Fighting Spiders (3)

Article in Today Newspaper dated 15 Dec 2008

A new TV drama series called Fighting Spiders premieres on Tuesday, 14 April 2009 at 8.30pm on Mediacorp Channel 5. Thereafter, the show is telecast every Tuesday at the same time:

"Set in post 60’s Singapore, in rustic kampongs, and the colorful chaotic streets of Chinatown, FIGHTING SPIDERS is a coming of age, adventure, story of three boys – Soon Lee (Edwin Goh), Charlie (Liang Shijie Jason) and Peter (Frederick Fielding), whose friendship is tested when they go to Malaysia on a quest to find and return with the King Spider, so as to challenge their nemesis, and bully, Ah Huat."

In case you think that the show is all about the 3 boys, you are mistaken. Relatively new and pretty actresses Rebecca Lim and Ezann Lee also star in the show.

Above: Rebecca Lim
Below: Ezann Lee

There is also Andie Chen, Star Search 2007 winner who also recently starred in the very successful The Little Nonya:


If you visit the show's official website, you will find a section called Relive the 1960s which contains pages describing life in the 1960s - the hangouts, the fashion, the food and snacks, the movies and the music.

Another section named Games Played in the 60s has pages describing chapteh, fighting kites, five stones, hopscotch, zero point, fighting fish and of course fighting spiders.

In fact, the website contains so much Singapore nostalgia in the 1960s that it looks like a mini yesterday.sg. It is little wonder too - the show's scriptwriter, Mr Andrew Ngin consulted yours truly in June last year on a number of topics including fighting spiders. Andrew even got Chuck Hio, a childhood friend of Chun See, to volunteer 2 hours of his time to be the 3 young actors' "spider consultant".

It remains to be seen if Fighting Spiders would be as successful a series as The Little Nonya.

Do remember to catch the show.

Earlier posts on spiders:

1. Fighting Spiders - dated 27 Jun 2008;

2. Fighting Spiders (2) - dated 21 Aug 2008;

3. Caught a Spider - dated 28 Aug 2008; and

4. Recluse Spider Bite... Or Was It? - 31 Aug 2008.

My Luck In The Toto Hong Bao Draw

Caution: This post is rated NC18. It contains discussion on gambling gaming.

Warning to my 2 sons: You stay away, okay?. (Studies have shown that parents who are avid gamblers gamers are likely to have children who take after them. Wanna bet?)

.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.

Many people buy 4D, Toto and Big Sweep for a hope. As they would say in typical Singlish, "Don't buy, no hope. Got buy, got hope. No win, neber mind. I do charity lor." (According to the Singapore Pools' website, its surpluses are "channelled toward funding worthy causes and projects through the Singapore Totalisator Board".)

I seldom buy Toto. Not that my religion forbids it. (I am a freethinker.) Not that I am not greedy for the money either. After all, "something without labour" is always better than Nil Sine Labore ("nothing without labour").

I only buy Toto when the grand prize grows to an astronomical amount and even then, only when I happen to pass buy a Toto outlet with no queue and all the stars are aligned in my favour.

Alright, enough excuses for being greedy. I finally succumbed and bought myself a $10 Prosperity Pack today. (Included in the pack are 2 boards of "Quick Pick System 7" and a "Singapore Sweep" ticket.)


When the results were published, I could not believe that I struck the Group 1 prize didn't even strike a single number out of the 14 numbers I wagered on:


Now could someone good in maths please tell me what were the odds for that happening? If chance was very slim, they ought to award me a prize as well, don't they? After all, if I had picked 38 numbers and didn't strike any of them, the chance would have been the same as correctly picking all 7 numbers that came out in the draw, am I right? (38 + 7 = 45, the total number of balls in the game.)

Frankly, I don't understand why people are so excited about the yearly Hong Bao Toto draws with big prizes. Consider this - the previous "non-Hong Bao" draw had only ONE Group 1 winner who won all of $1,592,705 while this Hong Bao draw had a total of 14 Group 1 winners sharing a prize of about $10 million. Each winner took home only about $732,000, less than half the amount which the previous Group 1 winner won. It doesn't make sense, does it?

In any case, now I feel like a really sore loser charitable person. As they say, it's time to move on and I am looking forward to striking $2.2 million 1st prize in the Singapore Sweep draw on 4 Mar 09.

Caught A Spider

I caught a spider at Kent Ridge Park during lunch time today. However, I don't think that it is the fighting kind. Above is a photo of the spider I caught. What do you think? What species is it, is it a male or female, and most importantly, is it poisonous?

YG was concerned that I might not know about the dangers of handling spiders which I am not familiar with. His concerns are valid as I know very little about spiders. He had sent an email with pictures to Chun See explaining why. I have just received the email from Chun See. I will update this post when I get permission from YG to blog about it.

Thank you very much for your concern, YG. I am appreciative of it and am waiting in anticipation for your advice.

Earlier posts on spiders:

1. Fighting Spiders - dated 27 Jun 2008; and

2. Fighting Spiders (2) - dated 21 Aug 2008.

Solving Rebus Puzzles Makes Mee Hungry

A rebus puzzle essentially consists of little pictures, often made with letters and words, which cryptically represent a word, phrase, or saying. It has nothing to do with mee rebus, a favourite local hawker fare.


Many years ago, a colleague would make us solve rebus puzzles without fail during Christmas celebration each year in the office. Maybe she thought that we had not been thinking hard enough at work so she took great delight in giving our brains a good workout even during a time of good cheer. You guessed it right - solving such puzzles didn't give me a lot of good cheer. Perhaps it did help work up my appetite a little as I was always thinking of the mee rebus they had prepared for the Christmas makan.

