June 2010 – miyagi.sg

Channel Newsasia makes a meal of a vulnerable species of fish

Our very own Channel Newsasia ignores the fact that the Giant Garoupa or Queensland Grouper was put on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species in 2006, and instead celebrates the story of a restaurateur who bought one this week and is selling it to customers at $20 per 200g.

via Channel NewsAsia:

The owner of a restaurant in Singapore has reeled in a man-sized Queensland garoupa off the coast of Sabah. And he expects to feed 600 customers with it.

The garoupa weighs 150 kilogrammes and is two metres long. It is so big that it had to be brought in on Monday morning using a forklift.

via IUCN:

Being such a large predator, it is rare even in areas unexploited by fishing (Randall and Heemstra 1991) and it has nearly been extirpated in areas where it has been heavily fished (Lieske and Myers 1994) for the live reef food-fish trade; this is a trade in live fish for food which is centred in SE Asia and expecially China and Chinese communities.

Not good to be in the news the same day as Sumiko Tan’s Hurricane

Oh well. Not that it’s that big a deal being completely overshadowed by “Singapore’s Carrie Bradshaw“, and the floods.

MRT train slower than football fan

If an artist can get away with tagging an MRT carriage for two days without staff noticing anything amiss, it shouldn’t be that far fetched that some football nut can somehow outrun the train and make it to the next station before it does.

For the newcomers to this country

“I hope that all of us are convinced that this country is for all races, and will have four official languages. But Malay will be the National and the common language. If you don’t learn the National Language, you will have yourself to blame. Without knowledge of it, it will be difficult for you to get a job.”

Lee Kuan Yew, 23 October 1965

Our son is iPhone native

Kai toddling at the Jacob Ballas Children's Garden

I’ve always been led to think that babies start saying their first word out of the blue, and start walking unaided all of a sudden.

Kai can walk now, albeit with his arms in the air holding on to invisible parachute straps. But that has taken about a fortnight of taking one, then two unaided steps, and there hasn’t really been a defining moment announcing his bipedness.

The other amazing thing is how quickly he’s taken to using the other things always attached to us besides him – my Blackberry and Naomi’s iPhone.

Naomi and I started out thinking: “We’re not going to let our son be distracted by flashy light thingies, PSPs and other such like”, but it was always going to be a lost cause when you have to feed, change and generally have to attend to a squirmy one year old toddler.

Other parents who don’t already know this – these are the two life-saving apps for your Blackberry and iPhone: Baby GO! for the ‘Berry, and Talking Carl for the iPhone.

Then Sunday night, we went out to Ion Orchard, and as expected, Kai got antsy after half an hour in the restaurant, so I took him out to toddle around the 4th floor. Near the concierge’s counter was a pillar with two touch-screen directories. One of them was just right for his height (presumably for the wheelchair bound), so he went at it, pressing and pushing until he accidentally pressed the search button at the bottom right, activating an onscreen keyboard.

Our 14 month-old knows his keyboard and starts pressing the letters anyhowly. But here’s the clincher: He’s been mimicking how Naomi, her mum and myself make and take calls with our phones over the past three months or so, and it still make us chuckle when he puts his hand to his ear every time he hears someone’s phone ringing. So this time, after pressing a series of letters on the touch-screen keyboard, he puts his hand to his ear and says his version of “hello?”