i read with amusement toh han li's article in today's straits times. the article imputes the plain english movement - a movement which has attempted to make the courts more accessible to the layman by simplifying the language used by the courts - to one cj chan.

cj chan, apparently, is a firm believer that we should all aspire to use plain and simple english. he fervently advocates this ideology with concise tidbits like "... laws drafted in archaic tautologous and convoluted language... are a legacy of the past."

i've been attending a course this past week, organised for prosecutors - both proper ones, and also those who nominally fall into the category but know absolutely nothing about the job requirements. like myself. - by the agc (attorney general's chambers, for the uninformed). this course has been decently informative. i have learnt many things, including the following two facts :

1. the number of magistrate's appeals has gone up by 300% since april. coincidentally, this rise in the number of appeals filed closely mirrors the departure date of a certain individual.

2. apparently, our nation is facing a crisis of dire proportions. offenders in singapore who have the privilege of being sentenced to caning are a pampered lot. the rod used to tickle their behinds is subject to the most stringent of quality controls. specifications for the cane to be used are laid out statutorily, so i have learnt, in the cpc. this details that the cane be made of organic wood, of a certain length, diameter, weight, etc.

our canes are imported from indonesia. recently, though, this indonesian supplier has notified us that all the cane forests have been chopped down. the cane trees remaining are too small to make legally-coherent canes. in short, our supply of canes has run out.

one can conclude that apart from setting forests on fire and sending prodigous quantities of airborne pollutants our way, the indonesians fail also to practice sustainable farming practices on the land they have razed.

it would be amusing if we had to amend the law to allow for the use of canes constructed out of genetically-modified cane. or perhaps we could send offenders to indonesia and not allow them to come back till they've found a suitably mature cane tree. a find-your-own-cane scheme - something along the lines of how my dad used to make me go and get the cane from his room so he could whack me for not practising the piano. i still hate the piano. we could even let them keep a bark rubbing from the tree as a souvenir.

have a good week.

i made numerous brilliant (at least to myself, at that time) observations about china during my one week sojourn. unfortunately, i've forgotten most of them.

there were several blog-worthy incidents. unfortunately, i've forgotten most of them, too.

there is one strange sight i do remember. unfortunately, i am unable to bring you pictures of this. this last letdown i can blame on someone else - my sister brought her camera along with us to china. in her infinite wisdom, however, she declined to bring it out of the hotel room, citing its weight as the limiting factor. the fact that she possess one of those pocket-sized jobs that probably weighs less than a miniscule slice of green apple typically contained in a $1 bag of mixed fruit slices that the fruit seller in the basement of the adelphi sells aside, what it means is that i am unable to produce photographic evidence of this revealing insight into chinese culture.

but anyhow - along a long, dusty road in the middle of nowhere in shanghai, was a long, dusty wall. made of grey bricks, irregularly stacked on top of each other, i would hazard that the wall is no less than a century old. now this ancient wall opened at one point into an equally superannuated florist shop. next to this florist shop, mounted onto this fossil of a wall, was a technological marvel of the 21st century - a vending machine.

now, perhaps a vending machine mounted on a wall is not a particularly startling sight in most places. but in this area, where the next most modern affair within a dozen square miles was a traffic light straight out of the 18th century, it was rather out of place. somewhat akin to seeing a coin-operated sewing machine in the middle of the aleutians. or a computer that takes less than 10 minutes to boot up in my workplace. you get the idea. an anachronism if you ever saw one.

but all was explained when i took a closer look at the machine, and realised that it sold condoms. a bouquet of flowers gets you a long way in shanghai, apparently.

more on china, as and when i recall interesting facts.

in the meantime, i'm off to placate my wife, who is annoyed at me again.

about five minutes ago, there came a call of distress from our bedroom. naturally, i ignored the first cry, and the second, and the third. then i figured that the yells would come in unceasing succession, and increasing percussion. so i wised up and went over to find her clutching her forehead in distress. she had hit her head on a shelf.

"is it bleeding?"

of course, there wasn't the suggestion of a mark.

"oh no, there's a gaping hole."

i replied, which, while pleasing her no end by justifying her yelps, also alarmed her slightly.

"is it bad?"

she enquired, with a worried look, pain forgotten.

"yes, you better not move your head, the brains might fall out."

i replied. which has sparked off her latest huff. the things i put up with.

off to shanghai and beijing for a week. one, glorious, week of not having to go to work. life is good. will blog when i get back. in chinese, perhaps.

i am conflicted.

it doesn't feel very good to laugh at people when infelicitatious events befall them. while that may not stop one from laughing at them anyway, the tendency is that one's laughter doesn't carry with it the same timbre of uninhibited hilarity as, say, laughter directed at someone who is being an idiot. which is the converse point to be made - it does feel very good to laugh at someone who's being an idiot.

should one then blog about an unfortunate event, but one which stems from someone's idiocy? a weighty question, and one worth thinking about. while you're thinking about the answer, you can entertain yourself with the following in the meantime. again, from the archives of that fount of all things wise and... well, not so wise, the bbc.

so, there's this country. cambodia it's called. located - well, never mind that. so there's this country, cambodia, which happens to be partially inhabited, as countries are wont to be, by midgets. some of these midgets, as midgets are wont to do, like to fight. these fighting midgets, as fighting midgets are wont to do, set up a league through which they could organise - you guessed it - fights. with each other. and this league, in a staggering display of cambodian-midget-inventiveness, is named the cambodian midget fighting league ('cmfl'). or, perhaps, it was named the cambodian midget fighting league. but we'll get to that eventually.

this forementioned cmfl had a president, one yang sihamoni. mr. sihamoni had, in his stable, 42 midget fighters. mr. sihamoni was inordinately proud of his league of extraordinary midgets. so much so that he created an advertising campaign, wherein the tagline was that his midgets would "...take on anything; man, beast, or machine."

this lofty claim aroused the ire of a disgruntled fan, who in turn vociferously offered the view that the cmfl was engaged in false advertising, and that a single lion would defeat the combined forces of the league.



this fired up mr. sihamoni, whom we can observe to be a midget in intellectual, if not physical, stature. never one to back down from a challenge, he decided to call the bluff of this dastardly fan, and set out to turn the fight into a reality. he arranged for a male african lion to be shipped to the city of kâmpóng chhnãng, which, appropriately enough, contained a coliseum. even more bizarrely, this lion was named panthera leo.

the cambodian government, in a rare display of sensibility, voiced concerns about the upcoming fight. equally sensibly, they promptly agreed to let the fight go ahead on the conditions that they were to get a 50% commission on each ticket sold, and that no cameras were allowed in the coliseum (presumably, so as not to startle panthera with flash photography. wouldn't do to get the beast angry, after all. might be - what's that word i'm looking for - dangerous.)

so, in front of a sell-out crowd, cmfl took on panthera, in what promised to be a titanic struggle of 42 little midgets against one camera-shy lion. mr. sihamoni was in a ebullient mood before the fight, bullishly predicting that his fighters "... could out-wit and out-muscle [panthera]." 12 minutes later, the fight was called, with 28 midgets dead and the other 14 unable to continue, as a result of injuries sustained during the fight. such as broken bones and missing limbs, which, the bbc opined very helpfully, "rendered them unable to fight back."

42-0 to the cat family. full article in comments, per normal.