Our neighbors: Very Large Snails

To see the scale of this bad boy, I took a picture of him next to my shoe.  My toes are about 4 inches across. Anybody for escargot?

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: Tree of Education

This is a 1992 work entitled “Tree of Education,” located oddly enough at the National Institue of Education, NIE: No, that’s not your imagination: the Tree of Education really does have a crown that can fit into a box, like a refrigerator.  Truncated and controlled, not to say stifled and inadequate.  Actually, this does seem […]

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.

Kingfisher Morning

This lovely fellow posed for me in a few spots this morning.  The first picture is blurred, but you can see his brilliant blue back and red/yellow beak: Then he flew into a tree and posed for me there; for a change my camera focused right on him rather than on a spot to the […]

Sculpture at NTU: marble bird-frog?

OK, you guess what this thing is: I climbed the hill and tried to read the little sign at its base, but it was a very weathered, chipped slab of marble, illegible except for a few initials in the upper left corner that read ….TU.  It’s in a prominent spot where all the buses and […]

Sculpture at NTU: The Flame of Knowledge? Or Oil Refining?

This thing benefited from a new coat of paint last month.  Although no longer rusty, it’s still not very pleasing: It’s a dead failure as a torch of knowledge – the relation of flame to support is wholly out of whack. On the other hand, as a representation of the  flames of the nearby Jurong […]

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 […]

Shopping sculpture

This one is also at ION shopping center, around the corner from the Giant Nutmeg: The people on the left are happily having their pictures taken in front of it.  Why?