June 2009 – miyagi.sg

Scary songs for children

We’re still learning how to put Kai to bed, or simply to calm him down. Talking and singing softly is one of the things we find works.

We’ve been singing to Kai some of the songs we know from when we were kids. And yes, we already knew that ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’, ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep‘ and The Alphabet Song all have the same tune.

But it’s the lyrics of some of the songs that can be scary. Take the Chinese version of Frere Jacques (Are You Sleeping Brother John) for instance.

For one, it’s got nothing to do with a sleeping brother John, but two tigers with what insurance companies call total disabilities. It goes something like:

Two tigers
Two tigers
Running fast
Running fast
One has no eye(s)
One has no tail
How odd
How odd

Don’t bluff lah, what odd? You ate the tail and eyes for medicinal reasons, you Chinese children’s song composer! That’s why the poor cats are running!

Kai might sleep well after, but I’m more afraid of myself going to bed having nightmares of deformed tigers.

So I’ve taken to humming instead, but Naomi thinks that’s copping out. She’s chosen to make up nonsense lyrics which are not scary like Chinese songs are, and which incorporate Kai’s name somewhere, so they could go:

Something something Baby Kai, something something Baby Kai.

But she also found what someone called ‘the best and worst song I’ve? ever heard in my life’, and what’s probably gonna be the song we sing to Kai for until we get sick of it:

Weekly Tweets

RT @mitchtan: Air China should stop hiring Chinese who tries to speak with an American slang… Seriously, me no understand you! #
RT @khaosworks: The jokes just write themselves, don't they? Strange Gel Remote Concept by Panasonic: http://is.gd/18JUq #
RT @HossanLeong: Where do I think is the best place to take the family on an outing? inSing.com has the answer. get that and call me NOW … #
From miyagi.sg: Plus one room for scale model maid http://tinyurl.com/nk8l2g #
RT @yellowhandman: @miyagi You let your maid sleep? What kind of Singaporean are you? #
An address more appropriate for a fireworks factory: http://ping.fm/u3vHi #
Baby Kai now has two baby citizenships! #
RT @gssq: Wondering how Chinese Scrabble would work #
RT @gssq: Two ways Chinese Scrabble could work: Radicals (http://tinyurl.com/moz73g; Pinyin (http://tinyurl.com/nbx4f5) #
From miyagi.sg: Cyclops can now fight Godzirra! http://tinyurl.com/ly8wsc #
There are more ppl answering queries than there are actual bank officers. So all's they do is tell you where to queue. #fail #
RT @billang: @miyagi Ya man. I ask the bank teller what she wanted to tell me and she looked at me with a blank face. Change the job nam … #
Instant coffee + instant oats = instant trip to toilet after breakfast #
RT @kskb: maju officer on radio fail: "we separate our men in time and space" – must be too much startrek #
missing the Confinement Nanny who did practically everything the past 2.5 months. #
RE: We spoke about it, yes. I'll check with the maid agency next time. I'm quite sure those that are endorsed by Mediaco… http://disq.us/n3a #
Because Temasek is so good at being a non-profit organisation: http://bit.ly/SIUTp #
RT @cowboycaleb: "Michael Jackson Has Passed Away" – http://tinyurl.com/lg4q9q #
OMG the number of times we saw our schoolmates do "Thriller" at school events. And that included the ACS Military Band version. #
From miyagi.sg: Rolls Royce for the disabled http://tinyurl.com/mhja9p #
RT @skinnylatte: In Singapore/Malaysia, you can order "a cup of Michael Jackson". It's a mix of soya bean milk (white) & chin chow jelly … #
RT @Agent_M: Photo: I’d drop my G1 for the Emperor’s iPhone…or Vader’s iPhone…in a second. via @gabrieli: http://tumblr.com/xo726879z #
Is sleepy and waiting for the family pizza meal. #

Rolls Royce for the disabled

We were really lucky to find a parking lot at The Central nottobeconfusedwithcentralmallandcentralsquare the other night, right next to the disabled parking lot, where we saw a magnificent cabriolet in baby blue.

Rolls Royce calls it the Phantom Drophead Coupé, but for the Singapore market it’s called the Phantom Disabled Car Parking Lot Hogger.

These must be the new labels for disabled drivers

Cyclops can now fight Godzirra!

“Ultraman + Mt. Fuji = JAPAN” – Photo by emrank

I am not arroud to make fun of Japanese-accented English, so sitting through two hours with an embassy official who was helping us fill up deceptively difficult forms was quite a task yesterday afternoon.

But it’s almost all done. Naomi’s and my marriage has been registered (we didn’t know we had to do this), and Kai’s birth has also been logged. This means our chubby little bub is now officially Japanese as well as Singaporean.

There’s still the matter of getting a passport for Kai, for which, we were told by the embassy official, we needed to get a passport-sized photograph of him ‘with his eyes open’.

The helpful official even drew an open eye within the outline of a head printed on a sample application form. I wanted to tell her our son was not a cyclops but I was too tired and just glad we got the first parts done.

Some more, the Daikin aircon in the interview room was on the brink, so it got warmer and warmer as the last few pages of the forms were being filled up, until the official helping us could take it no more (neither could we, but we were trying to be polite) and shoved the remote control at me and asked me to do sumsing about it.

Plus one room for scale model maid

Photo by fullres

Real estate agents can be arseholes sometimes. A few years ago, being first time home renters, Naomi and I were conned into paying double commission by this chow ah beng of an agent, and last year, we were treated to a siao char bor show by this independent agent who got her husband to talk to and abuse me on the phone when I called to ask that the apartment be fumigated before we moved in (it was infested with ticks from a previous tenant’s dog).

We’ve just started the merry dance of house-hunting again, seeing as it’s a little under a year to go before our lease expires, and yesterday was spent poring over the Classifieds and deciphering realtor acronyms like IT, CT, SD and 4D.

‘IT’ means ‘inter-terrace’; ‘CT’ means ‘corner terrace’; ‘SD’ means ‘semi-detached’, and ‘4D’ means ‘houses that only lottery winners can afford’.

We viewed a few properties and began to understand what realtors really mean, when they describe numbers of bedrooms in private dwellings as ‘3+1’ and ‘4+1’.

‘3+1’ means ‘three real bedrooms and a hole in the wall for your domestic helper’, or ‘three real bedrooms and a hole in the wall for storing your junk and your domestic helper’.

When I remarked “wah, so small” on seeing the five foot by three foot by seven foot hole in a yet to be completed house, the realtor attending to us, sweating in his shirt and tie, defended its design, saying, “but it’s just for your maid”.

Being in a reasonably good mood, I responded, “but our maid is life-sized” to which he pointed out, “but this house is different, this maid’s room got own toilet”.

The en-suite makes a big difference, I suppose. Imagine prison cells without them. Crap.