And it's from the same place that gave us Ikea and Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again. The word is a mash-up of “plocka upp” (Swedish for “pick up”) and jogging.
Washington Post called plogging “Sweden's latest fitness craze” and it has spread to other parts of Europe as well as the US.
It has reached Singapore too.
Yesterday’s plogging event was the first organised by the Superhero Runners.
Some armed with tongs and others with re-used plastic bags, the ploggers started at 8.15am from a clearing near the Hillview MRT station at Upper Bukit Timah Road and made their way to a bus stop opposite Beauty World Centre.
Superhero Runners co-founder Neyton Tan, 32, made it a point not to buy large black trash bags for the occasion. “We’re trying not to generate more waste”, said the training specialist at a pharmaceutical company.
After 45 minutes, they collected more than eight bags of rubbish, which were deposited in a large bin at the bus stop.
Miss Christina Leo, 30, an accountant, said: “I wasn’t surprised by the amount of trash but by the type of trash I collected.”
Apart from the usual plastic water bottles, beer cans and cigarette boxes, the haul also included an umbrella casing, outsoles of shoes and a large glass bottle.
And that was just from 2.5km of the Rail Corridor.
But can plogging go mainstream in Singapore?
Ms Anuja Aggarwal, co-founder of Secondsguru, an information portal on eco-friendly lifestyles, said: “We have seen plogging pick up in Singapore, but pure plogging, that is, jogging and picking litter at the same time can be rather hard.”
But for a Superhero Runner like Miss Leo, it’s not a problem.
She said: “I find that it’s a great way to bond, exercise and at the same time, do good for the environment.”
When I go out, I usually take the stairs instead of the lift in my HDB block as I live on a low floor.
On several occasions, I would see a man talking on the phone and smoking in the stairwell on the second storey.
Not only do I get nary a neighbourly nod or wave, he avoids eye contact with me altogether.
I suspect that this is because he knows that I know that what he is doing – smoking in the stairwell – is prohibited by law.
And to acknowledge my existence is to acknowledge his own guilt.
Even when I don’t see him in the stairwell, I often see cigarette butts on the steps.
I want to tell him to stop.
But even though I am a non-smoker and frown at such law-breaking, I know that confronting him would just make it unpleasant for both of us to continue living in that block.
So I would just walk past him with a resigned smile that he pretends not to see.
In a way, I feel sorry for him. He is probably forced to smoke in the stairwell because his family don’t allow him to smoke in his own home.
Last week, my sympathy became empathy as I was similarly treated like an outcast by my family and co-workers because of something that emits an odour apparently even more objectionable than a burning fag.
Ironically, I don’t even eat durians that often.
Sure, I rushed to McDonald’s to get the D24 Durian McFlurry on the first day it was available, but I’m not one of those hardcore aficionados who can tell the difference between Mao Shan Wang and Chen Show Mao.
It’s just that with durian prices dropping to the point where a couple of sellers were literally giving them away, I didn’t want to miss out.
The problem is that when it comes to buying durians, I’m a virgin. All the durians I’ve ever eaten in my life were bought by someone else.
And being a virgin, I’m afraid to be taken advantage of by unscrupulous durian sellers.
So I did what any 52-year-old man would do – I called my mommy.
Two days later, mommy called back to tell me she had bought 20 mini durians for $1 each (not free but close enough) and I should go to her place to pick some up for myself.
She even packed them in a convenient plastic container for me so I didn’t have to deal with the thorny husks.
I collected the package on the way to work and planned to eat my haul at my desk.
As I was opening the container, I was interrupted by a co-worker who had sniffed something in the air-conditioned air. “Come on lah, you’re going to stink up the whole place,” he said, almost like a threat.
I guess he wasn’t a durian fan. So I sheepishly put the container away without eating anything.
For the rest of my shift, people around me kept asking in disgust: “Why do I smell durian?”
I would admit in shame: “It’s me.”
I had fallen for the myth that if you’re a true Singaporean, you must like durians.
Shockingly, there are actually many true Singaporeans who can’t stand the stuff.
I know my wife hates durians, but I always thought she was an aberration. You know, like Singaporeans who don’t eat spicy food.
As it turns out, the king of fruit is also the forbidden fruit.
When I got home, the reception was even more hostile. My wife wanted to burn my clothes because of the smell, with me in them if possible.
Our two children also loathed the fruit. They were presumably brainwashed by my wife.
She told me if I wanted to eat the durians, I had to do it “like a thief”.
And that was how I ended up in the stairwell with my plastic container of $1 durians from my mother.
It may not be as illegal as smoking there, but if anyone walked by, I would probably avoid eye contact.
So I went to see to the Saturday matinee performance of Press Gang at Lasalle College of the Arts yesterday. Lim Kay Siu (Frankie Foo) was sitting in a row in front of me.
