Whatever happened to Miss Singapore?

Rathi Menon was just crowned Miss Singapore Universe 2014 on Friday night.

I know what you're thinking: "There's a new Miss Singapore Universe? Was it announced?"

Well, yah. They had a show hosted by Bobby Tonelli at Shangri-La Hotel and everything.



The problem is none of the papers reported it.

I don't think this has ever happened before. The PR person must be sleeping.

There was some newspaper coverage in the run-up to the event, but the closest thing to mainstream media that actually reported the winner is the xinmsn website, which is partly under MediaCorp.

Yahoo doesn't count, despite it being asked to register by MDA.

You can mock mainstream media for being lamestream media all you want, but MSM still has its power because of its mainstreamy-ness.

There was a time when you couldn't not know that a new Miss Singapore Universe had been crowned.

The hype peaked in 1987 when the Miss Universe pageant was held in Singapore. I shall forever remember the show as the one where they opened with Wang Chung's Let's Go, baby, let's go, baby, come on!



In more recent years, the best known Miss Singapore Universe is former NMP Eunice Olsen who won in 2000. Then there's Jaime Teo (2001), who married DJ-turned-cupcake magnate Daniel Ong, and Bernice Wong (2003), who married public transport non-fan Anton Casey.

(And let's not forget last year's finalist Jesslyn Tan, who was widely and unfairly attacked for her "Holey Moley" Facebook comment.)



But interest faded to the point where in 2008, Channel 5 stopped showing the finals on TV.

Then came Ris Low.



Because of the controversies surrounding her diction and credit card fraud conviction, the fascination with local beauty pageants went boomz in 2009, although she was not a Miss Singapore Universe, but a Miss Singapore World, which has never been televised.

In the short term, Low might have raised the profile of such pageants, but I suspect she might have diminished their reputation in the long run.

There is such thing as bad publicity. Big sponsors are scared away. Fewer big sponsors mean less money.

Which brings us to this year's Miss Singapore Universe.

I tried going to the website to find out who the sponsors are but got a "Bandwidth Limit Exceeded" message. I went to the website of the organiser Derrol Stepenny and it looks like it hasn't been updated since 2011.

At least you can find this year's videos on the Miss Singapore Universe YouTube channel.



But the best place to get the latest is the Facebook page, where I got these photos.






I guess Harley-Davidson and Aldo are two of the sponsors.

Apparently, the event was shown on something called Fashion TV. I have never seen Fashion TV and I don't intend to.

Unless they play some Wang Chung.



PS: There may be some confusion over whether it should be called Miss Singapore Universe or Miss Universe Singapore.

It used to be Miss Singapore Universe until it was switched around in 2012. I'm old school.

UPDATE: Mainstream media outlet Channel NewsAsia finally reported the winner four days after the fact.



But the organiser seemed more concerned you get the name of the pageant right.

Note the same correction in this post and link to the belated New Paper report the next day.



Is changing the name really that important even though it creates so much confusion?

2015 UPDATE: No pageant, but still a winner

2016 UPDATE: Miss Universe Singapore back to take the limelight

So how unlucky was 2013 for you?

It's called “triskaidekaphobia”.

That’s the fear of the number 13.

For those of you who suffer from this condition, it must a relief that in three days, 2013 will finally be over. It's basically 365 days where every day is Friday the 13th.

I’ve read that in some high-rise buildings, there is no 13th storey. They either call it Floor 12A or just skip to 14.

Sometimes I wish there is no year 2013. We either call it 2012A or just skip to 2014.

But it’s a little too late for that now.

The year started unluckily for me when I struggled to produce a stool sample for my medical check-up in January. Coincidentally, that was the same month as the Punggol East by-election where the People’s Action Party candidate was a colorectal surgeon. Somehow, I believe those two things are related.



Since the colorectal surgeon lost the by-election, I guess 2013 started unluckily for him too.

The year also seemed unlucky at first for MediaCorp actress Joanne Peh when her break-up with long-time boyfriend Bobby Tonelli was reported in 8 Days magazine in March.

