Fat Fingers

would dictate that in order for one to enter a train disgorging its occupants, one should wait for the occupants to be disgorged before trying to enter the train.

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It appears that while Singaporeans have a very clear vision of their desired future (the empty seats as seen through the glass), they somehow fail to understand the reality (of allowing some time to let the passengers out before they can get in).

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The authorities, ever-aware of the need to nanny the public, have taken great pains to melt markings on the station platforms clearly indicating areas to be kept clear to help passengers exiting the trains. These markings, however, are useful only up till the time the train opens its doors, after which all common sense is lost in an orgy of bent spectacle frames and torn watch straps.

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What then, must SMRT do in order to maintain discipline?

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I would declare that nothing else in the world is as efficient as a platoon of recruits. I can also vouch for the speed, order and efficiency with which any request is carried out at a single command. Do we need to resort to such measures to allow passengers to disembark at Boon Lay station safely and efficiently?

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Common sense is really not common at all.

greeted me this evening as I walked to the bus stop with two of my classmates. One went off in a Route A single-deck shuttle bus which appeared to be grossly overcrowded, while two of us remained.

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I was shortly treated to the sight of no less than four double-deck 179 buses cresting the hill, and all at the bus stop were similarly surprised.

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The bus stop soon became a hive of activity as the four buses simultanouesly disgorged and picked up their passengers. Within two minutes, all was silent, as if those shiny red-and-white monsters had never been.

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Not five minutes later, two more double-deck buses appeared, and I watched the same scenario unfold before my very eyes.

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It was not till the two behemoths had gone did the solitary Route B shuttle bus come chugging up the hill.

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Disparity.

The afternoon sun was scorching its way across the west side today - a rare event, so I thought I’d better make the most of it by taking the Bridgestone down to the jetty.

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I don’t know what made me think it would be a short ride - it turned out to be 12.06 km each way. I must have forgotten how long the runway was. Anyway everything turned out alright because I got there in one piece. Average speed: 29.3 km/h. Road conditions: plenty of gravel and wood chips. Traffic: lots of heavy vehicles and unfriendly drivers.

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The trip back was a little more difficult because there was a headwind most of the way which slowed the average speed to around 25-ish. Plus the stop-and-smell-the-roses attitude made the trip back rather more relaxing.

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Got back at about 6:30pm and went to buy dinner. Touched up the frame with some of the car paint and it seems to work.

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I am extremely tired out from a constant brain massage. How can one think so many (useless) thoughts in one day?

Today is Sunday - day of rest; day of relaxation; Day of the Lord.

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After doing my duty at the old, brown church opposite CHIJMES (something I actually love doing), I set off on a long, round-the-town trip.

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I went to Centrepoint to look for some model paint at Central Hobby - and found the shop gone. Well. Shows how often I actually go to town. So I went off to Funan to buy my keyboard. Of the stacks of keyboards they carried, I could not find one that was cheap, had a USB connection, and had a layout that I liked. After ten minutes, I ended up with some China-made piece of plastic which went by the name of A1pro, only because it had two out of the three prerequisites - it was cheap, and it had a USB connection.

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Well, one generally gets what one pays for. A1pro was a super-lightweight, ultra-thin, keyboard which was hardly any easier to use than my laptop keypad. Plus, it had the "Delete" and "Insert" keys in the wrong places and had an additional three keys which went by the names of "Wake Up", "Sleep" and "Power", which when accidentally pressed, would do various things, including shutting down your computer. Brilliant.

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To make things worse, the "Backspace" key was the size of a normal character key, so trying to go back on an internet page is about as difficult as using the mouse - which I don’t like either.

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On the way out of Funan, I stopped by Bata to enquire about a shoe brush. It was tiny, it was expensive, and it didn’t look fantastic, so I decided not to buy it.

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Then it was off to Art Friend. Contrary to the name, it was not very friendly. The salesman was less-than-enthusiastic to help me with my bor liao (nothing better to do) questions, which went to the tune of "How permanent is this paint?" and "Once it dries, does it mean that nothing can wash it off?"

