey turns of melodic phrasing, like the sly "madam" in "Miss Otis regrets". Just a bit strident in the higher registers, but maybe that was the mike, and her own songs betray their era far more than Ella's. Yet when she hummed, in inaccurate caressings of Hanyu Pinyin, "Bu Liao Qing", there stirred something inchoate in the hushed, dimmed hall, a trace, faint but definite, of Professor Higgins's "something in the air". |