An ode to disc golf in Singapore

Not a lot going on in Leaner land, but I thought I'd direct your attention to something I wrote about Singapore's tiny disc golf scene, such as it is.

This column originally appeared in last Sunday's Straits Times, and can be accessed here, provided you have a subscription. In case you don't, I've also reproduced it below. Lemme know what you think.

Round of disc golf, anyone?

Standing on the 18th green, putter in hand, I test the direction of the wind with a pinch of grass before I line up my shot. A moment of breathlessness as the putt heads towards its target... and drops! Birdie. It’s my best golf score yet.

But this is no ordinary game of golf. This is disc golf.

Its rules are identical to those of the traditional game. But instead of balls and clubs, this game uses discs – not Frisbees – of various moulds to reach the target, which can be a tree, a pole or, on a proper course, inside a metal basket.

Disc golf has been a hobby of mine for nearly half my life. I’ve won money in tournaments and have played courses on four continents: North America, Europe, Australia and Asia (I have not yet made it to the course that exists in Antarctica).

Singapore does not have a formal disc golf course. But that does not mean the game is not played here.

A couple of times a month, a group of us meet for a round. The size of the group varies, and it consists mostly of expatriates. Sadly, locals rarely venture beyond the invite list.

Disc golf can be played anywhere where there is a handful of open acres, preferably with a few trees for obstacles.

Such places are surprisingly numerous in Singapore, and we take our show all over the island, setting up nine portable “baskets” made of canvas and netting to create impromptu courses.

We’ve been known to take over the open spaces near MRT stations like Kallang, Bedok and, most recently, Outram Park, throwing discs and trying to make par.

Passers-by observe us with a mix of awe and bemusement. Many stop to watch the strange sight of ang mohs chucking things in a field.

Rarely does a round pass by without one of us explaining to an inquisitive onlooker what it is we’re doing (“It’s just like golf...”). Once that’s understood, it’s all chuckles and suspicious smiles as they wait for us to demonstrate.

A hefty drive – up to 150m with a good pull – never fails to elicit oohs and aahs and, of course, an enthusiastic “golf clap”.

At first, these occasional weekend rounds were enough to satisfy my disc golf habit.
But after a few months here, I was getting urges to play on weekdays, in the mornings, in the evenings – whenever I could. But Singapore doesn’t have anything resembling a permanent course.

So I decided to build one.

One day about a year ago, I was in a taxi in Upper Serangoon and happened to pass by the old Bidadari Cemetery. My eyes got wide. Such a boundless expanse of unused public land is a rare sight in Singapore. In short, it was the perfect place for disc golf.

I did my research and learnt that Bidadari had been a mostly Muslim and Christian cemetery until it was closed in the 1970s and exhumed beginning in 2001.

It has apparently been slated for development for the last several years, but the only perceivable sign of civilisation is the North-East Line’s phantom MRT station, Woodleigh.

In the meantime, I’ve designated some tees, collected some fallen branches and stuck them in the ground for targets and – voila! – it’s an 18-hole disc golf course. I hope the ghosts don’t mind.

Yes, disc golf is fun to play. But for me, it has also been a vehicle to explore and interact with new and local landscapes.

I’ve played courses in vastly different settings, from the ancient redwood forests in California to the crags of the Rocky Mountains. Each individual spot reveals its own unique flora, fauna and history. Bidadari is no different.

Photographers armed with telephoto lenses stand quietly near Hole 8 trying to catch a glimpse of the rare and brilliant birds flying from branch to branch of the sprawling banyan trees.

At Hole 2, the seeds of saga trees, hard and red as rubies, fall to the ground. An old man gathers them to line the bottom of his wife’s fish bowl.

Relics of Bidadari’s past litter the grounds. From the conical tops of Muslim grave markers to what appear to be directional signs scrawled in Arabic, mementoes of this land’s history are everywhere.

Disc golf in Singapore pre-dates me. The evidence sits along the Nicoll Highway, across from Suntec City behind the Raffles Education Corp College, in the form of a proper, metal disc golf basket.

I have been unable to ascertain why or how it exists. Hopefully the spirit that brought it here and keeps me playing will carry on long after I’m gone.

