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Brands Commence Schooling, Including Brands

While Joseph Isaac Schooling experiences a Great Way To Fly home on Singapore Airlines First Class, let’s take a look at what who else has come on board the brand wagon.

McDonalds

McDonalds Schooling
Maccers may start pushing Big Breakfasts as the breakfast of champions. Great timing considering their much awaited move to healthier choices.

Brands

Brands Schooling
Sorry, top PSLE scorers. This Brand is jumping ship and swimming to champion athletes.

Singtel

Taking out a full page ad in gratitude that they were convinced that sometimes, 'commercial decisions' aren't as good as sentimental ones of national importance.
Taking out a full page ad grateful that they were convinced that sometimes, ‘commercial decisions’ aren’t as good as sentimental ones of national importance.

SPH

Wah, people are buying newspapers!
Wah, people are buying newspapers!

Any more coming on? Media buy bulk discount!

My Father And The Melbourne Olympics

One of the many little things in my father's remarkable life
One of the many little things in my father’s remarkable life

I’ve told this story many times before, but as the Olympic Games get under way in Rio, I remember again my father’s stint sixty years ago at the Melbourne Olympics:

In another age altogether, my father scored a temp job at the Melbourne Olympics as a general clerk/intern assisting the accounts department. The Games then were a small affair, unlike the massive logistical behemoth it is now. It would’ve been remarkable enough to be able to tell your kids and grandkids that you once worked at the XVIth Olympiad, but Pa being Pa, had to inadvertently go one further.

There was this boxer from the Japanese team. There was no translator. So they picked the nearest Japanese-looking person to help. No matter that Pa’s knowledge of Japanese was confined to mostly pidgin from the Occupation a little over a decade earlier.

The boxer mentioned something about ‘cutting’ something, and kept gesticulating with his hands, pointing at his waist. He sounded desperate too. Pa put the bits of Japanese words he understood and two and two together and informed Games officials that the boxer had an abdominal problem that needed to be fixed.

They sent the boxer, this time screaming and yelling, to the hospital for immediate medical attention, fearing appendicitis.

A few hours later, the angry Japanese boxer came back to the arena, with real translators, and it seems, all he wanted to tell officials was that he needed to get a skipping rope to cut his excess weight down to that stipulated by his weight division in his event. Pa was sent to the back rooms to be buried under accounting sheets.

(Originally told on this blog in June 2004)