I'd do anything for free food (but I won't do that)

I love free food, but come on, who doesn’t?

So why don’t we all just become food bloggers like Mr Brad Lau? Then we all can get invited to restaurants to eat for free.

Mr Lau was invited for a free “food-tasting session” at a restaurant with a guest, but the food blogger brought three guests. There was a misunderstanding and the meal turned out not to be so free after all.

And not just in terms of cash. News of the incident went viral and Mr Lau has been vilified as a freeloader.

Hey, I’m a freeloader and proud of it.

I also used to get invited for free food all the time when I wrote for a magazine and I didn’t even write about food at all.

Journalists are typically inundated with invitations to media events, big and small, almost everyday. I just tried to attend the ones that promised the best free food.

And the public relations people know this, so they wittingly use grub to lure the media to their events, hoping for coverage.

Did that compromise whatever leftover morsel of "journalistic integrity" I had left?

No, because l hardly ever intended to write about any media event that I attended. I was there only for the buffet and any other free stuff I could score.

It got to the point where I even stopped pretending to care what the event was about.

I became so bored that I started amusing myself by testing how boorish I could behave before someone asked me to leave, which shockingly, no one ever did.

But my editor did receive a number of complaints and threats the day after.

And yet, I was still being sent to events that I wasn’t expected to write about.

How many times did I have to tell Kenny G I hated him at a press conference before I get banned?

Ah, good times. That’s the power of the press for ya.



Then I realised the food wasn’t really free.

I was paying for it by sitting through all these tedious press conferences and enduring all those insufferably ingratiating PR people (although they were usually attractive young women in tight skirts and high heels).

I also hated that I kept seeing the same “journalists” again and again at these events because we were on to each other’s game.

No amount of free food was worth participating in the hypocrisy of the PR process (even with the attractive young women in tight skirts and high heels).

I no longer write for a magazine.

Nowadays, no one even sent me a free pizza when I recently wrote a column in The New Paper about Pizza Hut’s Goooal! Splitzza being the most exciting thing about the World Cup. So sad.

But then I’m not a food blogger. Yet.

I need a name for my new food blog. How about SotongBall.com?

- Published in The New Paper, 29 August 2010

Forget the movie, I want to bitch about the MRT

So I was taking my mother to the recent Phua Chu Kang movie “gala” premiere at VivoCity.

Unless she leads a secret double life as Angelina Jolie, I believe it was the first movie premiere she had ever attended.



I thought she would be excited about meeting the actors like PCK star Gurmit Singh... okay, maybe not Gurmit Singh, but being a Channel 8 viewer, she had once mentioned that she thought Henry Thia was funny.



But, noooooo, all she did was whined about how she now has to pay more to ride the MRT.

I couldn’t believe it. My movie premiere was being upstaged by the new distance-based fare system.

Of course, my mother isn’t the only one unhappy with the new fare system implemented last month.

Enough people complained that it was brought up last week in Parliament where Transport Minister Raymond Lim defended the distance-based fares by citing studies by the Public Transport Council (PTC), but conceded that some people, particularly senior citizens like my mother, have to pay more.

It didn’t help that the train operators have admitted to numerous instances where commuters were overcharged by mistake. I think the people running our public transport system have a serious credibility problem.

Year after year, the PTC releases a report about how the quality of our public bus services is getting better.

PTC members have obviously never waited 40 minutes for a bus in the rain before. And when the bus finally comes, you can’t get on it because it’s packed tighter than a sausage filled with ground human meat. Mmm ... sausage.

Every few years, there will be a bus, train or taxi fare increase, and the PTC will be there to justify those increases.

At what point did the PTC become an apologist for the transport companies rather than an advocate for commuters?

I would go so far to say that more people hate the new fare system than the PCK movie.

You can always choose not to watch the PCK movie (like I have), but many people like my mother and me) can’t afford not to take public transport.



But of course, it’s unlikely we will return to the old fare system despite the criticisms. As in the previous fare increases, the storm will eventually blow over and we will learn to live with the new fares.

That is, until the next time they change the fares again and the cycle starts all over.

By then, I can take my mother to the premiere of Police & Thief The Movie.



- Published in The New Paper, 22 August 2010

I’m too scared to watch PCK movie because it may kill me

Eugene from the production company that produced Phua Chu Kang The Movie had arranged two tickets for me to attend the movie’s “gala” premiere two weeks ago.

I told him I was taking my mother and sister. Oh, he said, he would arrange a third ticket for me. I told him not to because I was skipping the movie screening.

Eugene’s confusion was audible over the phone.

How could I not support the movie since I was the credited scriptwriter, he wanted to know.

I said I did support the movie (otherwise I wouldn’t be forcing my own flesh and blood to sit through it) – I just didn’t want to see it.

“Why?” Eugene asked.

As another friend put it when I told her I was avoiding the screening: “You damn chicken.”

Yes, I am.

I had seen the PCK movie trailer and was dismayed by the number of things in it that I didn’t write.



If a two-minute trailer could cause me so much stress, sitting through the 100-minute movie could give me a cardiac arrest. I’m not a young man any more.

This is not unprecedented. One of my first TV jobs was reviewing movies on Channel 5 back in 1994.

After every show, I would rush to call my girlfriend and ask her to review my review because I was terrified of watching myself on TV.

And even though I created and wrote the two TV series Ah Girl and Lifeline, I have never seen a single episode of both shows apart from the pilots.

Instead, I forced my girlfriend-turned-wife to watch the shows and review them for me.

The only shows I had worked on that I could bear to watch were those where I had some control over the editing and music. I guess I’m just a control freak.

Too bad for me I wasn't the executive producer and director of the PCK movie, like I was of the original TV show's final season.

About two hours after dropping my mother and sister off at the PCK movie screening, I called to ask them what they thought of the movie.

My mum said it was “not bad” and “meaningful”. Not exactly the ringing endorsement one would hope from one’s own mother.

My sis said she slept through most of the movie.

What?! How could she fell asleep in the middle of her big brother's movie at its “gala” premiere? That was just, well, rude.

Her excuse: It was like a Jack Neo movie and therefore, she was not the target audience.

As if to make me feel better, my sister said that many people (but not her) enjoyed Jack Neo movies and so the PCK movie should be very successful.

Of course that was our diabolical plan all along.

That was why long-time Jack Neo accomplices Boris Boo and Henry Thia were hired to direct and ham it up in the PCK movie respectively. It even has a lot of Hokkien and bad reviews like a Jack Neo movie.

Now if only it would make money like a Jack Neo movie.

I’m sending my wife to watch the PCK movie today. She better not fall asleep.

- Published in The New Paper, 15 August 2010