Sunday Times
August 8, 2010
Page 33

A front-row seat to democracy in the Philippines

I spent Sunday afternoon down at the Philippines Embassy in Singapore, interviewing expat Filipinos after they cast their votes for president, vice president and legislators -- I was a one-man exit poll. Then I wrote this story.

Filipinos are a generally joyous bunch and it was clear the thousand or so that voted on Sunday were excited to be exercising what many characterized as their civic duty. Many people stood outside the walls of the embassy in the scorching sunshine taking pictures of their ink-stained index-finger nails, documentation that they had actually voted. (Voters' nails are splashed with indelible ink that remains for a week so officials can be sure no one is voting more than once.)

Many of the people there were first-time voters, or second-timers at most. The Philippines instituted overseas voting in 2004, so for many of the Filipino women who have worked as maids and nannies in Singapore for decades this was a rare chance to have a say in the goings-on back home. Indeed, most of the people I met there said they were domestic "helpers". Many of them were shy, but they clearly enjoyed the opportunity to vote.

I asked everyone I talked to who they voted for, but that was not information everyone offered up easily. Most people younger than 35 had no problem discussing their choice with me. It was the older crowd that was a bit cagey. Some told me they didn't think it would be appropriate to reveal their candidate of choice. Others were decidedly more paranoid. One woman told me she had a son in Manila, and wouldn't want him to get any unwelcome visits. Given the history of election-related violence in the Philippines, I can't say I blame them for being cautious.

The big buzz surrounding this year's election was the introduction of automated voting machines. As far as I know, they were not made by Diebold. Still, pre-election reports that the machines were glitchy led some to wonder if they might cause more problems than they solve.

Most people at the embassy on Sunday were pleased with the new machines. Sure the new system was no guarantee against "cheating", may of them said, but it's a big improvement over the old method of writing in your candidate's name and having the ballots counted by hand. "If we're not going to start it now, then when? We don't want to be stuck with manual elections forever," one woman told me.

All indications (including my one-man exit poll) are that Benigno "Noynoy" Aquino would win the presidency in a landslide. I honestly can't say what this will mean for the Philippines, but Aquino, if nothing else, has impressive roots. Here's hoping he does his nation proud.

Tender Ankles: A snap shot of health care in Singapore

An article in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago looked at Singapore's health care system in comparison it to the US model. Among other things, it said:

Singapore spends less than 4 percent of its GDP on health care. We spend 17 percent (and Singapore's somewhat younger population doesn't begin to explain the difference). Matching Singapore's performance in our $15 trillion economy would free up $2 trillion a year for other public and private purposes.

Impressive. As the article says, adopting all of Singapore's practices would not really work for American patients -- the country's notoriously intrusive tendencies in personal matters is nothing to admire.

But here's a little anecdote, just for matters of comparison. Earlier this month, I tweaked my ankle playing basketball. I knew it was nothing serious, but a few days later it was still a bit tender . So I decided to see the doctor, just to put my mind at ease.

This is something I would never even consider doing in the US -- peace of mind is not worth the however-many-hundred dollars a 10-minute doctor visit would cost. Such exorbitant cost is not something I have to worry about here, though.

I showed up to the clinic without an appointment and had the doctor look at the ankle. As I suspected, nothing a few more days of rest wouldn't fix. He gave me some cream to rub on the muscle to make it feel better. Since I was there anyway, I asked him about a wart on my toe I've had for a while. He gave me something for that too. The grand total when I left, including all medication, was three Singapore dollars -- less than two US dollars.

In the US, I would have spent half an hour or more filling out gratuitous paperwork, waited another 20 minutes for the doctor to see me, probably gotten an X-ray "just to be safe" because the doc doesn't want to get sued, and who knows what else. One thing's for sure -- I would have felt a lot worse after I saw the bill than I did when I went in.

I doubt Singapore has the best health-care system in the world, maybe not even one of the best. But it sure beats what's on offer Stateside.

And one more thing to respect about the way things are done on this side, from the Post piece:

In Singapore, if a child is obese, they don't get Rose Garden exhortations from the first lady. They get no lunch and mandatory exercise periods during school.

