The new no-smoking rule for eating outlets just kicked in over the weekend, and man were they strict. An indoor outlet can allocated 10% of its tables to be smoking area, while outdoor outlets can have 20%. The ban was supposed to start on the stroke of midnight on 1st july, in the middle of the Germany-Argentina match, which would have just started its 2nd half. Apparently kopitiam owners were quick to ask patrons to stop smoking or shift back to the smoking zone (hereby knowned as yellow box, due to the yellow line demarcating the area). Not that the kopitiam owners really cared about the health and environmental repercussions, they were more concerned about their wallets, most of them. With the orh-kong starting from a few hundred dollars for failure to make known the rule for the 1st time, to the possible withdrawal of operating license.

I think, living my entire life in Singapore has made me sorta of numb to such blanket bans. I was upset as a kid when they banned chewing gum. A field trip to Malacca with the Boys Brigade back in primary 5 saw us snapping up so much gum at the 1st makan stop in johor. So much that we had to figure where to hide them in order to escape from the customs officers. Now i dun even buy gum whenever i go on my weekly trips to johor for petrol. Getting used to it is one thing, failing to understand the rationale for it is another.

Sometimes i cannot understand anti-smoking lobbyists. Singapore is small, makan places are small. However is it really small enuff to prevent you from shifting to another place to sit in a makan place if someone in the next table is smoking? I can understand if you are already sitting there, and a smoker comes to sit near u and start puffing away. I would be fucking pissed too, cos the smoker purposely chose to sit near me and smoke. The scenario becomes abit trickier when a non-smoker sits next to a smoker who at that point of time was not smoking, but lights up later. To me, there is nobody at fault here, yet the situation could possibly be settled easily through some negotiating between the 2 parties.

However what if a non-smoker chooses to sit next to a smoking patron? Does he have the right to ask the smoker to butt out? Does he have the moral authority to force the smoker to accede to his demand? The government seems to think so, with all the new laws coming up.

Smoking most definitely harms your health, that is something that we cannot deny. Citizens have to be advised about the dangers of smoking and the benefits of quitting. If advice doesnt work, then u have to take action to force them to stop. An outright ban on smoking wun work, plus that’s a big loss of tax revenue. So they chose the yellow box way of containing the smokers, make it damn troublesome for them to smoke. I wun be surprised next time buy cigarettes must register with IC 1st, like for pre-paid sim cards.

Of course one may try to use yellow paint and paint around one’s shoes, portable yellow box… best..

Leave u with something from the Ig Nobel Awards, which awarded somethign to 老李 back in 1994

PSYCHOLOGY
Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, practitioner ofthe psychology of negative reinforcement, for his thirty-year study of the effects of punishing three million citizens of Singapore whenever they spat, chewed gum, or fed pigeons.

Off Boing Boing:

A recent Worth1000 photoshopping contest challenged entrants to remap the textures of items in photos so they appear to be made of other things — glass billiard balls, wooden watermelons, and lightbulbs made of oranges.

See more here