So to whet your appetite for the weekend meals that you will be having, below are some rebus puzzles for you to wreck your brains over. The answers will be given in the comments here on Wednesday. Alright, a little clue to help you get that perfect score - puzzle no. 7 is something I thought out myself and is topical. The rest of the puzzles are quite easy and you should have no problem solving them. Have fun!

How I Won From All The Mahjong Kakis

In case you are wondering about the meaning of the word kakis in the title of this blog, someone who plays mahjong is known locally as a mahjong kaki. Kakis is simply the plural of kaki. It is a Malay word that means "leg" or "foot". Frankly, I do not see any connection between "mahjong" and "leg" apart from the fact that a mahjong table has 4 legs and you need 4 people to play the game.

My late mum loved to play mahjong. She played with like-minded neighbours in a spacious common area next to the staircase on the 4th storey of our SIT flat. This was in the 1960s. I loved to sit beside her to watch the game. There was another reason why I loved to sit beside her. (Read on to find out why.)

As a result, like what Kenny Rogers sings in the song The Gambler, I "got to know when to hold them" (the mahjong tiles, that is) and when to throw them away. In other words, I grew up being quite good at the game but being quite bad as well, if you consider playing mahjong as a vice.

Each pok (session) of game would last one or two hours on the average. Every player started with $2.90 in chips. If the player lost all the chips, he/she would have to fork out $3.00 in cash to settle the account. Why the extra 10 cents? The answer is that the "missing" 10 cents went into what Chun See mentioned in Peter's mahjong post as "chow soi" (imposing tax).

(Don't you ever scoff at the seemingly small amount of mahjong money at stake. $3.00 may seem very little money nowadays as it may not even buy a bowl of noodles in a food court. To put it in perspective, the monthly rent of our smaller than 500 square-feet SIT flat was just $24. It was what my dad could just afford with his monthly salary of about $150 which had to feed a family of 7 people.)

The mahjong game usually lasted from morning till late at night. On weekends, it would even be "thong siew" i.e. played throughout the night till the next day, which meant that the players went without sleep for 48 hours or more at a stretch. If that happened, several dollars of "tax" could be collected for that mahjong session.

So what happened to the "taxes" collected this way? The funds were used in 2 ways:

1. Every year, during 中元节 (Zhongyuan Jie or Ghost Festival) on the 15th day of the 7th lunar month, a portion of the money would be used to buy offerings and food for the spirits. After the festival was over, the food items would be apportioned to all the regular mahjong kakis.

2. Every one or two hours during the mahjong game, I got a chance to earn some pocket money. It worked like this:

The players would give me 30 cents to buy coffee for them - 10 cents was officially declared as my reward while a kettle of black coffee with sugar from the coffeeshop downstairs cost 20 cents. The coffee was enough to fill 5 small enamelled tin cups. Sometimes, I even got to drink the fifth cup.

Even as a young kid, I knew how to maximise profits. I added 3 tablespoonfuls of sugar from my mum's sugar jar and bought only 10 cents of black coffee (without sugar) from the coffeeshop. This way, I earned 20 cents with every kettle of coffee that I bought. Over time, I saved up quite a tidy sum. And that was how I beat all the mahjong kakis and ended up as the ultimate winner.

Results of Chingrish (2) Contest

There were 8 entries this time. (Well, actually only 6 as you shall see.)

A recap of the entries:

1. Shilpa - Laxative.

2. Chris - (No guess.)

3. Cool Insider - Job that requires running about.

4. Etel - (No guess.)

5. Tigerfish - Do BIG toilet business.

6. Chun See - Business continuity assurance. (Or something to that effect. Trust a management consultant to come up with a term like that.)

7. Fr - No peeing here.

8. Firehorse - Related to toilet stuff.

Thanks to all of you for your entries. And the results are...

*drum roll*

Sorry, none of your guesses were correct. The photo in the last entry was part of a sign hung at the door of a Taiwanese restaurant in Joo Chiat Road:



The traditional Chinese words, written in simplified Chinese as 营业中 means "operating" or "open for business" or simply "open" - any of the 3 English answers would have been correct. Chun See's "business continuity assurance" guess comes close but not quite correct.

Nevertheless, everyone of you still walks away with an award, as usual.

The Persistence Award goes to Shilpa, Tigerfish, Fr and Firehorse for participating in this contest for the second time:



And now, the Special Awards.

The Lame Out-of-guess Award goes to Chris for not only his lame remarks but yet tagged me with a lame meme which he knew that I won't do:



The Maiden Effort Award goes to Cool Insider for guessing for the first time:



Finally, the So-close-yet-so-far/Goggle Award goes to Etel and Chun See for coming so close to making a correct guess but didn't:



Etel did a Goggle Google search but yielded no results. She had probably used the terms ["to run business" chingrish] in her unsuccessful Google search. If she had used ["to run business" chinglish] or even ["to run business" engrish] she would have found that celebrity blogger Kenny Sia had blogged about it before here. Wikipedia even has an entry on it and so do dozens of other websites like this one.

Having said that, I would like to clarify that when I posted this poser on April Fool's Day, I didn't know that this Chingrish sign had already been documented by so many websites. It was only after Etel gave me the idea to do a Google search on it that I discovered it was so.

So what's the moral of the story? Without any intention to sound smug, there are two things that I learnt here:

1. When looking for information using Internet search engines, it is very important that you specify the right search words; and

2. It doesn't necessary mean that you are less Internet savvy when you reach my age.

So take heart, Chun See and Fr.


Disclaimer: As usual, this post is meant to be light-hearted and fun. I apologise if anyone is sore about his/her award. He/she has 2 recourse - go apply some ointment or go ahead, strike me off from your "favorite blogs" list.