Among the Scrabble all-stars in Southeast Asia

A couple weeks ago, my girlfriend and I took our first dip in the waters of competitive Scrabble. We go head-to-head semi-nightly and the battles are always intense (sometimes, possibly too intense). We figured it was time to put our skills on public display.

The Singapore Scrabble Association was hosting the 2009 Yew Tee Scrabble Open Championship, which, as it turned out, was a warm-up for the biennial World Scrabble Championships (WSC) that was being held the next week in Johor Bahru, Malyasia, just across the strait from Singapore.

We were just there for a little fun, of course, full embodiments of our "Recreational" division (she finished 7th, I finished 9th out of 16 players). But others were there for some real-life Word Wars.

We didn't mingle much with the players in the Masters division. They had a pretty intense palate of games -- eight that day (compared to our six total) and eight the day before. But we chatted briefly with a guy decked out in short shorts and a Metallica "Ride the Lightning" T-shirt. (Didn't catch his name but the T-shirt was sick.) He had flown in from Hungary where he's among the elite, a top-rated player in both English and Hungarian versions of Scrabble. How someone can master all the arcane words required to be a world-class Scrabble player in just English is incredible. To be able to do it in multiple languages just makes my mind hurt. He was in Southeast Asia for the next weekend's WSC and was in Singapore to practice.

Also competing at the Yew Tee Open was New Zealander Nigel Richards, who cooly strolled up to the community center auditorium sporting jeans, a Scrabble T-shirt, a pair of thick glasses and a bulging fanny pack. I noticed him because of the fanny pack, of course, but little did I know that he is, or at least has been, the top-rated Scrabble player in the world, as well as the the reigning WSC champion. He crushed the competition in Singapore, winning 13 of his 16 games by a combined margin of 1575 points. He would go on to finish as the runner-up to Thailand's No 1 player, Pakorn Nemitrmansuk, at the WSC.

The WSC pitted more than 100 players from 40 different countries against each other over three days and 24 games worth of high-powered letter crunching. Turns out Thailand is a Scrabble powerhouse of sorts; Pakorn, who was the runner-up in 2003 and 2005, was one of three Thais to finish in the top 5. He won US$15,000 for his efforts. He secured his victory and a score of 670 by playing the word "botanica", whatever that means.

And here is an interesting little blog posting from the Wall St Journal several months ago about Scrabble.

Obama aces the politics of APEC as Singapore's political freedoms struggle to pass

I was at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference a couple weeks ago, mostly hanging out in the press room at the Suntec convention center watching on the TV the events going on a couple floors below me.

It was something of a historic conference with Barack Obama making an appearance, which was unfortunately truncated because of the shootings at Fort Hood. He ended up only being in town for less than 24 hours before he was whisked away to China.

While here in Singapore he was able to meet with leaders of the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN), including Burma, the first time a US president has done either of those things (a prez had never met with ASEAN, and not formally with a Burmese leader since LBJ in 1966).

APEC is not an incredibly interesting event and Obama's presence there was all about cultivating US "soft power". Here is a good description of what APEC is all about from the Economist's Democracy in America blog:

It's a big deal because, while what gets said at these Asian summits isn't usually important, who shows up is. It isn't a big deal because...well, just reverse that last sentence... But it is one of the premier Asian forums for showing up and being photographed standing next to each other while smiling, and one of the irritating things about East and Southeast Asia is that showing up and being photographed standing next to each other while smiling is extremely important. The Bush administration failed to send sufficiently high-ranking officials to Southeast Asia, and experts from the region said that contributed to declining American influence.

From Obama's standpoint, APEC was all well and good; photos were taken, hands were shaken. But the event also highlighted some of the more unseemly aspects of the host nation in terms of its political freedoms (officially, we're supposed to refer to "host economies", for PC's sake; I'm talking about Singapore here).

First, a well-known freelance journalist, Benjamin Bland, was denied accreditation to cover the conference and a renewal of his work visa was rejected, so he couldn't even be in the city while the conference was going on. No explanation was given for the rejection, and Bland said that if he had spoken out about it he would have been arrested. No wonder Reporters Without Borders ranks the country 133rd our of 175 on the world press freedom index (a ranking, by the way, that Singapore's Law Minister K Shanmugam calls "absurd and divorced from reality").

