Month: April 2008

Categories
photography ranting

So long Mosque Street

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So long Mosque Street. I will miss the beauty of this apartment. The wonderful shophouse windows and the high ceilings with the beams exposed. I will miss the muted sounds of the call to prayer from the mosque down the street. And I will miss being in the middle of it all… the Chinese New Year celebrations, the Indian festivals, the endless tourist hordes and the many places to just be.

I will not miss the noise; the trash truck that comes every night sometime between 11PM and 2AM and wakes everyone up for 10 minutes. The old Chinese guy who can’t pick his flip-flops off the ground as he walk… slowly… down the middle of the street. At 3AM. Every night! I won’t miss him waking me up every night.

We’ve been in the new place now for just over a week. It’s nice. Far from the crowded streets of the downtown area and surrounded by green. Much cooler (relatively; it’s still Singapore, one degree from the equator—at sea level—it’s just hot, nothing to do about it, c’est la vie.) Still a lot of boxes and a few minor things left to finish. I really miss the windows from Mosque Street they added a level of character to the place that can’t be duplicated. (They were replicas of the original window shutters that were on the building when it was built as the first public housing in Singapore in the 1920’s!)

It’s nice to have a place that is really ours. Nice to know that when we bring our firstborn home from the hospital for the first time it will be to our house, not to a rented house but to our house.

Now if only I could get the boxes to empty themselves.

Categories
photography

Beach Booty

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Categories
quotes ranting

Learning to Swim

“At a public swimming pool we have gates, put up signs, have lifeguards and shallow ends, but we also teach children how to swim.”

From the Executive Summary of Safer Children in a Digital World; The Report of the Byron Review [iwf.org.uk] via Slashdot [slashdot.org]

2021.08.01: Broken link to the report updated

That sounds like common sense. I think more parents need to read and understand that. It is not societies responsibility to teach your children it’s your responsibility as a parent. There will always be things beyond a parents control and society should take steps to minimize the risks to people—children and adults—but in the end it is down to individuals to be responsible. In the case of children it is the responsibility of the parents to teach and to shelter them, for the rest of the world is is down to personal responsibility. Most people seem to have forgotten this. Too many people in the first world expect that someone will take care of them; that they have a right to be an idiot, which they do, and that society has a duty to come along behind them and clean up their mess, which it does not. We seem to have forgotten that part of growing up is leaving the nursery and the nanny behind. Rather than focus on protecting children from the evils of the world we should help parents teach their children how to protect themselves. Every child should learn to swim just in case they fall in the deep end.