Last Monday, The New Paper reported that a naked man was spotted loitering at a Sengkang HDB lift lobby at night.Last week also saw a flurry of responses to the latest bunch of WikiLeaks cables related to Singapore.
How are these two things related, you ask.
Well, I remember WikiLeaks causing a similar flap here in December last year.
I also remember in December last year, there was a flurry of reports of naked people spotted around the island.
A woman took off all her clothes and boarded a bus in Bedok. A man was arrested in Ang Mo Kio after he sat down naked on the street for a few hours.
Another man went to a 24-hour McDonald’s early in the morning to buy coffee in the nude.
According to the McDonald’s website, over 110 McDonald's restaurants across Singapore serve 1.2 million customers every week.
But on 12 Dec 2010 at around 4am, the staff of the Ridout Tea Garden McDonald’s in Queenstown refused to serve that naked man.
I don’t think the naked man was “lovin’ it”. Or perhaps we should all be grateful he wasn’t “lovin’ it”. I doubt the McDonald’s staff were “lovin’ it”.
I have several theories why McDonald’s refused to serve that naked man coffee.
1. No clothes meant no pants meant no wallet meant no money.
2. McDonald’s coffee is infamously hot. So it was a safety issue. Nudity with hot McDonald’s coffee would just be an accident waiting to happen.
3. Coffee is a stimulant. I imagine the last thing the McDonald’s staff wanted was a stimulated naked man.
On the same day McDonald’s was fending off that naked man, the Government was fending off allegations in cables leaked by WikiLeaks that Singapore diplomatic officials undiplomatically called Japan a ”big fat loser” and India ”stupid”.
In light of this irrefutable empirical evidence, I’ve come to this inescapable conclusion:
Whenever WikiLeaks leaks something related to Singapore, there will be people exposing themselves in public around Singapore.
How metaphorically apt.
Unconvinced? That one naked man in Sengkang this time round not enough for you?
I have two words for you: Mindee Ong.
No, she wasn't spotted naked anywhere (which is a pity).
In her blog, the local actress recounted an encounter with WikiLeaks of a different kind about a week ago.
Ong owns a home accessories shop called Trolley on Club Street. She was leaving her shop at 12.45am when she noticed two men “sneaking around” her white Nissan SUV.
“I went closer and saw one of them actually peeing at the rear wheel of my car,” she wrote.
She also saw the other man urinating into her neighbor’s planter. Maybe they had too much McDonald’s coffee.
Ong yelled at the man taking a WikiLeak on her vehicle: “Hey! Zip up your pants and get off my car.”
He ignored her and so she yelled again: “You are peeing at my car. Stop it!”
According to star of the movie 881, the man then “turned towards me, continued to pee, dangled and flashed his dick at me”.
He said to her, “Look at my penis peeing.”
Ong blogged that she didn’t care that “he was so urgent to release, but at least have the decency to keep his private part to himself”.
Even though she was shocked, Ong still had the presence of mind to snap iPhone pictures of the man flashing at her, which she posted on her blog, albeit with his “dick” pixellated,Maybe one day WikiLeaks will leak the unpixellated pictures.
Ong called the police, but the two men left in a taxi before the police arrived.
And there you have it. Be prepared for more indecent exposure the next time WikiLeaks releases more cables.
Get your iPhone camera ready and hang around McDonald’s.
Or Sengkang. Or Bedok. Or Ang Mo Kio. Or Mindee Ong...
Aiyah, just have a camera ready wherever you are in Singapore.
And e-mail your photos to smong@rocketmail.com.
Don’t pixellate them. Thank you.
- Published in The New Paper, 11 September 2011