An unrelated, but significant, event also took place while Obama was in town. It was the launch of a book by Dr Lim Hock Siew, Singapore's second-longest-held political prisoner. I can't say I know a whole lot about this man or his politics, but I couldn't help but be captivated by what he had to say at the book launch (see below).

As a top figure in the opposition Socialist party (and a defector of the still-ruling People's Action Party), he was detained without trial for close to 20 years (released in 1982). Opposition voices are not exactly welcomed in Singaporean politics, and as Dr Lim's case shows, many opposition figures are forcefully silenced. I don't know if the book launch was meant to coincide with Obama's visit here, or if anyone expected Obama to even acknowledge the plight of Dr Lim. Under the circumstances, it would have been wildly inappropriate and counterproductive of Obama to do so. Nevertheless, Dr Lim seems to be quite an interesting figure in Singaporean politics, or maybe I'm just a sucker for the underdog:

Singapore leaders are either too cheap to recycle or too lazy

Last week, Singapore's infallible first Prime Minister and current Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was giving a talk at the Singapore Management University and was asked a question about why Singapore has fallen so far behind other industrialized Asian nations like Japan and South Korea on the recycling front. His answer? Too expensive:

On recycling, (MM Lee said) the main problem is that the single rubbish chute in every Housing and Development Board flat encourages residents to throw everything into it, instead of separating their recyclables from food waste as the Japanese, Taiwanese and South Koreans commonly do.

“We have thought about this very carefully, but just restructuring the buildings to make the lift stop on every floor...may cost nearly $100,000 per flat. You start putting two or three chutes into every flat, where do you find the space and what will it cost?” he asked.

True, Singapore has some green tendencies. Just this week it launched a Zero Energy Building, which produces as much energy as it uses and is the first such building in Southeast Asia. The country has also found a fairly innovate method for disposing of waste, at least for the short term. Trash is incinerated and then shipped to an island a few miles off the coast where the ashes are buried. The Semakau landfill also doubles as a rejuvenated nature preserve. But trash incineration, even though it supposedly also creates up to 3% of the total power generated in Singapore, is far from a sustainable way of getting rid of waste.

Still, Singapore is hardly known for its environmentalism. The most popular food courts serve their goods almost exclusively on Styrofoam plates with disposable chopsticks. Grocers may literally give you more plastic bags at checkout than actual products you're purchasing -- one small bag for the meat, one for the soap, another for the shampoo and so on, all placed in another large bag to carry all your (bagged) products. It's shocking, and I stand by with a watchful eye declining the excessive baggage. I usually leave an unneeded bag or two on the counter when I leave.

Recycling is such an easy way to reduce waste. It's a habit that's been drilled into my Western mindset, but it's one of the healthier habits I've developed. Recycling bins apparently exist across the island, but I can't recall ever seeing one. And without a vehicle, it's not exactly convenient to haul bulging bags of bottles and containers to some faraway receptacle.

At my apartment, we put bags of recyclables and stacks of newspapers outside our door or down in the basement, assuming they're picked up and properly deposited. But now I'm not so sure that whoever picks up those items doesn't just toss them in with the rest of the trash.

For MM Lee to be so flippant about even trying to promote recycling is troubling. The way he puts it, it'll just be too expensive to retrofit apartment buildings and that's the end of the discussion. All it would take is to have a collection bin at all apartment complexes, convenient enough for willing recyclers, and have waste management services swoop by on their regular routes. People may be lazy, but just because they can't currently toss recyclables down a shoot like they do other refuse doesn't mean recycling is a lost cause. For such an advanced Asian nation, Singapore's primitive attitude towards recycling is inexcusable.

A tale of chaste sex-tourism in Cambodia

I was in Cambodia back in the summer. I wrote about it here.

But there is a sequel. It takes place in the seaside town of Sihanoukville. Here it is, at long last, finally published on The Tyee last week.

Enjoy.

New hoops league to tip off in Southeast Asia

Basketball fans in Southeast Asia now have some professional teams to call their own, as the ASEAN Basketball League was officially launched last week in Manila. Games should get underway next month.

