Happy 46th birthday, Singapore! And why no mother-in-law jokes here...

What was I doing on 9 August, 1965? Frankly, I can't remember. But I was 14 years old and in secondary school, with a great bunch of friends (we still keep in contact and call ourselves the G4). The hawker centres and airconditioned foodcourts of today were non-existent. I remember instead the Orchard Road carpark opposite present-day Centrepoint that, come the evenings, transformed into a cluster of open-air foodstalls. Other streets and alleys had their rows of foodstalls too, like this one:

No, that's not me in the picture, which is actually a "grab" from a newspaper.

Next, I found an undated photo of the Khoo family clan (including the spouses of the married siblings but less one unmarried brother, How Tiong, who reportedly had come back from shift work that morning and was in no mood to have his picture taken):

A guesstimate would be that the picture was taken in 1967, two years after the first National Day (Tan Huat, the baby in the picture, looks to be about two years old). So, I would have been 16 years old then.

Finally, I also found this 1971 pic of me, doing my National Service stint:

Gee, apart from all that shock of hair (relative to what I have today), look at those thick glasses! The irony is that the picture was taken when I was training to be an infantry section leader -- you know, the chaps who are supposed to point loaded rifles at the enemy and shoot at them. The military must have been very, very short-sighted not to be aware that I was very, very short-sighted.

Fortunately, the possibility of Singapore's military history's first case of "friendly fire" (that is, the unintended shooting of one's own "friendly" forces) was averted when I later sought a transfer -- successful, but with some persuasion needed -- to a pen-pushing job.

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Yesterday, I referred to a linguistic device, the leading question. Thinking about it, the example of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" should more properly be labelled a "loaded question" (nothing to do with loaded rifles, of course).

Here's Wikipedia's take on this term:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loaded_question

It is worth clicking on the link because the examples cited are interesting.

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Postscript: I've learnt that my mother-in-law has started reading my blog, so I won't be telling mother-in-law jokes like this one:

Did you know that if you rearrange "mother in law", you get "woman Hitler"?

Or this one:

The Law of Relativity states that an hour with your girlfriend (before marriage) is like a minute while a minute with your mother-in-law (after marriage) is like an hour.

Or this one:

Did you hear about the cannibal who got married, and at the wedding reception, toasted his mother-in-law?

Nope. I won't be telling mother-in-law jokes, no sireee.

P.S. Mum, if you're reading this, just kidding... You are a wonderful mother-in-law!