Archive for Uncategorized

Sculpture: City Square Shiny Blobs on a Stick

This is outside the Farrer Road MRT station and new City Square Mall.

Our neighbors: Parcur snails!

I was walking between downpours this morning, and saw a lot of snails climbing the YOG fence. Here are the approaches of 3 of them: Who says you need opposable thumbs to grasp objects?

ASEAN Sculpture Garden: Ship

The ASEAN Sculpture Garden is on the middle level of Fort Canning Hill. Walking there from the National Museum of Singapore, this is the first thing you see: East India Company ship?  A ship bringing laborers from Hong Kong or India?  Appropriate at any rate for a nation whose history and economy are so singularly […]

Sculpture: The Bronzed, Laden Lady of Fort Canning

This statue is next to a set of stairs that climb Fort Canning Hill, where Sir Stamford Raffles started the first botanical garden of Singapore. Front view: Nice elegant long neck, expressive eyebrows, and an armload of what appear to be babies. Let’s see her from the side: Now that’s a set of biceps!

Uniquely Singaporean: promotions

A Singaporean promotion is one in which your job title changes, you have tons of new duties and responsibilities, and no additional pay. How does this happen? Well, take performance appraisals at the university. These are directly tied to performance bonuses, which makes sense. And the number crunchers assume that if you graph people’s performance […]

Textured Tree Bark

Sculpture – Olympic!

This was unveiled by the head of the International Olympic Committee, Jacques Rogge, in time for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. It’s at NIE, the National Institute for Education, and it demarcates the part of the building dedicated to training PE teachers.

Welcoming sculptures at Sixth Avenue

Here are some interesting, if not beautiful, sculptures at the entrance to a gated condo development on Sixth Avenue (across from the ever-to-be-praised bakery, Simply Bread). First, the gatehouse itself, with rusty frogs admiring the palm and gecko-frieze above them. Gate posts to either side as you enter flank you with a gecko-related bas-relief: And […]

YOG: Philistine Fencing Fuglier

They’re adding the barbed wire to the top of the new fence, just as I feared. At least it’s not razor wire. But it adds even more obstruction to the cooling, refreshing jungle view we used to have: To see how this affects your view of interesting plants closer to the sidewalk, behold: But there […]

We’re Back!

Our webhosting service appears to have folded its tents and stolen away quietly into the night; Mei managed to get us a new domain name and move us onto a more stable (and cheaper) platform.  I thought I’d just put the headers from more recent posts into this entry so that people might pick us […]