Years ago, Singapore boasted one of the countries that seldom and almost zero accounts of flooding. Meticulous studies and research to prevent flooding was made and it worked nicely for decades. Singapore was almost flood free. Almost as certain parts of Singapore still faces slight flooding.

Boon Lay Way, where the old Boon Lay Secondary School used to be, always faced the problem of flooding at the side gate. It was a major to trudge through the ankle deep water just to get out from the gate and to the bus stop. It was even terrible when you have school the next day and the only pair of shoes  you have were those wet ones you wore in the flood.

However I didn’t expect an important place like Orchard Road to be facing a terrible flash flood. So who should we put the blame of the recent flash floods? Will it be the unpredictable weather or the construction works on the Marina Barrage that affected the main water flow of the main river in Singapore or the ever on going land reclamation project at every known Singapore owned islands?

In my opinion, it would be all of them. I wonder if the geologist in Singapore has done any studies of the movement of the earth. Constant digging through the earth for tunnels and other purposes, land reclamation and the lacking of widening of the main water flow such as the rivers and canals  may perhaps be the factor of the flash floods in Singapore.

But is Singapore sinking? I am not sure about that. Unless there is a major earthquake (touch wood!) it may perhaps move Singapore like what it did to some countries after the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami.

Coral reefs were destroyed, some land were pushed upwards from the sea while some land sank. I can’t really remembered what was the title of the documentary but I clearly remembered how much land the quake had pushed out from the sea.

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Perhaps I should start a club on loving oneself regardless of weight, size and colour. The recent matter of small sized clothes that had me huffed in frustration turns out that many women are facing the same thing. We all hate SMALL Size or FREE SIZE apparels.

It has come to my attention that clothes manufacturer lately has a crazed devotion on making clothes which are either notoriously small for an average healthy size person like me and declaring them as Free Size. Unfortunately wearing those clothes doesn’t make me feel free at ease, in fact it makes me feel suffocated. Only the agile lithe gymnastic person who can bend their limbs can fit those clothes without tearing the seams.

What’s worse is that once we, the average size women, cannot fit into these small sized clothing, the sales person and those who are around us would give us sly smiles and snicker behind our backs. What’s so good about having only skin and 1mm of meat on your bones? Are those who are not in this category labeled as aliens?

Perhaps we should all place the blame on the founder of the Skinny Models, Twiggy Lawson. She was our first skinny, twig sized model that made the whole fashion industry scrambling to make all the clothes as small as possible. These are the people that make kids and adults being so self conscious of themselves that to look otherwise would make them be alienated or even criticized by others.

I could still remember the time when everyone thought being skinny is healthy. Everyone I knew was scrambling to get their fats out of their system, partly also the men would not find anything larger than skinny desirable. Slimming pills, Slimming spa, appetite suppressant (many wanted to buy phentermine) and etc became such a big hit.

The skinny issue is also warranting ill effects from the  youngsters. Some have taken up excessive starving, practice of bulimia and excessive usage of slimming pills. There are even websites and clubs that promotes such a thing to get the desired effect.

If only these youngsters know how difficult it is to bring back home food, then they would not practice such things. If only these youngsters faced the problems such as those in countries that are plagued by war or natural disasters where food is scarce, then they would think twice of starving themselves.

If only someone could ban the skinny models on the runway and replace them with average healthy BMI person. NOW then the fashion industry would be fair to us, average sized women.

It’s amazing what changes Helium.com has made throughout a year. They have more writers, more topics, more advertisers and more articles stupidly written by irresponsible writer that didn’t do a comprehensive studies on the topics they were writing.

I’m not saying all the writers in Helium but a small group that makes me grit my teeth whenever I stumble upon such articles. Did these writers ever figured out that once a wrongly set of information is given out and published on the net, it can create confusion and at some point even destroys a person’s religious faith in his/her religion?

Writing an ariticle doesn’t mean taking an information from a source only. As a writer, a responsible and good writer, we have to research the topic that we are about to write on. We need to get as many information from many sources so we may be able to strike out what is the fact and what is the falsely changed or interpreted information. We can’t simply take the information which we think is the easiest to comprehend and most available one at hand.

Take the topic on “What makes us a good muslim” for example. I am not going to copy and paste the actual sentence that was written by the writer as Helium.com as rules and conditions about it. But the author, clearly he didn’t bother to do a through look up on the topic but instead just copied everything from Wikipedia.com, states that a muslim would get out of a conference/ meeting/ lecture etc the moment the prayer time has arrived and goes to a corner, takes out his rug and start praying, oblivious to the responsibilities he had before.

I don’t ever recalled and remembered in the Quran saying we, Muslim, had to drop everything and anything especially in an important event to head out and do our prayers. Yes, the five times per day prayers is an obligatory and we are advised/ forced to do our prayers during the specific prayer time before the next prayer session arrives.

But should our situation calls for us to skip our prayers time, we will then have to pay back the missed prayers in the nearest available time we have. We don’t ignore our responsibilities and turned a rude shoulder to our business clients or other people when prayers time arrives.

It really makes me wonder if Helium.com really harbors good writers or just irresponsible writers that does everything and anything to get a reward. After all they were the one that introduced the star award. With the star award, the writer can start earning his cash rewards on the the articles written.

However I personally dislike the star rating because it allows writers to rate other writer’s articles and it depends on the writer’s taste and qualification to rate the articles. It’s as good as the voting for your favourite singer on the SMS or online. If you don’t believe me, read this. They have updated their badges system award.

With upfront payments stated below for star awarded writers on every articles they write, I’m not surprised that the quality of the articles had become trash.

Upfront Payment Scheme for star writers:-