It wasn't cheap — $144.50 to book two tickets for my wife and me from Sistic and that's after a 10 per cent discount with my POSB debit card.
But I wanted to support the playwright, Tan Tarn How, whom I consider a friend, though we haven't seen each other for maybe 20 years. I knew him at Mediacorp in the 90s when he was the head writer of Growing Up and, of course, VR Man.
I had never seen any of his plays before, but I wanted to see the Ivan Heng-directed Press Gang because it's about working in a Singapore newspaper, something I have been doing for the past 10 years.
The play is set mostly in the newsroom of Singapore Times, a sort of fictionalised version of The Straits Times where Tarn How used to work.
At the start of the play, I grinned in recognition when I heard the word "offstone" and the line about subs screwing up headlines and captions, although actor Shane Mardjuki said "offstone" with an odd emphasis like the word was alien to him.
Actually, I found that the whole cast spoke with a mishmash of distracting accents like in a Channel 5 drama. I don't know. Maybe local English plays are supposed to be like this, but the often stilted dialogue didn't help.
I was also distracted by how much actor Benjamin Chow resembled US actor John Cho (Sulu in the new Star Trek movies) without sounding anything like John Cho. But that could just be me.
The thing that really took me out of the play was the central dilemma that drove the plot: Should the paper report the rumour that the prime minister's son slapped the deputy PM?
The problem is, there's no dilemma at all. Newspapers, in Singapore or anywhere else, aren't supposed to report rumours, regardless of who the rumours are about.
And it's not because we're afraid of the big bad Government. It's because we know rumours may not be true. That’s why they’re called rumours.
And despite lapses, journalists generally still care about stuff like that. Don’t wanna be accused of fake news. Or sued for libel.
If the paper wanted to pursue the story, it would just try to get someone to confirm on record that the incident happened and report that. Otherwise, no story.
But is the slapping story even worth pursuing in the first place? This was where the play felt a little outdated despite references to Facebook and Hardware Zone.
We're living in a time where our real-life Prime Minister's sister has outright accused the PM of abuse of power on Facebook for all to see. The play’s slapping rumour seems rather quaint in comparison.
I should explain here that in the alternate universe of the play, even though Facebook and Hardware Zone exist, Lee Hsien Loong doesn't. The PM in Press Gang is an unseen fictional character who may or may not have a resentful fictional sister.
So it's weird that in this alternate universe, there's also mention of an earlier fictional slapping incident similar to the one brought up by real-life then PM Goh Chok Tong in his 2003 National Day Rally speech:
"You may also have heard this old story about Loong. In case you have not, I'll tell you now. Back in 1990, Loong had a quarrel with Richard Hu. S. Dhanabalan sided with Richard. Loong lost his temper. He reached across the table and gave Dhanabalan a tight slap. The whole Cabinet was thrown into commotion. I then forced Loong to apologise. I must be suffering from amnesia. I just cannot remember this incident. Now you know how creative Singaporeans are."
It can get a bit confusing trying to distinguish what in the play is real, based on something real or totally made-up. But that's part of the fun.
For instance, the columnist played by Amanda Tee is obviously based on Sumiko Tan in a surprisingly self-aware portrayal.
My wife believes that the Malay character played by Oniatta Effendi is based on Zuraidah Ibrahim, an ex-Straits Times editor who moved to Hong Kong with her husband, Cherian George, who also got (half) name-checked in the play.
The veteran reporter played by T. Sasitharan, who got the best lines, reminded me of former New Paper (now back at Straits Times) editor Dominic Nathan physically if not character-wise.
I have never worked at The Straits Times, so I can't comment on how accurate the office politics or politics politics depicted in the play are.
From my perspective at The New Paper, which is at best Straits Times-adjacent literally, figuratively and organisationally, parts of Press Gang rang true, but much of it sounded like Tarn How straining too hard to make a point, however valid that point may be.
But the whole "Should we print a rumour?" thing just didn't work for me.
In an early scene, there was mention of the paper previously reporting someone having an affair (safe to say, based on real life).
I might have enjoyed the play more if it were about that instead.
There was even a picture of a man in a hospital bed.
Right away, I suspected this was fake news.
In the first place, if the news were true, I would have seen it all over the place and not just in my WhatsApp group of former secondary school classmates.
In the second place, the Malaysian Airlines flight disappeared more than four years ago, not two years ago. So it wasn’t just fake news — it was two-year-old fake news.
Just by glancing at those headlines, anyone should be able to tell that the website is not exactly the most credible.
But like many people tend to do, my stupid friend couldn’t be bothered to check the news source and impulsively shared the fake news in the WhatsApp group because he felt it was so urgent that his former secondary school classmates know that the MH370 pilot had been found.
