Rubbing it in!

There's serious stuff out there to blog about, especially today's ST page one lead, "Turn S'pore into tropical jewel? 'Work never ends' ".

Having just come back from a cruise that visited several Baltic cities, I believe the imperative to make cities vibrant and liveable yet not exorbitant (eg, pricey "pay and pee" toilets and vehicle parking charges that cost an arm and a leg!) is a cogent one. But I will need to organise my material for this theme and I can't do that yet, as my eyes still tire easily.

So, for today, given the abundance of weird stuff out there too, I'll highlight three goofy items...

Should one make fun of a country's national anthem?

ST carried a New York Times Syndicate article today on this issue (Alex Marshall, "Sung with national pride", 2 July, page A22). I had earlier blogged about how an athlete from Kazakhstan, at a medals award ceremony in Kuwait, had to endure listening to a fake Kazakh anthem taken from the spoof movie Borat. I even included a YouTube clip in that particular blog entry.

Well, the NYT article says there was another Kazakh national anthem gaffe, this time in the very country itself! At a ski festival in Kostanay in northern Kazakhstan in March this year, the opening bars of Ricky Martin's Livin La Vida Loca (Livin' the Crazy Life) was briefly played by accident, instead of the anthem. Here it is, courtesy yet again of YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65sJCET54CQ

Little wonder that last month, the Kazakh Parliament passed a Bill mandating that anyone who "desecrates" the country's national anthem faces up to a year in prison.

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Ris Low: how to put on a condom

As usual, insing.com does not disappoint in the funny bones department. Actually the story here is a serious one -- a survey that found many Singaporean teens are clueless about condom use. But it is the Ris Low video clip included in the story (captioned "Safe sex with Ris Low") that you gotta watch!...

http://news.insing.com/tabloid/sporean-teens-clueless-about-condoms/id-5b523f00

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Mama's boy: Air India pilot won't fly off without her!

Last item is an AFP wire story, from xin.msn.com:

http://news.xin.msn.com/en/weird/air-india-pilot-seats-mum-in-cockpit-report-5