how do they know?

The question of the day is this: how do the MRT people know how many people are in the trains? Did they employ a person just to look at cctv footage and count the number of people who enters and exits each train?

If they claimed to know how many Singaporean are in the MRT system at any one time, that I can believe. But to claim they know how many people there are in a train at one time? Is that even possible?

What is the crush-load anyway? The kind people at MRT might want to clarify.

a nation of screamers...

I have a neighbour that screams at her child. It's not a one off event. It's quite regular. But while I cannot make out everything that she says. At least you can make out it's directed at her child.

But that's not the point. Instead, I want to talk about what happens when parents constantly scream at their children. Firstly, I want to say that screaming is not effective, unless you claim that it's good exercise. Anyway, what's the point of screaming? Do you need to tell your neighbours that you are discipling your child as the model parent should? Or is your child hard of hearing, therefore the need to raise your voice? Perhaps your child is hard of hearing because of all the screaming in the first place.

The worst effect of screaming at the child would be that the child would grow up thinking that screaming is the only way to deal with people when they are upset. So you get teenagers screaming at each other thinking it's normal. You'll get more and more parents screaming at their children, not knowing how else to deal with ill discipline.

I think the only setback of living in Singapore is that none of the neighbours are doing anything about it. (Including myself) Indifference. That's what a nation of screamers will be built upon.

national education...

It's not a good sign when you see more and more pastors making the papers for all the wrong reasons. Today, another pastor made the headlines for making insensitive remarks towards another religion. And Christians wonder why they are always being misunderstood by the rest of the community.

Sermons can get pretty dry. However, if pastors need to resort to to making fun of other religions to maintain the attention of the congregation, that's a sad sad state to be in. Attend a speech and drama class, learn the proper way to engage your audience. Oscar Wilde said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit. And everyday we fight a war to prevent teenagers from making fun of their peers. With role models like these, no wonder we are on the losing end.

So this is a national educational message: Don't make fun of others. There are other things out there that are actually funny. If you can only find laughter when you put someone else down, you've got to reevaluate your sense of humor, there might be something connected wrongly somewhere.