Promise is a promise (?)

Five students from an all-girls secondary school had their heads shaved at the
charity event Hair for Hope in support of children with cancer, but were reprimanded
for breaking school rules on shaved or 'unfeminine' hairstyles.

Some educators and parents supported the school principal by saying that
she is well within her rights to chastise her students since they made a promise to her to wear wigs at school.

I disagree.

What the girls did was commendable -- why were they made to make that promise
in the first place?

Here's one solution in which the girls can show their empathy for cancer patients,
and still pacify their principal:

Promise is a promise (?), Part 2

It takes the Education Minister to finally knock some sense into the principal's head:

SOURCE: www.straitstimes.com

This makes me SO ANGRY!

I did this for the Punchlines column:

 

The next day, someone wrote this to the papers:

Commenting on the Health Ministry’s proposal to prevent shops
from displaying cigarette packs, a recent Punchlines cartoon
(ST, Monday, June 03, 2013) carried a claim that alcohol “causes
far worse problems” than cigarettes, and referenced a news story
involving a traffic accident relating to alcohol intoxication.

While any such accidents are sad events, the fact is that in
Singapore they occur relatively infrequently: according to
police data, in a typical month there are one or two alcohol-
related traffic deaths. (Their rarity is part of what makes them
newsworthy.)

In comparison, according to Health Promotion Board, there are
more than two hundred tobacco-related deaths in Singapore
every month. Indeed, the Royal Australasian College of Physicians
has calculated that “more people in Australia and New Zealand die
from cigarettes than from alcohol, illicit drugs, road accidents,
suicides, homicides, drowning, shark attacks, falls and
electrocution – combined.” As such, public awareness of the
dangers of smoking and secondhand smoke should be promoted,
not downplayed.

- (Professor) A J Berrick
National University of Singapore

Yes, smoking is bad, Berrick.
However, that is self-induced.

Being innocently maimed or killed by drunk drivers is comparatively worse.

If you are a non-smoker, you can walk away to avoid secondhand smoke.

But it's hard to react in time when an alcohol-laden moron
is speeding his car directly at you.

Case in point (The New Paper, July 05, 2013):

19 people
were arrested for drink driving in an islandwide operation on the morning of July 04, 2013.

706 arrests for drink driving
from January to March in 2013. This is up from 675 in the same period last year.

2,917 arrests for drink driving in 2012
as compared to 2,735 in 2011.

Try telling this poor 5-year-old that smoking is actually MORE DANGEROUS:

Footnote cartoon to my post above

Helping (strong) hands

A maid agency is planning to bring in a batch of about 30 male domestic workers
trained in caregiving from Myanmar by the end of next month (Feb 2013).
There is a strong demand for male helpers to take care of elderly clients whom
the more petite maids may have difficulty handling. A few other agencies have
brought in such male helpers on an ad hoc basis in the past two years.

You saw it here first

I did this comic in 2002, to suggest how our public transport operators can get
more revenue (you can read the original post here):

Ten years later, in 2013, this news came out:

Let's hope we'll finally get to see those seats in the trains real soon!

Young people say thanks to elders on Gratitude Day

2 January 2013 was Gratitude Day, organised by Blossom World Society
for the young to honour their parents for raising them.

They got down on their knees, said emotional words of thanks,
and served their parents tea.

There was barely a dry eye in the hall during the tea ceremony.
Many were moved to tears by the emotional outpourings.
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And then:

Population growth

The number of people in Singapore rose to 5.31 million in 2012.
Most of increase stemed from 100,000 foreigners entering over the past year.