Getting ill and fat from stuffing our eyes with TV

Watching television and shopping are among the things I don’t do much of, so I was rather taken aback when, to fill time, I wandered into Best Denki, an electronics and appliances store. More than half the floor space was devoted to television sets, some of humongous size. It wasn’t so TV-heavy the last time I was here. Wow, TV-watching must be a really big thing in Singapore, I muttered to myself.

Does this explain the rapidly expanding girth of people here?

Hospital bed supply trailing far behind increase in elderly numbers

My father came down with a urinary tract infection last week. At his age, the Emergency Department did not want to risk giving him only outpatient treatment, and decided he should be hospitalised for closer observation. That led to four hours’ waiting for a bed at the National University Hospital.

It so happened that a few days earlier, the Straits Times had a story about the shortage of beds. Again.

The newspaper reported:

Gay equality helps fight HIV, but don’t oversell it

In his one-hour talk on 31 May 2011, Australian Justice Michael Kirby (retired) engaged the audience from the Law Society with three key issues as requested by Society president Michael Hwang: the advantages of a having a permanent Law Reform Commission, when and how to refer to evolving international jurisprudence in deciding domestic cases and the legacy of anti-gay statutes from the days of the British Empire.

Singapore’s HIV policy neither rational nor compassionate

Which of these two options would a rational person choose?

1. Live normally but die an early death, or

2. Live longer, but starting tomorrow, life becomes a living hell for the rest of your (longer) years.

I would be extremely surprised if anyone can claim to be rational and still pick #2. Yet our Health Ministry, by their impenetrable logic, expects people to choose the second.

Horny straight guys’ choices

You’re a heterosexual male, HIV-free, feeling horny tonight and in Singapore. Which partner presents the lowest chance of exposure to the HIV virus?

1. A casual (girl)friend you’ve known for a while

2. Your wife, or fiancée to whom you’re engaged to be married soon

3. Someone you’ve just met at a singles bar

4. A sex worker operating out of a licenced brothel

5. A freelance sex worker you picked up in a bar or on the street outside.

Pope relents (a bit) on condoms, Burmese junta couldn’t care less about HIV

In extremely convoluted comments, Pope Benedict XVI is reported to have said condoms may be permissible in certain situations. This appears to be the first time a head of the Roman Catholic Church has varied the church’s long-standing opposition to condom use.

His comments were made in interviews for a book, excerpts from which were published by a Vatican newspaper over the weekend.

Cowboys in paradises

The four of them looked like they were two married couples. Like me, they had just come out of a screening of Amit Virmani’s documentary Cowboys in Paradise, whose subject matter was the beach boys of Kuta, Bali, and their relationships with female tourists.

“There were no Indian girls there,” remarked one of the two women in her recogniseably Indian accent to the rest of the group. “I guess Indian girls are too smart for all that.”

One of the men following behind — perhaps her husband — replied: “There are no Indian girls because the boys only go after  Westerners.”

Which was not true; the film clearly showed a number of Japanese women involved.

Invisible obesity tax – addendum

This post is just a container to hold some additional information that appeared soon after the earlier post was uploaded, in case this information proves useful in future.

Thanks to commenter Fox pointing to a “temporary” page on the Health Promotion Board’s website, we have unearthed their revised guidelines, intended for public health action (below).

Invisible obesity tax

Rush hour. A huge crowd had built up at the foot of the escalator going up to the metro concourse. Almost all commuters honoured the “stand to your left” rule, allowing those who wished to walk the right-side lane. But in fact, the walkers could not walk anyway, because there was one commuter who was as wide as the escalator, and despite trying her best to keep to the left, she could not free up enough space beside her to allow others to pass.

On the train itself, there was one guy trying to contain himself within one seat, but he overflowed his own space so much that no one else chose to squeeze into what remained of the seat to his left.

Farewell – Dr Balaji Sadasivan

This obituary by CSZhou:

27 Sept 2010: I came back from a meeting to find two messages from a couple of hours  ago this morning. I had just met him a few weeks ago, with his  beautiful wife and went over to shake his hand and wish him well. We  had not chatted in two years.

The gay community sometimes treated him as anti-gay but the little  time I have had with him I learnt that he was a man of much  magnanimity, a doctor to the end.