A ruckus over a rucksack?

For today, I just want to excerpt and comment on letters that caught my eye in ST and Today:

1) First one is a letter in Today (29 March) headlined "Was bra ad appropriate?". The writer felt that an explicit "one-minute" ad for a brand of  maximizer bra shown during a Mandarin TV programme on Channel 8 that began at 10.45pm on a weeknight was inappropriate.

She was "appalled" to see shots of women slowly unzipping their tops and close-ups of cleavage. She wondered how "such an advertisement made its way to a programme aired at a family viewing hour".

Today obviously contacted its parent company, MediaCorp, and here is the latter's interesting reply on the same day and on the same page, as excerpted:

"The said 30-second advertisement was aired at 10.45pm, past the family-viewing time of 6am to 10pm [in compliance with the regulatory authority's ruling]".

So, there you have it, folks. Singapore's official family-viewing time is from 6am to 10pm. To put it in Singlish, if your kids watch TV before 6am and after 10pm, that's your pasar!

MediaCorp then tried to be helpful -- on behalf of the advertiser -- with regards to the way the "said 30-second advertisement" was done. It said: "The treatment of the advertisement is cheeky and, in our opinion, did not contain any sexual innuendos."

So, again, there you have it. Bra advertisers now know that they are safe if they show shots of women slowly unzipping their tops and close-ups of cleavage. Only after 10pm, of course. And presumably before 6am.

2) Also in Today (29 March) is a very pertinent point made by another writer in her letter headlined "What about not raising rents". She notes that MPs were "going around hawker centres and coffeeshops urging stallholders to be part of the Retail Watch Group by making them promise to maintain their prices". She added: "The small profits of these food sellers would have been squeezed by higher ingredient prices and higher rents. Shouldn't the MPs look at dealing with the increased cost upstream by urging landlords not to raise rents or by getting wholesalers to similarly pledge not to increase their prices?"

3) The Straits Times (29 March) published two letters that commented on a picture story the newspaper ran yesterday ("He's in the army... but she has the backpack") which showed a fit-looking NSman in uniform walking ahead and what looks like a diminutive maid (although the story merely said "woman") carrying his military-issue backpack trailing behind.

One writer commended the SAF for promising to look into the matter, adding that the "stint in the army is to toughen the individual and turn them from boys to men, and into soldiers".

The other writer made the seemingly valid point that the photographer should have stopped the soldier and asked him why he needed a helper to carry his backpack.

Netizens, it seems, have already weighed in.

I smell a rat in the photo, which was sent to ST's STOMP, the paper's citizen journalism platform. I suspect it was a posed shot, sent to ST to "cho luan" (create a controversy). Let's see if I'm right.