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After pondering for a good ten minutes, I bought two bottles of paint and had to wait ten minutes for the Sunday-mood salesgirl to finish serving the Sunday-mood lady in front of me. On the way out, I asked the salesgirl the very same questions, and being the Singaporean salesgirl she was, knew absolutely nothing about the products she was selling, and proceeded to ask the very same salesman who had informed me about the paints.

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Miffed, I walked out and went to the model shop opposite Art Friend. The not-so-friendly looking owner turned out to be friendlier than he looked. He advised me on the right and wrong paints, and then happily ripped me off four bucks for a tiny bottle of car paint. At the very least he was able to tell me what was permanent and what was not.

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On the way into the MRT station, I passed by a teenage girl, all dressed up, carried out on a stretcher by four SCDF personnel. That reminded me of a bloated and blackened body (which I thought was a very large fish) carried out of the ferry terminal one night in Pulau Tekong.

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At Bishan, I met the cyclist who was selling his saddles. For forty dollars, I bought my first non-lemon of the day - a three-year-old Selle Italia black leather Flite TT. Well-used and coated with a thick layer of mud on the underside, it was definitely good leather for my ass. So I happily went off with the mud-coated saddle in my bag and forty bucks lighter.

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I then stopped by Toa Payoh to see if I would have any better luck with the shoe brush. No chance. Not a single store carried anything that remotely resembled a shoe brush. I ended up at Bata, again, whereupon I was given the same tiny brush, which looked like it had come out of China - and it probably had - costing a grand total of $S$1.95. The only difference was that this time I was made to wait another ten minutes while the salesgirl went upstairs to hunt for the brushes. The fact that she was rather cute did not make me any happier with my reluctant purchase.

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Even more pissed now (not at the salesgirl, but with the general state of rising oil prices and rapidly-falling standards of quality), I set off home.

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The first thing I did was to clean up the saddle and polish it. The second thing I did was to examine the heavy, solid-looking shoe brush I had been using for years. It said "Bata" quite loudly on the top, was made of varnished (not painted) wood, and was about two-thirds larger than the one I just purchased. The faded price tag said S$1.90. According to my mother, that brush belonged to my father, therefore making it at least fifteen years old.

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Fifteen years. How time has flown by. How things made today pale shockingly in comparison with things made fifteen years ago. I really, truly, lament the loss of quality products made in the "good old days".

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What kind of a cheap, plastic, and temporary future is our children going to have?

179 to Boon Lay. MRT to Choa Chu Kang. LRT to Bukit Panjang. 975 to Jalan Bahar. 172 to Nanyang Avenue. 199 to the bunk.

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All that to get one perfectly lousy ITM handlebar that looked like it had been screwed down too tight, jumped on, hacked, and then dragged along the road. Okay, so it doesn’t look that bad. But it sure was not worth all that trouble.

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A bit of filing, a couple dabs of kiwi, some steel wool, and hard, hard rubbing. It now looks slightly better. But I’m still not happy. I can just make out the printed words "ITM" and "Mantis". Strange how I cannot seem to find a single reference to an ITM Mantis ATB straight handlebar online.

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Component manufacturers do not make quality items like they used to anymore. Gone are the days when they used to polish and buff the bare metal to a high shine. Where everything was metal bushings and no-shit clearances and aesthetically perfect to a T. When shop floor workers put their heart and soul into every part they made. Every component was beautifully crafted, sculptured even.

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Today, they take the lazy way out and automate everything. All the stuff is anodised and plated. Gone are the mirror smooth surfaces. Everything from everyone looks exactly the same; everything looks cheap.

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I grieve at the loss of good craftsmanship; I grieve at the loss of pride in workmanship. This loss is ours to bear.

I was walking down that slippery curved ramp from the bus stop into school, right on the dot at 1430, when I saw something. Something that caught my eye. Something red. Something that looked eerily familiar. Something that made me do a double take, and caused me to lose twelve seconds.

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It was a Bridgestone CB-1, almost exactly like the one I once had. A red CB-1, in most of its original glory. I say "once had" because in three weeks I had it transformed into the confused machine that it is today, neither mountain bike nor road bike.