Then in April, the publication reported that MediaCorp actor Qi Yuwu was dating Peh, much to everyone’s incredulity, including mine. But now, eight months later, they’re apparently still together just to spite me.



I once tried to broach the subject with their artiste manager, but unluckily for me, the artiste manager headed me off at the pass: “Don’t ask me if it’s a publicity stunt hor.”

I mentioned how my column on Peh’s surprise split with Tonelli seemed to be popular since the article was reproduced on three AsiaOne-related sites, which was a record for me.

The artiste manager replied: “So she helped not only 8 Days’ sales.”

But despite my hard-hitting analysis of the Peh-Tonelli break-up, my greatest journalistic achievement of 2013 is that I’m the first person to use the word “selfie” in a Singapore Press Holdings newspaper article.

I looked it up.

Before I used the word in my Mother’s Day column on May 12 for a “Yo mama” joke (“Yo mama so ugly, she took a selfie with Instagram and broke the Internet”), the only previous appearance of the word in an SPH paper was eight days earlier in a caption for a newswire photo in The Straits Times.



The caption was: “A Javanese dancer in traditional costume taking a ‘selfie’ – a type of self-portrait – on Monday.”

The word was so unfamiliar at the time that a definition had to be provided. Now, mere seven months later, even I’m sick of the word.

Before May, the word never appeared in The Straits Times, The New Paper, The Business Times or MyPaper.

In May, “selfie” was used twice – in the caption and my column. In June and July, four and three times respectively.

Then the numbers surged to double digits in the following months, partly thanks to the emergence of Singapore’s sultan of selfies, Mr Baey Yam Keng, otherwise known as the Member of Parliament for Tampines GRC.

So far in December alone, the word has appeared in SPH papers more than 40 times (not counting this column you're reading), the most yet.

Is it any wonder “selfie” is the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year?

Unluckily for me, I won’t be getting any award for my achievement. But then I’m no Anthony Chen. The Ilo Ilo director has won more fiim awards this year than Mr Baey has taken selfies.

Speaking of films I don’t want to see, whatever happened to the much publicised Ris Low movie, Justice Devil?



The unappealing trailer was released in early September and the movie was supposed to follow two weeks later. Well, it’s now 16 weeks later and still no movie.

Maybe 2013 isn't so unlucky after all.

That’s more than can be said for the new Downtown Line, which broke down on its opening day last Sunday and again two nights ago.

I hope the child who might have caused the most recent breakdown won’t be deported.

But living in Yew Tee, I don’t really care that much about Downtown Line since I'm unlikely to use it.

Closer to home, I'm more concerned that a bag of stool (not the kind you sit on) was left at the back door of the People's Action Party’s Yew Tee branch office two weeks ago.

I could’ve used a bag of stool in the beginning of 2013.

Some guys have all the luck.

I can’t wait for 2014 to get here.

Hold on... isn’t the number 14 also considered unlucky by the Chinese?

Alamak. Maybe we should just skip to 2015.

- Published in The New Paper, 29 December 2013

McGecko versus Ris Low movie trailer: Discuss disgust

Welcome to the new normal.



Floods. Haze. Ris Low.

Baby lizard in your Sausage McMuffin?

To be fair, the haze has been an on-and-off affair since the 90s. So it’s actually part of the old normal.

And the lizard tail turned out to be a chicken vein, according to McDonald’s



I believe that finding a chicken part resembling a reptile part in a McDonald’s breakfast menu item is a freak event that occurs only once in 50 years.

But then once is probably once too often for some people.

A few years ago, my wife bit into something hard while eating a piece of bread.

She took it out of her mouth and saw it was a dead beetle (not to be confused with John Lennon or George Harrison, ie a dead Beatle).

At first, I thought it could be a raisin - except my wife wasn’t eating raisin bread. And it was much bigger than a raisin.

I wrote an e-mail to the bread company to complain.

Someone from the company came to our home with a fresh loaf of bread he bought from a nearby convenience store to exchange for my wife’s half-chewed bug-encrusted piece of bread.

It also had some jam on it.

After some time, the company e-mailed back and suggested that the insect could have come from the jam.

