Organic-Ally

Found myself going to church one Sunday wearing clothes that were not exactly colour-coodinated. I remember a friend asking why the Chinese in immediate post-Mao China seemed to be wearing clothes that clash in colour. You know, like they mix an orange blouse with a red skirt. He was a medical student (and now trains doctors in deepest, most rural China) and posed the question: Are they all colour-blind? Of course not. They simply didn't have enough clothes to match them accordingly. I am in what some social anthropologists might call being in a liminal, in-between, state. I, too, do not have enough clothes to ensure that I am always colour-coordinated. (One of my ex-colleagues reading this will be gobsmacked. She might remember how I used to have a 'personal shopper' who picked out all my working clothes as I hated shopping even back then.) Yes, I do have clothes in the wardrobe, but they are mainly of conventional cotton, and some have polyester and viscose mixed in. My ...

Last Saturday, Husband and I had the rare opportunity to attend a concert at our local arts centre. It featured Cantabile, a male quartet, that does a lot of a capella singing. I first saw the group perform on TV and was thrilled that they were going to perform at the Singapore Festival of Arts more than a decade ago. I was then working for one of the 'Big Six' accounting firms as a change management consultant and could pretty much afford to attend any of the big-name foreign acts -- including the musical Evita and Placido Domingo -- being brought in by promoters aiming for the 'Yuppie' market. Cantabile left a distinct mark on my musical landscape as I had one of their cassette tapes when I packed my one suitcase and headed to Amsterdam to begin my life as a full-time Christian worker. From a habit of indiscriminate use of taxis in Singapore, I had to resort to cycling or taking the tram in Amsterdam. Instead of a fat wage package every month I made the transition t...

I think I might get a lot of hate mail after this. But as I merely wish to discuss some vexing contradictions in life, I hope readers would just take this as an 'airing of thoughts' with no ill-will directed at any particular individual. This week a young woman who's suffered from cancer is refused permission to have her frozen embryos implanted because her ex-partner has refused permission. I just saw a programme about a child of a very disabled woman who is struggling to be a single mother and a professional artist. I recall another TV programme about another single mother who is profoundly deaf and blind who had a baby and needed a retinue of supporters to provide childcare. Isn't it strange that the very people (scientists) who believe in evolution -- survival of the fittest -- are prepared to give medical treatment to women to conceive babies when there isn't a chance that they could look after these children on their own, and especially without a father? What ...

Found the following report which supports what I've suspected all along and mentioned in a previous blog . It's factory farming that is to blame for the spread of bird flu. Worse is to come, it seems. Note the last sentence in this report. ************************* Taken from Straits Times Feb 28, 2006 'Poultry industry to blame' for bird flu Wild birds, backyard farms not at fault, says NGO report BANGKOK - A NEW report released yesterday blamed the transnational poultry industry, and not small-scale poultry farming and wild birds, as the root cause of the global bird flu crisis. The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has actually created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses such as the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Mr Devlin Kuyek of the Montreal-based international non-governmental organisation, Grain. Once inside densely populated factory farms, viruses can become lethal rapidly and amplify, Mr Kuyek s...