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I was devastated. I no longer owned the only CB-1 in school. Worse still, this one was in better shape than mine. The paint was hardly scratched. Fortunately, it was very dirty, like the way mine was when I first rode it home. My odometer read six thousand five hundred kilometers - it sure looked like it did all of those six thousand five hundred kilometers after being coated with a thick layer of engine oil, whereupon it gleefully attracted all the dirt on the road, stuck on all the brake dust, and added a hapless fly or two to its paintwork. The chain, upon toothbrushing three times in a dish of thinner, yielded half its weight in sand. Well, almost.

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So I thought no more about the bike, until I was walking to LT 11 with dear old Gabriel, when I suddenly spied something red peeking through the glass pane of a staircase door at the North Spine. "Hey wait a minute," I said to Gabby and opened the door. It was the red CB-1 again.

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Dear God, were you playing tricks on me today? I would hardly blink an eye if I found a Seven Sola parked outside my door, or a Rivendell in class tomorrow. Heaven only knows what would appear next.

A week ago, I was surfing around in Togoparts and came across this ad for a Bridgestone MB-0.

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I had just acquired my first Bridgestone three weeks ago, the CB-1 you read about earlier. I was hooked.

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I read dozens of articles and posts on the MB-0, and found out it was a Taiwan TIG welded frame. They made it thin-walled, they made it light. They made it for racing and it broke. It was supposedly the top-of-the-line MB series for Bridgestone. However, it was nothing like the lugged MB-1.

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I went down to the shop at Bedok North to take a look at the frame this evening, five minutes before it closed. I brought my torchlight and my measuring tape. I took down all the dimensions, and even persuaded the shop girl to let me mount wheels to check the standover height.

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I was still not convinced it was THE bike for me. I checked all the welds, I checked for rust, I checked the paint job, and I checked it over again. Then I called the owner and asked him to come down. While waiting for him I chatted up the shop girl. Didn’t get very far before the owner came down on his Iron Horse. Then I chatted Him up, and we sat and stared into space for fifteen minutes.

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I offered him three-eighty versus his four-fifty, and we had a deal. I swiped the card, picked up the frame, and took a bus home. The risk and liability was all mine now.

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The tubes are extremely thin. I don’t think anyone could sit on the top tube without squashing it. It is a beautiful ivory colour. I think I will like this bike.

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Fourteen years on and still looking good - enter the Bridgestone MB-0.

Here’s my secret to life.

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In music, use suspensions in abundance; on bicycles, use them sparingly. In film, keep the audience suspended till the end, and then fail to resolve it.

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In practice, I do all three, and the reactions are invariably as follows:

"Eh write the chords for me!" They can’t figure it out.

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"Wah! So uncomfortable!" But I like to feel the road, and I don’t do downhills.

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Sometimes I even get "How come your bike got no suspension one?" which implies I am riding a cheap, Taiwan-made, one-hundred dollar bicycle. Which - come to think of it - is not a bad thing.

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Finally, audiences usually state, in no uncertain terms, that they had absolutely no idea how the story ended. Some even declared they did not understand the story. The poseurs would, however, nod their heads and go "Mmmm." Which leaves me wondering.

I am in love with pianos.

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Those unfortunate souls who hang out with me find that out very quickly.

If there’s a piano somewhere, I tend towards it.

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A piano is a beautiful instrument.

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A handcrafted piano - with thousands of loving hours painstakingly invested in every tiny detail - is a work of art. It is every pianist’s greatest joy, responding to the slightest touch upon its keys. Every nuance you subtly impart translates into wonderful shades of colour, depth and expression.

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I remember the first time I laid my unworthy, grimy, fat fingers upon a Steinway & Sons - the concert grand in Victoria Memorial Hall. The year was 1998, and it was the Anderson Junior College Choir’s debut of Miss Saigon. I was going to make my first public show on the Steinway by playing The Heat Is On In Saigon. The Steinway that so many celebrated pianists had played upon. What a blast!

