Nutted by the news – miyagi.sg

Tremors II

OK, I got my sleep interrupted by a very long series of tremors, and we’ve just turned on the telly to watch CNA talk about last night’s quake, aftershocks and then this morning’s shaking news.
“Normally our building code is sufficient to build buildings of safety”, says the engineer/professor who’s a guest on CNA right now. So, how safe are we? When do we evacuate? When do we rush down the stairs and stand in the car park, within the shadows of our tall apartment blocks?

How sure are we that the buildings we live and work in haven’t been damaged by the tremors? What’s our building code? Does it specifically say that the building must be able to withstand sways of up to 1m? So many questions, so hard to type. Because I’m sleepy, and I would have swayed as I walked out to get my computer even if there wasn’t a quake anyway.

The engineer/professor also says that we should evacuate to where “only if there’s really open ground”. So, OK, we’ll just wait till the open ground eventuates before we do anything. Personally, I reckon the waves of en-bloc sales do more damage to old apartments here than quakes ever do.

Technorati Tags: indonesia, quake, singapore

Tremors

7.20pm
This just in. Naomi thought the cat was under the sofa rocking it, causing her to feel a little dizzy. Then we found the cat on his perch, and so she asked me to sit on the sofa to feel it swaying a bit.

“Why ah?”, she asked. Being the professional bullshitter that I am, I said, “I think the seat of the sofa sits on the base in an unstable way.”

I sat on the other sofa, which didn’t “sit on a base in an unstable way”, and said, “No, this one don’t have”, and then, “eh? Got”.

For confirmation, we stared at a glass of water on the coffee table, and saw ripples.

Oops, there it comes again!

There are no thundering sounds, so Jurassic Park III is ruled out, and I don’t think our neighbours have bought their 5:1 Dolby home theatre system yet.

Just switched on CNA on the telly, and they say there’s been a quake near Bengkulu, Sumatra at 7.9M.

USGS says its preliminary magnitude is 8.0 and a tsunami warning has been issued.

Technorati Tags: quake, indonesia, singapore

No detectable Vitamin C in Ribena

An NZ court has found GlaxoSmithKline guilty of misleading advertising because there’s actually no detectable vitamin C in Ribena. But in Singapore, the AVA has certified that local Ribena Berries aren’t just cannibals, they’ve also been ‘certified rich in vitamin C‘.

Damn you creative people and your idiosyncrasies!

Your, you know, idiosyncrasies, are going to infect the heartland!

“Eventually I cannot put a finger on it. But I would say if this is the way the world is going and Singapore is part of that interconnected world and I think it is, then I see no option for Singapore but to be part of it.

“They tell me and anyway it is probably half-true that homosexuals are creative writers, dancers, etcetera. If we want creative people, then we got to put up with their idiosyncrasies so long as they don’t infect the heartland.”

I dunno. There’s probably an easy solution to this dilemma, isn’t there? You know, come up with a couple of useful campaign slogans – like the really scary one for dengue – “If they breed, you will bleed”?

Oh wait, they don’t breed. Well, at least most of them don’t. Hmmm… Oh, it’s just too hard. Thank goodness I’m not a public servant and have to think up measures to deal with these things. Good thing they’re so well paid.

Technorati Tags: GLBT, MM Lee, singapore

Partial recall

While idly on the ingterneck a couple of mornings ago, we decided to see if the cat food we buy for Jake was on the recalled brands list. So we googled, and got on to the USFDA’s website, and to our shock and horror, the list was like, damn long lor!

A quick scroll down the list found the brand of cat food we normally feed Jake, and a call was made to the pet shop to see if they’d done anything about it – i.e. taken it off the shelves. The friendly pet shop boy on the phone said the distributor had just called the day before and asked for them to take the brand off the shelves.

(It turned out that the dry cat food we buy for Jake wasn’t on the recall list – only the wet cat food was)

Later, we decided to take a look at the AVA (our friendly local government agency tasked to deal with such matters) website, and not surprisingly, the website was last updated on 10th April, and the latest press release to do with the pet food recall matter was dated 20th March, whereas, the USFDA’s page on the matter was updated 20th April, which was like, two days ago.

There was nothing on the AVA’s site to suggest that there was any cause for concern, as the site merely says:

According to the recall information available so far, the products are sold in the United States, Canada and Mexico. Nevertheless, the AVA is currently carrying out investigations to determine if the products had been exported to Singapore…

A chat with the pet shop boy suggested that the best place to go to for the latest information would be the pet shops, ‘because we get information from the distributor who get information from the manufacturer direct’.

I suppose, then when they feel like it, they then tell the AVA, and the AVA might just update their website with the latest information.

Technorati Tags: animals, AVA, pet food recall, USFDA, singapore