I pointed out that the bug was embedded in the bread, so the jam was just an innocent bystander.

Later, we received a letter from the company assuring us of its commitment to quality and invited us to tour its Singapore bakery.

A free tour? I could use the vacation.

I was keen to go, but for some reason, my wife wasn’t interested in seeing how bread was baked. It’s not quite the Eiffel Tower.

It seemed like we weren’t getting any more compensation apart from the one free loaf of bread and the free bakery tour offer. I’m not sure what we were hoping for.

More free bread? But then again, do we really want more bread from the company whose bread we just found a dead insect in?

Cash? The tainted bread cost only two bucks or so.

Compensation for the distress of biting into a dead beetle? Well, at least my wife didn’t swallow it.

If she had, then we might not have even known about it. If a bug in the bread is eaten and no one sees it, does it make a crunchy sound?

I decided to write it off as one of those things that happens only once in 50 years.

We still buy bread from the company and we haven’t found a bug carcass entombed in any of the baked goods since. I figure we’ll die before the 50 years are up.

And despite the alleged McGecko, people were still going to McDonald’s for the Sausage McMuffin.

Perhaps they figured even if it was a lizard, since someone else had already found it, another wallcrawler wouldn’t turn up in their food until 2063.

If the reptile tail-resembling chicken vein wasn’t enough to turn your stomach last week, the trailer for Ris Low’s new movie Justice Devil was also released online.



Yes, she’s back – with a vengeance. And it hasn’t even been close to 50 years.

Judging by the 90-second trailer, the Mandarin movie looks similar to the violent 70s sexpoitation cult classic I Spit On Your Grave, about a woman who gets revenge by tormenting her former tormentors.



Sort of like what Low is doing to us with the trailer.

The former Miss Singapore World even wields an axe. Maybe she’s hunting for leopards. They make nice prints. Unfortunately, she doesn’t wear a “bigini” in the trailer.



I feel like I should get partial credit (or blame) for Low being in the movie, which will be released this month, according to the trailer.

Back in 2009, I wrote in The New Paper: “And somewhere out there, someone must be producing a women’s prison movie with a role for her in it. One can only hope.”

Okay, so Justice Devil is not a women’s prison movie per se, but Justice Devil is in the same exploitation genre as a women’s prison movie. That’s close enough. Boomz for me.

But what I did fail to foresee is that the most horrifying thing about the trailer is that Low appears to have regained the kilos she lost in 2010 when she actually looked kind of hot – to me, at least.

Back then, she told TNP that people calling her fat made her angry.

If her weight in the trailer is the new normal, then I strongly recommend some anger management classes.

She should also watch what she eats – and not just for dead bugs in her bread.



Perhaps she has been swallowing too many Sausage McMuffins?

Hmmm, if only there’s some way McDonald’s can make her lose her appetite...

- Published in The New Paper, 8 September 2013

I’m sorry but I think slimmed-down Ris Low is kind of hot

Did you see the pictures of Ris Low in The New Paper on Wednesday?



Those legs! That hair! The peek-a-boo panties!

If the pictures were Bengs, they would have beaten me up for staring at them for so long and hard.

Having lost some weight, the former Miss Singapore World looks better and sexier than when she won the beauty pageant last year.

Okay, I know what you’re thinking:

“Eeeeeeeeeeee!”

This reaction could be due to a couple of reasons. One is the unfortunate image of a dirty old man like me leering at pictures of a young woman like Low.

The other reason is that saying anything positive about the convicted credit card fraudster is almost like a social taboo tantamount to clipping your toe nails on the MRT train while singing “Love your ride!”

Low has been a target of much mockery since she crashed into our collective consciousness with the infamous “leopard preenz” interview a year ago.



Now I think she’s kind of hot after her weight loss.



And what’s wrong with that? It’s not like I’m complimenting Hitler on his posture. Low didn’t exterminate millions of Jews – she just murdered the English language.

One colleague exclaimed that he wouldn’t sleep with her even if you paid him. I find that somewhat ingenuous, but I can see where he was coming from.

