Yesterday (June 6 2008) was one of the happiest days of my life in recent memory.
Jui and Paul, former colleagues from my last job as a copytaster, agreed with me too. They were happy because they could stay out of the daily hassle of newsroom deadlines, while I was happy because I finally had time to chill and learn something new. My current workplace has too much noise and I am always hard put to find a place to eat, read or work in quiet… even the library is full of students playing games on their laptops.
It was an eye-opening experience to meet Jon Peterson, who created the www.singeo.com site. A mashup master, he basically took bits of pieces of lots of seemingly disparate information and composed a very useful site out of it.
On his site, for instance, you could find the locations of bus-stops in Singapore, the stops for the upcoming circle line, where the various branches of the national libraries and Starbucks are. You can even draw a map from your school to your house and send it to friends. And he was hugely entertaining, especially when he said “Sometimes” to the question “Don’t you have to ask for permission to use the info from other sites?”
I was just floored. This guy has done something lots of established media spend nights worrying about – he’s taken lots of stuff from the ecosystem of published media and built a whole new soundtrack for whatever groove you fancy to dance to.
My only beef is that there was no music while he presented. He should have a celestial choir or something descend on him when he had a ta-dah moment.
What is particularly compelling about www.singeo.com is the use of historical pictures on the maps of Singapore roads.
It’s hard to describe how powerful that feeling is -to see a landmark you remember as a kid and which is no longer there as you grow older. Like I don’t see what the fuss is about the movie St Jack all these years. The scenes of Boat Quay brought back lots of memories of my dad’s very modest workplace in Circular Road in the 70s.
I’ve lived all my life in Singapore but I find myself relating better to the old places I’ve seen when travelling.
Like Tiananmen Square. Or the public library in New York on 5th Avenue. You don’t have to know lots about the history of the place to just stand there and soak up the history. Because they are not apologetic about being there.
Certainly not like the way the sorry I-know-my-days-are-numbered way the National Library building used to look before it was demolished. Or the way Tanjong Pagar Plaza looks now opposite the spruced-up Amara Hotel, where Paul, Jui and I had our training sessions. Or the way an old primary school looks now in Telok Kurau.
I got all that from Tan Hui Yee, who wrote a nice piece in ST about landmarks at risk in the papers today (Jun 7). It was an unsentimental piece, noting that the cost of conservation and the current incentives for conserving old buildings may not save many old buildings from the wrecking ball.
Imagine the landmark buildings cut down and in their place new condos sprouting up like bamboo shoots overnight.
Why is the jungle changing when the inhabitants are still the same?
I’m reminded of the story of the last member of the banded leaf monkey found in Bukit Timah in the late 1980s.
When the Bukit Timah Expressway was being built, it effectively cut the Central Catchment Reserve into two parts: the MacRitchie side and the Bukit Timah site. Animals used to traversing the forest suddenly found themselves cut off from food and other members of their kind in the other part of the forest without warning.
The last banded leaf monkey in Bukit Timah was found in a tree by a member of the public. Under the tree was a group of wild dogs waiting eagerly for the elderly primate to drop out of the tree and become their dinner.
The woman succeeded momentarily in chasing the dogs away but the monkey nevertheless came down from the tree and was mauled by the dogs.
I heard the the story of the monkey when I visited the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity a week ago.
The carcass of the sad-faced monkey with a pained expression is now on display in formaldehyde at the museum. I don’t know if loneliness drove her to her fate. But maybe she really felt she had little to lose, being the last of her tribe. The species, once common here like the irritating long-tailed macaques in Peirce and Seletar Reservoirs, is believed to be highly endangered in Singapore now, with some 20 individuals left.
I once had a tortoise as a pet. It was an African sulcata with nice lovely ridges on its back. It was about 10 years old and it was about the size of a nice pot. Someone walked into my garden one day and stole it when I had carelessly left the gate open.
I really miss it.
If I’d kept it, it would have outlived me and maybe it would 180 years. It would have made a nice companion for my kids and their kids. One of my daugter’s first words was “tortoise” and I used to calm her by getting her to feed the tortoise.
It took a while, like 25 minutes, to feed the tortoise… she’d snap and tear away at lettuce, carrots, mouldy bread, hibiscus as her eyes shone in glee. It was calming to see a staid old thing feed herself till she was full. Well, I don’t know if she was a male or female, really.
Twenty-five minutes are but a flicker in the life of a 180-year-old. I liked the fact that I managed a few moments in eternity in the life of something that would outlive me.
It made me feel insignificant. And also relieved kowing that I connected to an ecosystem, a larger cycle of life, if you will.
And that is a liberating feeling.
