Broken Dreams and Darkness at Pungol Beach

Outside the School of the Arts there is a broken dream: Do not sit. (I'm pretty sure it's accidental irony.)

Speaking of broken, this is what the inside of a palm tree trunk looks like. I was surprised!

And here is what the palm trees look like a Pungol beach.

Pungol isn't so much a palm tree beach as it is a forest beach, with pine trees!

It has its beauty, but it's more of a creepy beach, especially in the rain (we love Singapore rain walks).

I found beauty in this heavily creepy boat rope. Tiny Barry shown for perspective.

Pungol Point, below, was one site of Sook Ching, the biggest massacre in Singapore in WW2, where thousands of (mainly Chinese male) Singaporeans will killed by the occupying Japanese. Given how excellent the other war memorials and sites are here, I was surprised to see this was only a plaque.

Regardless, it's a good spot for reflection.

There were pretty Barringtonia racemosa powderpuff tree flowers nearby. (Lazy survival tip: Use the fruit from these fish poison trees to catch your meal as they contain fish-toxic saponins!)

As usual, we were looking for animals. We just missed them: you can see the wild boar prints under these sad yellow hibiscus buds (botanical identification inconclusive; I didn't look inside their flowery bits).

The hints of wildlife that we did see were also creepy. We assume this is a boar skull.

Horseshoe crab, missing the crab part.

And barnacles.

A friend, let's call him Nacky, recently taught me about Trypophobia, which is an aversion to patterns of small holes or bumps, so this would freak him out. Sorry Nacky. In enlarging this, I just realized that barnacles are not round!

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Pigsy, Lust, and Knucklefarkers: Lessons from Haw Par Villa #1

Here in Singapore, we are filled with an unsual, righteous rage! It is due to Pigsy, shown below, and to those who didn't learn his lesson.Pigsy comes from Haw Par Villa, the best tourist attraction in Singapore, which has just reopened after a year. In this time, we've been lost without it's proverbial and Confucian moralistic teachings!The Magic Cypress Grove story teaches us the trouble lust can bring. In other words, poor decisions were made in the company of hired women.As you can see, honey traps don't encourage social distancing.

Hopefully, in addition to lessons about keeping your piggywilly put away, the tale teaches social distancing, gender equality, liberation, and consent, but I digress.

As the story goes, since Pigsy was a knucklefarker, he got encapsulated into a tree. And, trees can engulf entire houses here. In Haw Par Villa, this is happening with the actual tree, making it a stronger message!

Today, the story of Pigsy the Knucklefarker has become our reality (above is Pigsy's actual modern home). Speaking of reality, here are Singapore's recent Covid numbers. Regardless of your views on the pandemic being over and it being time to lick the neighbours, we are a country of 5.7M, with a total of under 40 Covid deaths so far. But the countries around us house 600M people with single digit vaccination rates, meaning our borders remain quite tight.

So when we see this, we demand to know why. Also, Singapore does extensive contact tracing and testing so we ask why, and we get answers.

The answer is this. Despite (or perhaps before) the short-term 2-person/table restaurant limit, our KTV, or private-room Karaoke bars, decided to do their own thing, inviting in "hostesses" to service groups of patrons in private rooms. Perhaps you're not a mathematologist, but if you add jugs of whisky and brandy, underemployed young women, and the aforementioned knucklefarking, then you get the biggest, and most annoying COVID cluster Singapore has had in a year.

Don't be confused, avid reader(s), for Laura and Barry have decided to do some investigative journalism to get you some more facts! Let's start looking!

We circumnavigated hazards. However, we were also confused by this sign telling us that the mall housing one of the cluster establishments, was private property that couldn't be photographed. On the other side of this door was an open grocery store.But we know how to find our way around.

Also, this is the point at which Barry lost all enthusiasm for my detectiving and got hangry because the neighbourhood has many delicious foods. We didn't actually go INSIDE anything anyway.

Let us investigate the KTV. KTV stands for Karaoke Television, or, as I prefer, Knuckfarkers Taunting Variants.

You rent a room by the hour, get drinks, and with this, you rent a hostess or hostesses of your choosing. It appears that singing and drinking just aren't enough. There are additional services, and these are extra.

During the pandemic, once restaurants were allowed to open, KTV bars later got permission to open as restaurants, subject to the same rules. As you can see, they look like lovely places to dine.

We suspected this one was open.

Our investigative journalism also revealed that most of the bars we viewed at random had new opening hours and our strict entry scanning system, meaning they were open now. Looks like a great place for sushi, or some pasta?

One even had a hygiene certificate from March 2020!

Other nearby businesses haven't been as lucky.

Anyway, we were pretty happy with the way the cases and the vaccines were going here. While we got down to zero daily cases last week, and are now up to 88 new cases today

Now, Singapore is filled with rage. Here is some in Singlish, learn some lingo! Breaking the banana is the way to show rage.

Singapore noted that of the first 88 Knucklefarker cases, only 6 were vaccinated. That's interesting, since 80% of the population is in the vaccine process, and everyone over 12 has had the opportunity to have their first shot by now.

In my favourite irony of the week, this actual cluster location below sells branded masks and hand socks. That is, a sock you wear to protect your arm from the vicious tanning of the sun. It's as useful as wearing a condom on your foot.

So, what would Pigsy advise?

Pigsy, I think, would recommend better hobbies like bubble tea popsicles, or perhaps hanging out a bit more with the Buddha, who advises us to cultivate compassion, if not healthy eating.

Or mushroom identification. This one, behind Golden Mile Complex, again unknown to science, shall be called the knucklefarcarus regretfungus.

And in case you were wondering how common KTV is here, all of these pictures were just samples taken at walking distance from our house.

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Singapore's Newest Frontier

This is lampost number one. Like a greying rockstar with a drug problem, it knows its days are numbered. Today cyclists, Barry included, put stickers there to commemorate their arrival at the western tip of Singapore. (I only have my "I'm fully vaccinated" sticker, which I'm not willing to give up.)

But it's all now a fallacy, because behold, the upcoming Tuas Megaport. Not just one , but Tuas, emerging from the sea! (Singapore is moving the port from prime central real estate to the edges, and making it more mega).

You can see it on Maritime Singapore Connect, but in real life it looks more like this.

Barry tells me that these crane lifterators are extra big and lotsa cool, but my pictures not so much.

So instead, we looked for suspicious activities! Just recently, vagabond fugitives swam onshore!

This second sign also gave us helpful guidance. This is not a popular locale.

Suspicious bamboo hidey-hole or boobie trap? We didn't test it.

I always find these twisterator vines a bit suspicious.

Boat treasure? Illicit sculpture?

There were also deterrents for would-be fugitives. The local jungle has dangers.

Fungus? Biological agent? You be the judge.

Since again I seem to have found species new to science, I shall call the above the skidoofungi, with appropriate latin name to be appended.

This one, which grows both one and inside the log shall be named chesterfield.

Then, minding our own frontierial business, we found a very suspicious gate!

Holy smokes, it's a tunnel to another country**! **Fake news, this is an old WW2 tunnel from a different location! Just aiming at entertainment, chesterfield reader(s).

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