Take US TV reality stars Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian for example. Intellectually, I’m able to understand how they can be considered sexy even though I don’t find them particularly appealing myself – but if you paid me, hey, why not? I’ve done worse things for a buck and half a springroll.

Another colleague said that he was okay with Low as long as she didn’t speak. That’s perfectly understandable.

But that’s also my point. Don’t judge the cover by the book, which may be a slim volume containing made-up words like “boomz” and “shingz”.

Wow, I just managed to associate books with Ris Low. I should get a Cultural Medallion for that feat alone.



You see? I can still make fun of Low even though I think she’s hot. Admitting that she is physically attractive doesn’t mean you’re endorsing anything else about her.

Unless you happen to also own a “Boomz” T-shirt.

Eeeeeeeeeeee!

- Published in The New Paper, 17 October 2010



2013 UPDATE: Not so slim or hot anymore

Why Ris Low is my Singaporean Of The Year

When it was recently reported that CNN had named Ris Low as one of Asia's 25 "most influential" people in 2009, a few Singaporeans I know threatened to renounce their citizenship.

But then when the Government announced on Monday that non-citizens will have to pay higher school fees, those same Singaporeans realised that a 19-year-old dethroned beauty queen is perhaps the least of their problems and kept their pink IC.

I would contend that Ms Low is not only one of the most influential Singaporeans of 2009, but is Singaporean Of The Year

Actually, the CNN report was somewhat inaccurate.

In the first place, it wasn't CNN, but a CNN-affiliated website called CNNGo. You may say it's the same thing, but it's like equating American Idol with the Singapore Idol website. There is a huge difference.

And it wasn't a list of the "most influential", but of "Who Mattered Most" - which only trivialises the list even more.

Regardless, it served to add to Ms Low's notoriety and extend it beyond our coastlines.

On top of that, the ex-Miss Singapore World also made it to Yahoo! Singapore's 2009 top 10 most searched list.

Interestingly, the CNNGo list and the Yahoo! top 10 had one thing in common apart from Ms Low - the Association of Women for Action and Research (Aware).

And the only thing that Ms Low and Aware have in common is that they're female.

One of them has seriously tarnished the image of Singapore women this year while the other ... uh, okay, maybe they have two things in common.

But Ms Low's singular achievement, as correctly identified by CNNGo, is the coinage of the word "boomz" and its proliferation in local popular culture.

Even the catchphrase king himself, Phua Chu Kang - who popularised "Don't play play" and "Use your brain, use your brain" - got into the Ris Low act.







The sitcom character, played by Gurmit Singh, spoofed Ms Low's now iconic "leopard preenz" RazorTV interview in a series of MediaCorp-produced videos that also went viral, but on a smaller scale.



Remember "Shut up and sit down"? It was the most memorable quote that came out of the Aware saga.



"Shut up and sit down" T-shirts were printed, but unlike the "Boomz" T-shirts, they weren't sold at New Urban Male and the would-be catchphrase never really caught on.



Hoping that lightning would strike twice, Ms Low herself tried to introduce another buzzword with "shingz", but failed because it was too self-conscious and calculated.

The "boomz" boom was a happy accident. (Okay, maybe more of an annoying accident for some.) No one planned it, least of all Ms Low herself.

Of all her mistakes, from linguistic to the credit card fraud, I thought the dumbest was her not getting a cut of the New Urban Male T-shirt sales.

One of the year's greatest ironies is that it all started because of protests that the "bipolar" teen was unfit to represent our country in the Miss World pageant, which eventually led to her representing Singapore on CNNGo's "Who Matter Most In Asia 2009" list.

If only those protesters had shut up and sit down, Ms Low would've faded into obscurity just like the woman who eventually took her place in the Miss World pageant did.

Instead, Ris Low is now, by my estimation, 2009's Singaporean Of The Year.

- Published in The New Paper, 26 December 2009

Revenge of a nerd who doesn't care about football

For over a week now, there has been a surprising spring in my step and a blissful smile on my face. Why is that?

