Groundhog Day in Mexico
I'm still thinking about those days when I was about to go to Mexico. How did I get from there to where I am today? Deep down inside, I didn't really like what was going on in my entire adult life. OK,...
View ArticleLow Hanging Fruit
The last time I had such a rough time in my life was at the beginning of my adolescence. And it was bad. It cast such a big shadow over the rest of my life. For the previous few years, I had done...
View ArticlePost Donald Trump
Unfortunately a lot of what I have to unpack about the time that I spent in the US will revolve around Donald Trump being elected president. That is the reality. In many tangible ways, he didn’t make...
View ArticleMaradona - the Ultimate Midlife Crisis
I watched the Asif Kapadia documentary on Maradona on my flight back to Singapore at the start of the pandemic. It was pretty entertaining. The thing that struck me most about Maradona was that he was...
View ArticleSunlight versus Quantum Theory
There is the argument that "sunlight is the best disinfectant". It means that in politics, if you can expose the truth to the public, it will prevent more abuses. That argument is not true, because...
View ArticleSubconscious Intuition
I had been chasing down one prospect of work. It was a bootcamp for data scientists. I didn't get in. I got to the last round and was cut, which doesn't sound as great as it might: it's no use being...
View ArticleInhumanity of web interfaces
People think that masturbation is evil, because it is the surrogate of sex, not the real thing. It's alienating because it detracts from what makes us human. Then Facebook is a surrogate for human...
View ArticleNext Prime Minister
LKY is the father of our nation. At least, he is one of the founding fathers, and one is reminded of how Jefferson, Adams, Madison, Washington, Franklin and Hamilton are enshrined in American...
View ArticleFunan Centre
I remember that I used to go to Funan Centre very often after ECA days. It would be my time to go and tuang in a shopping mall, and I did it quite often. I never told my parents about it, and it was...
View ArticleEuropean Super League
How did we get here?The club has trumped the individual.There are several stages where this has happened. First was World Cup 1974, when the Dutch invented total football. If Brazil 1970 was the...
View ArticleGlobal Football
The formation of the super league made me realise that the rise of the English Premier League is basically a disaster for Southeast Asian football. In 1992, the Malaysian Cup was by some distance the...
View ArticleFootball Miracle Results
I think one of the most wonderful things about football was the magic of seeing something incredible happen in front of you. There would be something interesting about seeing something that hasn't...
View ArticleFrom the Football Superstar to the Superstar Squad
One of the most important matches in football was Italy vs Brazil in 1982. The 1970s were very often called the "me" decade but that was very far from the case when it came to football. The Dutch...
View ArticleCompetitive advantage of Premier League Teams
I still remember the early days of the English Premier League. Leeds United were the first defending champion. Man U's first rival for the title was Aston Villa, and it was not a given that it would...
View ArticleClosure (or rather "merger") of Yale- NUS
In another lifetime, I somehow recall writing about Yale NUS. Now that that experiment is finally over, let's have another look back at it. I don't really know why Yale-NUS decided to close down, but...
View ArticleNo More Top Down - Yale NUS
After a few days of digging things up, some things have become a little clearer. The NUS administration closed the school down, and this decision was taken over the top of the president of Yale NUS....
View ArticleNew Rules of Democracy
I'm thinking about how the traditional defences of democracy seem to fade away during the internet age. I used to wonder – human civilisation has been around for thousands of years, and only 200+...
View ArticleWomen's football / women's sports
I remember one of the biggest tennis matches of all time, and it was between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. It was the famous “battle of the sexes”, and notwithstanding that Billie Jean King...
View ArticleTeenage Wasteland
I went back to a place that I had known well when I was doing national service. I sometimes think about those grey colourless days. I had thought that they were merely 2-3 years of my life. But they...
View ArticleCompetitiveness of top clubs
I was going to write another screed about “the end of the end of history”, but it seems that I've already done that once before. So this time, what I write will be different. The events of 1989 were...
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