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I remember in the hours before the concert was to begin, my friend Zhengyu and I were playing Rachmaninoff (me and him) and Beethoven (only him) on it, and the rich sound carried all the way to the back of the hall quite clearly. And that hall has less-than-ideal acoustics. Okay, okay, we thought it was a nice hall, until the Durian was built.

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The next time I tried a Steinway upright was in the new showroom at Takashimaya. Apparently the showroom at Centerpoint didn’t hold the dealership for Steinways anymore, etcetera etcetera, and I shall not talk more about that. So it went to the shop at Taka, and they were nice enough to let passer-bys try the pianos. The moment I laid my fingers on the keys I knew it was no ordinary piano.

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I declare that I am a lousy pianist. Well, at least, a lousy classical pianist. I can no longer play Beethoven, nor Bach, nor Brahms, nor Bollywood (not that I could play them before). I don’t dare to play anything remotely "classical" when anyone is around, for fear that he or she may instantly recognise my complete inability to perform it properly. How embarrassing.

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So I play things like Somewhere Over the Rainbow, or Somewhere Out There, or just some song. But, I tell you, the moment I touched those keys, I felt the magic. A hair-raising, spine-tingling, electric magic. And the deep, rich notes made my day. It was like seeing a Bentley waft by on the road, serene in all its majestic glory.

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You know how some pianos are absolutely crap. It takes a brave soul to play them. Let me tell you about the cultural desert called NTU. Concession, it’s not a cultural desert. It just has some very, very bad pianos.

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Hall 7 has a piano with a key that sounds like it plays two notes simultaneously. Someone might have deliberately mis-tuned one of the strings on that note (each note has three strings if I am not wrong). Then take Hall 3 - The piano is almost devoid of any sort of expression throughout the keystroke. It sounds as dead as a doornail. I have not tried the rest of the hall pianos yet. But I am bracing myself for a very hair-raising (in all the wrong senses of the phrase) time ahead.

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But the issue that takes the cake is that Hall 9, which I live in, has NO piano. The cruel hand of fate (or irony) struck a blow, most evilly, upon this wretched creature. I thought about it long and hard, and came to the miserable conclusion that I must have done so many bad things in my life that I am now deprived of my most basic need, the piano, as a punishment.

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Deprive me of food, deprive me of water. Deprive me of my handkerchief and I may still survive. But the piano, not the piano! What did I do to deserve this agony?

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No wonder that my bicycle has been receiving an inordinate amount of attention recently.

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These days, I only play sad English love songs, and some really sad Chinese love songs. My current favourites are Two Beds and a Coffee Machine by Savage Garden… ah heck, you can read the rest in my profile. It’s all there, well most of it anyway. However, I still like the Chinese songs better. They seem to connect with me better than the English songs. I’m thinking it could be the pentatonic (five-note) scale that the tunes use. Who knows?

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But to be very objective, Corrine May’s Same Side of the Moon is rather poignant. It tells of loneliness, and the emptiness of being apart. Listen to the song and let the words pluck at your heartstrings and pierce the depths of your soul.

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You know I can’t be that far from you, if we’re both looking on the same side of the moon.

and the third bicycle.

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A classmate said, "Why don’t you do a blog? It might be interesting." Not in those exact words lah, but close enough. It’s been pricking my brain all of two days.

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But it might not be interesting today unless you ride bicycles.

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I have a beef - why is it that when I say "bike", most people think I mean "motorcycle"? Is it that inconceivable that someone this old should not be playing with bicycles anymore? Well, here’s a fact - I play with not one, but three (3) bicycles. And I’m thinking of getting one more. So there.

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A motorcycle would be nice, but not right now. I’m thinking Honda Cub and Ducati Monster. But that’s a long way away lah. Maybe in five years, when I’m all grown up with more facial and leg hair too. Eeeeks.

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Now playing: Just be yourself, Mr. Beasley - Corrine May

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I just inherited my friend’s Bridgestone CB-1. Now CB (city bike) isn’t a very nice name for a bicycle, or just about anything for that matter. But CB it says on the seat tube, so CB it is. CB-1 in fact, which is the highest class of CB there is, save for the CB-0, which I have not seen nor heard much of.

