Yours Toothfully by Dr Chan Joon Yee

Those of you who buy a particular brand of air-con had better be sure you don’t do naughty things. That’s because this brand of air-con obviously have an important image to upkeep. These folks actually dropped their spokesman for having an affair. Or are they dropping him because his affair was exposed?

yao mo gao chor ah? What has Jack Neo’s affair got to do with air cons? Are people who buy that brand of air con so squeaky clean that they would be too disgusted to support the brand if it’s promoted by a celebrity who has cheated on his wife? Actually, he didn’t even bother to cheat. His wife knew about it all along. She just decided to close one eye and here comes a bunch of moralists telling everyone that he should neither be forgiven nor be allowed to promote energy-saving, easy to clean air cons.

I’m glad mine is a Fujitsu.

Now let’s talk about the women. Singapore has indeed come a long way. Our women have won us Olympic medals and fought their way to the summit of Everest. For the sake of diversity and forgetting Annabel Chong who is no longer in business, we now have our very own Monica Lewinsky. In fact, I think Wendy Chong has surpassed Monica Lewinsky in more ways than one.

OK. So Jack Neo was more careful than Bill Clinton. He made sure there weren’t any hairs left in his car. He didn’t give Wendy Chong a chance to keep a stained dress unwashed for 2 years. Even without DNA or potential YouTube video evidence, this young lady had dared to go public with their affair. Amazing.

Even more amazing were the young ladies who jumped on the bandwagon to claim that Jack Neo has made advances at them. Which attractive young lady hadn’t have horny guys making passes at them? Why didn’t they complain about the Ah Pek at the coffeshop who kept staring at the butts? Why didn’t they complain about the foreign worker on the crowded MRT who tried to elbow their breasts? What about the guys on MSN and Skype who keep asking them to turn on their webcams? Does it really make sense to complain about these folks and warn other girls who probably faced even more nuisances and harrassment than they ever did? They think our girls are so stupid that they need them to play martyr, expose their own affairs so that others can learn something from it? As if our pretty girls who are so used to unwelcome advances, don’t already know how to protect themselves.

But it’s Jack Neo! That makes all the difference. Luckily I’m not into show biz.

“What? $5 for the soup? Steamboat is supposed to come with soup. How can you charge me for it? It’s not that I can’t afford to pay for the soup. It’s just that this is the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard.”

This was the argument I overheard at the next table. It was between an angry woman in her late 50s and the poor waiter trying hard to explain company policy. You might think that she was shocked by the bill when the waiter showed it to her. But no. She had not even started yet. The waiter was just informing her upfront that they would be charging $5 for the soup.

I was having steamboat dinner with my friend Tsun Han at Fat Fish Restaurant at the Admiral Country Club on a Saturday night. They serve steamboat which included a generous spread of seafood and sliced meat buffet style. Like one reviewer said, “the prawns were so fresh that they squirm”. The staff was also friendly and attentive. The ambience was pretty good without being packed with noisy crowds. Well, at least it wasn’t noisy until Madam Soupless turned up and complained about the $5 soup even before she started.

Let’s see. The restaurant charges $22.80++ per person which was cheap. Adding $5 to the total bill would mean an additional charge of only a little more than a $1 for 4 people. So would Madam Soupless be happier if she were charged $25 (2 people at her table) with no mention of soup cost?

The restaurant’s policy is just an example of itemised charges promoting “transparency”. If charging Madam Soupless $5 was enough to freak her out, I wonder what would happen if the restaurant gave her a bill which looks like this:

Food $18
Soup $5
Utensils $1
Gas $1

$100 + $7 GST is ridiculous? $107 no GST is good? Look who is being not just ridiculous but also stupid.

OK, so now we know that Tiger Woods is as champion with golf as he is with womanising. We’re certainly going to see a lot of finger-pointing, condemnation and jokes related to this latest discovery. A star he is, but Tiger Woods doesn’t control the media like some governments. He’s certainly going to get a hard time from the public - especially from the wronged women and envious men.

Of course, stories like Woods’ are hardly new. Some years ago, Chinese superstar Jackie Chan was embroiled in a scandal involving an illegitimate child. A blow from this guy would send a man crashing through doors and walls, but the public, far from his lethal blows, were giving the kungfu superstar more pointed accusations that he could deflect. It doesn’t matter how big or how deft you are. Public opinion reduced poor Jackie from superhero to gutter rat in cyberspace.

The excuse for all this condemnation, especially within conservative Asian societies, is that these folks are supposed to be role models. Our children learn from them, drink the same brand of green tea they drink, use the same brand of shampoo they use, so we must also keep minor wives or sleep with someone else’s husband if they do.

In the Land of Sheltered Walkways, exposure to any form of bad influence is not acceptable. Hence, if a role model ever does something immoral in the eyes of the righteous public to whom similar temptations are totally out of reach, he/she must be brought down. It’s already so unfair that these folks get so many temptations. How dare they succumb? Fortunately Jackie Chan doesn’t depend on Singaporeans to earn a living.