Backed by AirAsia founder Tony Fernandes, the league will start with six teams from six different countries: the Brunei Barracudas, KL (Kuala Lumpur) Dragons, the Philippine Patriots, the Satria Muda BritAma, the Thailand Tigers and the Singapore Slingers. There will be 15 home and away games with a four-team playoff in February.

Basketball hardly enjoys the following in ASEAN countries as it does in, say, China. My guess is that the Philippine Patriots are going to be the hottest team and probably the most financially successful. Of all these countries, the Philippines is definitely the most hoops-mad -- while soccer is king everywhere else, it barely cracks the top three favorite sports in the Philippines, coming in far behind basketball and volleyball (in that order).

I played a few games with my Filipino roommate's 14-year-old son, and at a foot shorter and 15 years younger than the rest of us, he dominated. The Patriots are the team I'll go check out when they come to Singapore.

According to ESPN Star:

Each ABL team will be fielding seven local players, three ASEAN imports (with one needing just ASEAN heritage to qualify), and two international imports. Teams do not have to field ASEAN imports if they have the additional three local players they are satisfied that can perform just as well, like the Patriots of the Phillipines.

A significant point was made at the press conference and that is the salary cap has been set at US$400,000 per season, with the top import being set to be paid in the region of US$100,000. The second top import's salary will be set at US$50,000, with the remaining players splitting the salary amount left according to their discretion.

The league is interesting because it will pit club teams that represent countries against one another, injecting an undeniable flavor of international competition with heated rivalries almost a given. I'm sure the Singapore/KL games will be intense.

It may take a few seasons to get off the ground, but with solid financial backing and the moral support of FIBA, the ABL could really be something. Measured against the always floundering CBA in China, success should not be too difficult.

Tuol Sleng and the Killing Fields: A morning basking in past brutalities

I've been spending more time travelling than blogging, lately. I should be staying put here in Singapore, for a while anyway, but for now I'm going to use this space to regurgitate some of what I've seen.

It's not all interesting, but some of it is. Back in June I took a trip to Cambodia. I was told before I left that Cambodia is a place where things rarely go according to plan. Even though I had no firm plans going in, I still found this to be the case.

The first part of my trip, in which I play "genocide tourist", can be summed up here. Read that for more explanation about the material below.

The rest of (this part of) the trip will be told through pictures (and some text):





This is the inside of one of the classrooms-turned-torture chambers at Toul Sleng prison (S-21). Hard to imagine what unspeakable acts happened to poor souls shackled to that metal bed, tortured into unconsciousness. Outside this room is a set of tall wooden poles. It's like a gallows but without the mercy of death. Prisoners would be yanked off the ground by their arms, behind their backs not over their head. Once the prisoner passed out from the pain, he would be lowered to the ground where his head would be shoved in a cauldron of rancid water, often contaning human waste, to be shocked back into consciousness.



These are some of the thousands of pictures of condemned inmates. The utterly terrified look of the guy on the bottom left pretty much sums up how I think I'd feel if in their position.



These are some paintings by Vann Nath, one of the 10 or fewer prisoners to survive out of the 15,000 or so detained at the prison (see some more of his paintings here, depicting the varieties of torture and murder inflicted at Tuol Sleng). Vann Nath recently testified at the ongoing genocide tribunal. Pay particular attention to the painting on the right (hint, note the water can)...



Look familiar? Looks an awful lot like waterboarding to me. That means the tactics the US has employed in the "war on terror" to extract information are comparable to the brutalities favored by the Khmer Rouge. Let it be said, indisputably: waterboarding is torture.




Part of what makes Tuol Sleng so chilling is its dirt and grittiness. This is not a Disneyland ride. I have no official confirmation, but if those aren't blood stains underneath where there were once shackles and countless suffering prisoners, I have no idea what they are.



In case anyone had the idea to plunge off the third floor of the cell block to end with a quick and relatively honorable death, three-storey sheets of barbed wire were stretched across the front of the building. That's the courtyard in front.