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I thought Bridgestones were rare bikes. I know of an old friend who rides an MB-something; an old classmate who rides an MB-3; a togoparts (tgp) guy who has an MB-5; and another tgp guy who is selling his MB-0 frame, which I hope to buy. But I have not heard from anyone who has a CB-x frame. If you do, let me know.

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Bridgestone stopped making bicycles about ten years ago, and I heard from Ewan (a shop) that they still have a couple of RB-x (road bike) frames in the shop. “Black and Silver,” they said, so I think they might just be RB-1 frames. Correct me if I’m wrong there.

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The second bike I own is a 700c Motiv Motiv8r. You might ask "What in the heck is that?" I don’t know. I got it from a colleague in the United States after some split-arsed moo stole my Schwinn, to quote Willie Garvin from Modesty Blaise. It’s got old-school Exage parts and the infamous Biopace cranks, which are a novelty with their ovalised chainrings.

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If you want this classic thing-a-ma-jig, let me know because it’s for sale. Let me tell you how I brought it home. I packed the whole thing in a cardboard box taken from a furniture store in North Hollywood, thank God that Eva Air allowed sixty-four kilos of check-in luggage. Even then, I was over the limit and had to carry the beer crate sitting on my feet the whole flight back. Sucks. Talk about cramped flights – I enjoyed sitting in the loo more than on my own seat.

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The customs man at Changi was going to open my box, but luckily he thought the better of it and waved me through, much to my relief.

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The coolest bike I have - at least it seems to be cool to every other cyclist except me - is the ’97 Litespeed Ocoee. I finally gave up on the Judy SL (suspension fork) and replaced it with a one-hundred-and-ten dollar aluminium rigid fork.

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It is a fast bike, faster than I can take it. And on those speed bumps, you rattle every bone in your body. Now that I changed to slick tyres and a second-hand SLR XP saddle, the whole thing feels stiff like a piece of uh, I don’t know. If you like to ride a sofa, this bike is NOT for you. It rides dangerously. I happen not to like riding a sofa.

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Sofas are for lounging in with a whiskey and a fireplace and your wife, covered with a warm sheepskin or rug and sad love songs playing in the background. You ride a bicycle, not a sofa. You lounge in a sofa, not on a saddle.

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By the way, all my bikes were, uh, second-hand machines. Ironically, the only bikes I ever bought brand new, a Chinese Flying Pigeon and a Taiwan-welded Schwinn got stolen. I shall stick to my used machines. Cheaper some more!

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So anyway, I got some new parts for this Bridgestone: Kalloy Uno seatpost, Mavic X517 new "old" rims to fit the 36-hole Duraace 7700 hubs given to me by a friend, my ten-year-old CODA handlebar which I hope does not break, Avid SD 7 v-brake set (I’m too lazy to fiddle with cantilevers), and my old Specialized saddle, which I just realised is a leather piece mounted on a carbon fiber base, with titanium rails. It must have cost a bomb to whoever bought it. I shall care for it more now.

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Today, this bike looks nothing like the Bridgestone truck I rode home that night from Dover, three weeks ago. Oh yes, and I removed the black fenders too. Now I shall get sprayed with oily road water when I ride.

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I should really be doing my readings instead of polishing the frame and tinkering with this bike. I remember my neighbour’s look when he saw my all-black hands under the tap: “You painting your room ah?”

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Anyway, I hope to get hold of a classic, lugged, frame. Japanese if possible. Then I can install all-Japanese parts and create the ultimate Japanese classic bicycle. Tange headset, I-don’t-know-what leather saddle, Nitto parts, Suntour or old-school Shimano stuff, Araya rims and Wheelsmith spokes. I’m thinking MB-1. Anyone wants to sell one?

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So now I have a couple of rather confused bicycles, which are neither XC (cross country) nor road, nor hybrid. They are, confused. Confused bikes = confused owner? I hope not.

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Boys will be boys.