Is it because of the ongoing one-woman teen soap that is The Ris Low Show? At least it’s easier to follow than the other long-running telenovella earlier this year called The Aware Saga.

In that one, there were too many characters to keep track of and let’s just say they weren’t exactly beauty queens. Plus Ris is funnier. Insert your own “boomz” joke here.



But no, the erstwhile Miss Singapore World 2009 is not the reason for my good cheer.

There’s a word for what I’m feeling – it’s called “schadenfreude”. I can't pronounce it, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word of German of origin means “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others”.

In this case, the “others” are the football fans in Singapore and their “misfortune” is SingTel winning the broadcast rights for the English Premier League.

Oooh, just typing that line sends a tingle of delight all over my body. I’m going to type it one more time just to get that feeling again.

SingTel won the the broadcast rights for the English Premier League.

Oooh, there it goes again! Shiok, man!

As you may have guessed, I’m not a football fan. And to a non-football fan, football fans can be a rather overbearing lot. Obnoxious, even.

This obnoxiousness was abundantly demonstrated in the aftermath of the Singtel news. All that whining. All that over-weaned sense of entitlement. Why so drama? Bipolar, is it?

“I already have StarHub set-top box. Now I have to pay for a mio TV box too? Oh, woe is me!”

Cry me a river.

Some fans are even arguing that the Government, in the form of the Media Development Authority, should step in to protect their interests.

Who do they think they are?

We pledge ourselves to build a democratic society, based on justice and equality – not on reasonable subscription rates for the sports packages.

Even without the latest Singapore population census report on hand, I can safely say there are more non-football fans than football fans (though maybe not in The New Paper newsroom).

But given the Sturm und Drang (yes, German again) over the SingTel news, you would be forgiven if you thought the vocal diehards outnumbered the quietly apathetic.

I suggested to a particularly emo Liverpool fan I work with who lives in Bukit Panjang that he could watch the S-League on TV for free .

He yelled at me: “Who cares about local football!”



Oh, that reminds me, please send my best wishes to Dollah Kassim.

He’s a reminder of a bygone era when Singaporeans actually cared about football played by Singaporeans - rather than how much we have to pay to watch it played by wealthy foreigners in a faraway land.

The Singapore football icon is in the hospital after suffering a heart attack – a couple of days after the SingTel announcement.

Coincidence?

- Published in The New Paper, 11 October 2009

UPDATE: Dollah Kassim dies

Tie a Yellow, Silver & Pink Ribbon round Ris Low

If you go to the official Miss World website, you will see no mention of Miss Singapore.

However, on the "Miss World 2009" Wikipedia page, you can find the names of all the 90 delegates from around the world - except, of course, for one.

Instead of a name for Miss Singapore World 2009, there are three letters: TBA. Maybe they stand for "The Boomz Attack".

Oh, Ris Low, what have you wrought?

Many have opined that the convicted credit card fraudster, who has also been accused of murdering the English language, should not be allowed to represent Singapore in December's Miss World pageant because she would "tarnish" our country's reputation.

What reputation? You mean "Disneyland With The Death Penalty" where you can get flogged for spraying graffiti and chewing gum?

Heaven forbid, our nation's integrity be compromised by a 19-year-old diploma student with a declared penchant for animal prints.

Last week, a New Paper reader wrote in to suggest that the dethroned Miss Singapore World could instead be "Miss Yellow Ribbon" and a role model for other young ex-offenders.

It's an incredibly enticing idea, partly because it conjures images of all those vintage low-budget babes-behind-bars B-movies with lots of catfights and shower scenes.

Imagine Ris bitch-slapping another female prisoner and then they rip each other's clothes off and then the prison guards turn the water hoses on them — hot.



Except Ris went on probation, not to jail, so all that slammer stuff doesn't quite work.

Still, there's no denying the unique cachet and trashy mystique of a teen beauty queen with a criminal history. She's beautiful — and baaad.

Instead of trying to cover it up, Ris could've been upfront about her troubled past from the start and used it to her advantage as a platform for her Miss World campaign.