It’s not difficult to see that being a role model can be very tiring. You’re not perfect like everybody else, but you not only have to put on your best behaviour whenever you go public, you’ve got to make sure that anything unpleasant or sinful that you do in private doesn’t get exposed either. You can’t control the exposure. You don’t own all the newsPAPers.

It’s quite understandable that Hongkongers, Taiwanese and even Americans who voted for Bill Clinton are against adultery. Singapore has higher moral standards. Beauty queens are not supposed to steal things, speak bad English and have breast “enhancement”. Wait a minute. I understand the need to make sense and be honest. I may even agree with the no “naughty” photos rule. But no boob job?

It’s deception, they say. Those who “cheat” viewers into paying 20 cents to vote for them with their phones, cheat judges into giving them good points and cheat dirty old men into drooling over their artificially enhanced mammaries are dishonest and must be stripped of their crowns. Future beauty queens must all be examined for surgical scars and xrayed for butt and breasts implants.

Picture of Rachel Kum taken from the New Paper

yao mo gao chor ah? Are they going to xray contestants for dental implants as well? For dentists, dentures, crowns, bridges etc are all supposed to look like real teeth. Does that make me an accomplice to all this “cheating” if I make a replacement for a missing tooth that looks real and helps the contestant win the title of beauty queen? Or must the contestant go on stage with her missing tooth/teeth just to be “fair” to people who can’t win even with a full set of teeth?

Our Foreign Minister George Yeo said at the APEC meeting: “creeping protectionism must be addressed …”

Who cares?

Thaksin is in Cambodia, for goodness sake. Please pass the popcorn and the beer. The show has just begun. In fact, at this moment, both countries have sent each other’s First Secretaries packing. There were threats to close the border which Abhisit quickly withdrew. Hun Sen laughed and blasted the incumbent Thai government. Then a Thai journalist calls Koh Kong (a Cambodian border town Thaksin had started to develop while in office) a land of “Corrupt Immigration Officials, Visa Scams, Crooked Cops, Prostitutes, Gambling”. One Farang reader remarked: “Are you talking about Thailand?”

Angry Cambodians replied: “Aren’t such things far more common in Thailand than in Cambodia?”

What is regional politics going to be like without people like Thaksin? Who wants to watch a beauty queen who gives boring answers when there’s someone who boomz? Who wants to listen to all that politically correct nonsense when Thaksin is back in town to stir things up? Thaksin-generated news is certainly more deserving of popcorn and beer. All right. A few angry people have remarked that Thaksin shouldn’t have accepted Hun Sen’s offer and cause a rift between both countries, but let’s not forget who started all this.

Rewind to the time when Cambodia applied for Phra Vihear temple to be listed as a UNESCO heritage site. Back then, the pro-Thaksin government did not show any objection to it. And rightly so because as far back as 1961, The Hague had ruled that the temple belonged to Cambodia. The latter graciously allowed Thais free access to the temple as if it were their own.

For decades, the residents at the border have lived in harmony. All of a sudden, Abhisit and his “loyalists” revived the territorial dispute, all with the very obvious aim of trying to make the pro-Thaksin government look unpatriotic. And at what price to the well-being of the Thai people. Yellow-shirted Bangkians who were unoccupied after dinner travelled thousands of km to the Cambodian border to stage demonstrations, disrupting cross-border traffic and causing business losses to the local residents. That’s why they were attacked by the angry local residents who should be the ones complaining if there were any real territorial disputes. Ironically, it was the people from faraway Bangkok, unoccupied after dinner, who were there to stir trouble all in the name of patriotism.

Why was Hun Sen labelled as a pawn in Thaksin’s big gambit? He and his country have lots to gain by engaging Thaksin. What about the Yellow-shirted fools who caused trouble in Cambodia in the name of “patriotism”? Aren’t they the real pawns in a big game plan to destroy Thaksin without giving a damn about the future of Thailand?

Hun Sen has done his Math (probably with some help from his shrewd adviser). If Abhisit decided to close the border, Thai businessmen will lose US$2 billion in export income annually. In contrast, Cambodia will only lose a few million. The cancellations of MOUs between both countries will likewise have little effect on Cambodia because with this Thai government in power, none of the proposed projects will ever take shape anyway. Hun Sen also said: “If Thailand does not respect international law, how can you expect us to respect Thai law?”

And Hun Sen was not just talking about Phra Vihear. Russian arms dealer Victor Bout, suspected of selling weapons to Al Qaeda, was arrested in Thailand. The Thai judge threw out the request to have him extradited to the US because he was arrested for dealing with US agents posing as Columbian guerillas who were not listed as terrorists! Goodness. If Mas Selamat were arrested for a traffic offence in Thailand, he probably can walk free after paying a fine.