Finally, this is not at Tuol Sleng but the "Killing Fields", which likely more people have heard of. It's where most Tuol Sleng prisoners were hauled and finally executed, usually with a club to save bullets. The fields themselves, formerly an orchard, are not much to look at. Some exhumed mass graves, now grassy ditches scarring the earth. A lot of skulls too. It's all about the vibe there, just dwelling for a moment on the unspeakable acts and thoughtless murder committed just 30 years earlier on that very spot. The thing that represents this perversion of nature more than anything else is above: the killing tree. Guards would bash the heads of children against the base of the trunk and dispose of them that way. This glorious, benevolent entity twisted and turned into a tool of destruction ... it really just gets me, eats at my conception of nature. I sat in the tree's shade and pondered this paradox. It still haunts me.

Standing up for the "sexually challenged"

It's easy to retch at the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold the legal-discrimination edict of Proposition 8. A shame, yes, but really not all that surprising. And, sadly, it was the "right" decision, in that the court's job is to interpret the constitution, not legislate. Like it or not, in a state famously "governed by proposition", the constitution actually allows the nuptial equivalent of separate drinking fountains for gay people.

That is reason enough for California to junk its current constitution and start from scratch. Suffocating 2/3-majority requirements that leave the state financially hamstrung every year is probably the most politically viable reason to start fresh, but the fact that California's constitution now officially promotes ignorance makes the whole thing seem worthless. The fact that a majority of ignoramuses can pass a measure so rooted in archaic understandings of human relationships proves the current system is seriously flawed in what is otherwise a fine state.

Then again, it's not all that bad when compared to the situation in Singapore. We learned earlier that views of homosexuality here are not exactly enlightened. And though I think people in the US who would deny a homosexual the right to marry the person he or she loves would be the same people a generation earlier tsk tsking at "uppity negroes" holding up traffic, I also realize that they don't hold a flame to attitudes here.

To review the basics: sex between two men in Singapore is against the law; it is a "gross indecency" under section 377A. Apparently, sex between women is OK, or at least not criminal -- they seem to differentiate between "lesbianism" and "homosexuality" here. To be fair, anal and oral sex of any kind was illegal here until 2007, when that ban was repealed. Progress?

Like elsewhere, I would hope attitudes towards homosexuals here are evolving and that discrimination will die out in the next generation. But reading some of the things printed in the paper last week makes me think attitudes here have a long way to go.

Take this letter to the Straits Times, posted on the website. The author sagely informs us that "sexually challenged" is not an offensive term referring to gays. He continues:

"It is a fact that homosexuality is an abnormality for the simple reason that it is against the laws of nature. Nature intended each species to reproduce itself and homosexuality does not do the job.

"It is possible that some people are born with homosexual inclinations but that does not make them normal. They are in the same category as people born mentally retarded or blind or deaf or mute. While we may sympathise with them, we do not think of them as normal."

How enlightening. (In case that link disappears, as the ST website is not terribly reliable in its archives, here's the cache.)

On Thursday, another article ran quoting a professor named Koo Tsai Kee, who delivered an impassioned plea to Parliament warning that "intolerance" poses the biggest threat to Singapore. Ok, you'd think, some truly wise words. (Here's the cache.)

"Intolerance", Mr Koo says, is a "growing cancer in society". But to him, intolerance only relates to "religious and racial bigotry". The AWARE saga (linked above) was a showdown between a group of conservative Christians and another group of (for the sake of derogatory hyperbole) homosexual sympathizers. That the debate was "framed" this way by the media, Mr Koo claims, shows there is a clear "intolerance of diversity". In other words, being supportive of gays is an affront to Christianity and, thus, a potentially destructive show of intolerance.

The way the saga was covered, Mr Koo suggests, was tainted by reporters "hobnobbing with the homosexual fraternity", something that calls into question "whether there should ever be an unregulated press". ST editor Han Fook Kwang rightly refuted such claims in his defense of ST's coverage, which was as complete as it could be under the circumstances.

But no one in the mix seems to understand the heart of the issue: Tolerance means tolerating everyone, regardless of race, religion, gender or sexual preference. The very fact that there are laws on the books ANYWHERE that legalize discrimination and criminalize human nature is an affront to humanity. Until we see the end of officially sanctioned intolerance, the "growing cancer" will continue to spread.