I wanted to reply: “You’re an idiot! It’s stupid people like you who are causing the spread of fake news around the world.”
But I didn’t because I value the few friends I have despite this one’s stupidity.
And it was a good thing I didn’t. The next day I learnt that you don’t have to be as stupid as my friend to unintentionally spread fake news.
Remember Dr Thum Ping Tjin? He’s the guy who was questioned by Home Affairs and Law Minister K. Shanmugam for six hours during the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods hearing earlier this year.
Last Monday, he shared on social media a very old editorial cartoon contrasting how the reception to Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s speech to the US Congress in 1985 was reported differently by The Straits Times (“standing ovation”) and International Herald Tribune (“polite applause”).
Dr Thum commented:
Hmmm... now I’m wondering just how much of what Singaporeans believed to be LKY’s vaunted global reputation was actually manufactured by the government-controlled media, in the days when there were no alternative news sources?
Sounds to me like Dr Thum was implying that The Straits Times made up the standing ovation to mislead the sheeple of Singapore about Mr Lee’s “vaunted global reputation”.
Then someone posted a YouTube video of Mr Lee getting a standing O from the US Congress in 1985.
Just as ST reported.
So like Inception but with fake news, Dr Thum was spreading fake news about the spreading of fake news.
He quickly backtracked:
Thank you for the comments, everyone! Lots of misunderstandings here so I'll do my best to explain. This isn't an example of "fake news", it's an illustration of subjectivity. Thanks to two intrepid commenters, we have all the sources at hand and it's clear that both articles were accurate but what the reporters chose to highlight leads readers to different impressions. In my original post, I was not implying that either newspaper was reporting "fake news" but asking a question about how different perspectives (or lack thereof) have affected our understanding of the past. The ST and WaPo reported the event accurately, but the reporters drew very different conclusions, due to subjective experience. The WaPo reporter had likely seen many addresses with far greater attendance and applause, while the ST reporter undoubtedly wished to emphasise LKY's reception and standing, reflecting Singapore's stature in the world. This leads one to wonder, as I stated above, just how much of what Singaporeans believed to be LKY's vaunted global reputation was actually manufactured by the government-controlled media, which is incentivised to report news positively (not inaccurately, but positively) in the days when there were few or no alternative news sources. If we get all our news from only one source, then the inherent subjectivity of that source would inevitably affect our understanding of events. This does not ascribe malicious intent but merely raises the danger of reliance upon a single set of sources that reflects a single set of perspectives. Every event has as many different perspectives as the people who witness it, and the truth is subjective. As I've said before, reasonable people can experience the same event and draw very different (even opposing) conclusions. That's what makes history so much fun!
Cool story, bro.
And this guy is a legit academic. I mean, he has a Dr in front of his name and everything.
So I shouldn’t be too hard on my stupid friend for falling prey to fake news if a PhD holder could also be a victim.
Any of us could be, too.
Anyway, another less stupid friend in the WhatsApp group replied to the post about the MH370 pilot: “Fake news. 2 yrs ago reported already.”
My stupid friend’s response: “Alamak.”
At least he didn’t claim it was an “illustration of subjectivity”.
The last time I ran at MacRitchie was about a year ago, commuting by foot from my Choa Chu Kang home to my workplace in Toa Payoh.
This morning, I was back at the reservoir for the Force of Nature Ultra 12km trail race. (The other categories were 64km and 23km.)
By the way, I gotta say the event T-shirt is rather ugly because of the random yellow streaks and circles.
The start line was at Dairy Farm, exact same place as the On The Hills 10k race a month earlier. But unlike that race, it didn't rain this morning.
First flag-off was at 7am.
I started out surprisingly stronger than at the On The Hills 10k race, but would finish much more poorly.
This was where my shoes got muddy:
Taking the Rifle Range Flyover over the BKE:
Right after the sign that says "Stop feeding the monkeys", there was a guy feeding the runners.
Another guy feeding the monkeys, I mean runners:
Nearby, the first and, as I discovered later, the only water point on the 12km route:
Crossing the brook:
I saw a woman running the wrong way and wanted to go after her to tell her, but I wasn't sure if she was part of the race. She later overtook me, so I guess she was part of the race and must have realised she missed the turn. (And she's faster than me.) There seriously needed to be more course marshals.
Damn the uphill climb:
I used to run at MacRitchie on weekday afternoons when there was hardly people, so I was surprised to see so many trail runners (who weren't part of the race), running groups, hikers and students this morning. It got a little squeezy on the narrower parts of the route.
Out of the woods at last:
It was another long kilomtre to the finish line.
Water, bananas, apples and more at the finish line:
Having used to run this route on my own once a week only a couple of years ago, I hadn't expect it to be so hard for me this time.
