***
I was in Balestier today and I happened upon the infamous 'Fragrance Hotel'. Near the branch where this picture was taken, there was a sign reading "ROSE" pointing into the hotel.
Meanwhile, the whole area was filled with cheap hotels - there was another branch of Fragrance Hotel down the street, and there was a Hotel 81 on either side of the road.
***
September 2002 archives are restored.
Excerpts:
"We medics are tasked with the horrible area cleaning task of washing the toilets. What makes our unenviable task worse is people's disgusting toilet habits - mainly, not flushing. These people are at least 18, if not 19, 20, 21 or beyond, and in the army to boot, and they still don't know that you should flush a toilet after you use it. Or maybe they just don't like us."
"We had another change of command parade, this time for my brigade. Parade Commanders for Armour Parades travel in style - on Jeeps!"
"I think next week I'll book in on Sunday morning. No one cares, not that anyone is around to anyhow. Anyway the punishment meted out to one person for missing Weekend RT was 1 confinement, so I assume the worst they can do to me is give me 1/2 a confinement!"
"I'm very happy that I have not been forced to glimpse any naked male members in camp so far! Of course, I notice that the number of "sightings" is roughly proportional to the number of Malays in my bunk."
"Probably not by accident, I've been tasked by the Senior Medic to take care of the "Weight Management for Obese Regulars Scheme". Gah."
"Mysteriously, the ET (Entrenching Tool) stick I borrowed from Wen Fa for 4NTM disappeared from my fieldpack, and the groundsheet he lent me became a poncho. Perplexing and disturbing this mystery is, and I'll have to bear the losses and replace his items! :("
"His latest stunt failed miserably when I strode into the MO's room and saw him typing in a SMS to send via the Internet to "90483827" and which started, "Hi, I'm your secret admirer". Unaware of my sudden entrance, he continued typing for a while while those around him started laughing hysterically, and I finally exited the room with sounds of amusement."
***
Under the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, if copyright owners are and have been vigilant, works made in 1923 or after will not be in the public domain till 2019. I'm positive that in 2018 or thereabouts, another Copyright Term Extension Act will be passed in the US Congress. In fact, I recall some site where you could make bets about this sort of thing, but by 2018 I'd have forgotten about the bet, so.
"Honour Intellectual Property Laws' Original Spirit - Be HIPLOS; Insane copyright terms kill creativity"
(This putative advertising campaign seems to have more going for it than my "Honour Artists' Original Intentions - Be HAOI; Censorship kills creativity" proposal)
***
Quotations on criminal justice from the Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe:
"Take away the "immoral" criminal, and we'd be robbed of one of the lies we need in order to live: namely the belief that there is someone who is even more immoral than we are. We all need someone to despise and look down on as not having full value. This is another of our strong points of likeness with that same criminal: in prison there always develops a hierarchical type of society, where the safecracker and the gunman rank highest and the sexual offender lowest.
The prison is a true copy of our own society.
—"Crime as a way of life" (1967)
"A judicial system's first task will always be to secure and protect itself: the judicial system must necessarily regard itself as justice and the rule of law incarnate, and it thus becomes entirely logical that defense of the judicial system must have the very highest priority followed by protection of the state and its officials and civil servants. The inevitable consequence will be that the judicial system and its administration will comprise the very skeleton of society, its innermost, immutable, reactionary mineral core. The circle is complete: the prosecuting authority can only be reported to the prosecuting authority, whereupon the prosecuting authority "rejects" the accusations and declares the prosecuting authority free of any guilt.
It cannot be otherwise.
-"The righteous and the innocent" (1967)