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

Half marathon, full experience – but I walked a quarter of the way

I first joined the Safra Sheares Bridge Run in the early 90s.

More than 20 years later on Sunday, I took part in the 21km Safra Singapore Bay Run and Army Half Marathon.



It was fun at first, running past Shenton Way and Marina Bay Sands, but after 7km, I started to struggle.

That was also where runners were delayed by a bottleneck near the Marina Barrage. I took the opportunity to rest longer than I should.

I had been working six nights straight and had less than a hour's sleep before the run, which was flagged off at 5:15am.

After 15km, I was jogging so slowly I might as well walk, which was what I did for most of the rest of the way. I was very disappointed with myself.

I was so exhausted I could feel the weight of my sweat-soaked tank top on my shoulders. My right knee buckled at one point. I really felt all of my 47 years.

I also made the mistake of drinking (or "hydrating") during the run which I've never done before. That made it difficult to pick up speed as I was filled with fluids.

Still, I managed to force myself to jog across the finish line at 3 hours 3 minutes. I was hoping to make it under 3 hours. I must try to do better next year.

Below are some of the less blurry pictures I took with my shaky iPhone along the way. They seem almost psychedelic in retrospect.























One positive side effect is that next Sunday's 10km Vertical City Trail run (which includes a 20-storey stair climb) now seems like nothing in comparison.



UPDATE: Don’t worry about the 10km run – the stairs will kill you

Don’t lose your IC if you’re a long-haired male atheist

My world changed suddenly eight days ago at the Singapore Expo.

I was there to collect the race pack for this morning’s Safra Singapore Bay Run and Army Half Marathon, having registered online for the 21km run two months earlier.

As I joined the queue in Singapore Expo Hall 3B that Saturday afternoon, I pulled my wallet out of my jeans back pocket to take out my identity card to prove I was who I was so that I could get my stuff.

Except... where was my IC?

I searched my wallet again.

Okay, I had my 10 million credit cards, my Passion card, my Kopitiam card, my Watsons card, my Spotlight card and the free Safra membership card I received for the 45th anniversary of national service - but no identity card.

I felt like I had been transported to an alternate universe where ICs randomly disappear from people’s wallets.

How was I going to get my stuff now? Do I leave the queue? But I had travelled all the way from my home in Choa Chu Kang to the Expo.

I decided I would beg for my race pack.

When it was my turn, I told the counter girl I didn’t have my IC with me. She asked if I had any other form of identification.

Since it was a Safra event, I showed her my Safra card. She accepted it without me having to beg. I got my run pack within minutes. Thank you, 45th anniversary of NS!

But I still had to find my missing IC.

Without it, I can’t prove that I’m not a foreigner and my fellow Singaporeans could protest against me ar Hong Lim Park by mistake. Oh, wait, I still have my passport. Except it’s expired.

And what if someone used my IC to borrow money from a loan shark? Well, my wife has been complaining that our door needs a new coat of paint.

Anyway, instead of looking for pictures, animated gifs and videos of City Harvest Church chiobu Serina Wee on the Internet like every other Singaporean man, straight or otherwise, did last week, I was looking for my IC.

Search parties were organised. Cabinets were ransacked. Pockets were turned out.

I went to the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) website and learnt that the cost of replacing a lost IC was $100. So I had another one hundred reasons to find it.

But the search proved futile, although it turned up my long lost iPod Touch, a sticker for the McDonald’s Monopoly game and a special collector’s ez-link card with a picture of Elijah Wood as Frodo from The Lord Of The Rings movie trilogy.

I eventually threw in the towel after a shower and headed for the ICA building on Thursday to get a new IC.

It’s a common misconsception that you have to make a police report when you lose your IC. Actually, you only have to do so if you’re a victim of a crime.

I just needed to fill up a declaration form, which asked for the reason I lost my IC.

How was I supposed to answer? “Carelessness”? “A rupture in the space-time continuum”?

I wrote: “I opened my wallet and my IC wasn’t there.”

Next, I went to the fourth floor to get my IC photo taken for $5.

The woman looked at me and said, “Alamak. Women can have long hair. Men cannot.”

I was given a pink rubber band to tie my hair back. Is rubber band supposed to match the colour of my IC?I refused to wear the pink rubber band.

Are we still living in the 1970s? Males with long hair are not allowed to have their IC photo taken?



The woman grudgingly took my photo sans pink rubber band but warned that if the photo was rejected, she wasn’t going to give me a refund.

I paid the five bucks, collected my IC photo, returned the pink rubber band and said, “Thank you.”

Then came the moment of truth. I handed the photo and declaration form to the ICA officer to apply for my replacement IC.

She said nothing about the photo (not even “wah, so handsome”) but asked me to write “I dropped my IC” on the form.

I paid the 100 bucks with Nets and was asked to check that my information was correct.

Next to religion was “free thinker”. I asked if I could change it to “none”, which would be more accurate.

She said I could choose either “free thinker” or “others”, but “none” was not allowed. I couldn’t help feeling atheists were being discriminated against.

I stayed with “free thinker” because “others” could suggest I perform human sacrifices at Stonehenge and that was something I would rather keep a secret.

After everything was settled, I was given a collection slip to collect my replacement IC a month later. The ICA officer said that in the meantime, the collection slip could be used as my temporary IC.

Really? That little piece of paper?

So yesterday afternoon, I went to Novena Square to collect my race pack for next Sunday's Tanjong Pagar-Tiong Bahru Salomon Vertical City Trail run.



The counter girl asked for my IC. I said I lost it and showed her the ICA collection slip.

“Oh,” she said, “you really lost it.”

She thought I was kidding? She then asked for my IC number and gave me my race pack. Race pack collection counter girls are all so nice.

So the collection slip worked, though not the way I expected.

I just hope I don’t wake up one day to find red paint splashed on my front door. My wife prefers off-white.

- Published in The New Paper, 1 September 2013