While the other contestants mouth platitudes about world peace, human rights and blah blah blah, our Miss Singapore can go up there and say in her exotic Ah Lian accent: "I'm here to represent those who have made mistakes in their lives and should be given a second chance to succeed — because I'm one of them. And if you don't let me win, I'll boomz you."

Wait, isn't she bipolar as well?

That means she can also represent sufferers of brain disorders. She can be Miss Silver Ribbon.

Yes, there is actually a Silver Ribbon Coalition, whose mission is to promote awareness of the problems faced by the mentally ill.

Hey, why not just give Ris a hat trick by making her Miss Pink Ribbon too? She qualifies because Pink Ribbon promotes breast cancer awareness and she has breasts.

And what perfect timing because this month is Breast Cancer Awareness Month - plus World Mental Health Day is this Sunday.

So who needs Miss World when Ris can be Miss Yellow, Silver and Pink Ribbon all rolled into one?

And somewhere out there, someone must be producing a women's prison movie with a role for her in it. One can only hope.



- Published in The New Paper, 5 October 2005

hello mister I just want to say that what you wrote about that Ris person on the new paper today was hella funny! But to be honest, i think that anything criticizing Ris is hilarious. xD so to sum it up, YOUR COLUMN VERY BOOMZ .

TinkerHell raddxcore

Interest in Miss Singapore World, not Universe, hits new high, thanks to Low

Since Mas Selamat was captured, Singapore has been in need of a new villain.

Hello, Ris Low!



Thanks to her highly quotable misspoken English to her recently revealed rap sheet, she couldn't be any more infamous now if wanted posters of her adorned every bus stop, MRT station and bikini (or "bigini") shop on the island.

But to her credit, Miss Low has accomplished something no other Miss Singapore World has managed to do - actually make us care who Miss Singapore World is.

For far too long, it has been the other Miss Singapore pageant - Miss Singapore Universe - that has been hogging the spotlight.

Like when we bitched about how the national costume sucked, that was for Miss Singapore Universe, not World.

And it's not because "universe" is bigger than "world" since I don't recall ever seeing a Miss Mars or Miss Alpha Centauri in the Miss Universe swimsuit competition and that is not something I'm likely to forget.

It's because the one that was shown on TV annually until last year was Miss Singapore Universe, not World.

It's because former nominated Member of Parliament Eunice Olsen was Miss Singapore Universe, not World, in 2000.

And oh, Donald Trump owns Miss Universe, not World.

And even when I produced an episode of Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd a couple of years ago where PCK's nemesis Frankie Foo married an ex-beauty queen, the character was a former Miss Singapore Universe, not World.

On top of that, she was played by a real-life former Miss Singapore Universe, not World, Cheryl Tay, who won the crown in 2005.



Unlike Miss Low, Cheryl was a veterinarian who was more likely to save a leopard than wear its prints. But that was not what impressed me most about Cheryl.

There was a scene in the episode where I wanted Frankie, played by Lim Kay Siu, to hug Cheryl and grab her buttocks. It wasn't in the script. I just wanted to see it.

But I had a problem: How do I ask a former Miss Singapore Universe, not World, to let her buttocks be grabbed on national TV?

Cheryl wasn't an actor by profession, unlike Kay Siu, a dedicated professional actor whom I'm sure was happy to grab anyone's buttocks - or let his buttocks be grabbed - as long as it was "artistic".

In my infinite wisdom, I decided to ask an assistant director to ask Cheryl. To everyone's surprise and delight, she agreed to do it.

Unfortunately, even though we shot it, the MediaCorp censor ordered the derrière-fondling edited out because Frankie looked like he was enjoying it way too much by prime-time TV standards.



If I was producing that episode today, Miss Low would be my first choice for Cheryl's role. The ratings would be huge! Bigger than Singapore Idol's, although that's not saying much nowadays.

I would change the character to a former Miss Singapore World, not Universe. I would even throw in a "boomz" or two in the dialogue.

But would Miss Low let Frankie Foo grab her buttocks? Sadly, we may never know.

Hmmm, I wonder if Mas Selamat would like to guest star. Would he let Frankie Foo, uh ...

- Published in The New Paper, 27 September 2009