As best put by people who ventured into the deep sea, that "it is an unforgiving environment".

You know, it has been hard trying to write consistently. I was hoping to write regularly on this blog. Unfortunately that has not come to fruition. The struggle seems that I spend more time reading many things and consequently running out of time for the day, which then means there is little to no time for writing.

A terrible excuse, I admit. Well, l must not lose hope. So may the Lord grant me strength to repel the habit of reading too much and writing too less.

So, you may have heard about the Titan submersible that imploded. In its excursion to see the Titanic which lies 4,000 metres beneath the sea. 

It piqued my interest and I spent a fair amount of time reading about the deep sea. The deepest sea is the Marian Trench located at western Pacific Ocean and the maximum known depth is found to be 10,984 metres - source: Wikipedia. 

What's even more interesting is James Cameron (director of Titanic and Avatar series) is an avid deep sea explorer. He took the deep dive with a machine called Deepsea Challenger (DC). A machine whose capability is phenomenal. In contrast, the Titan submersible seemed to lack (at least going by the comments and views shared online) the necessary safety features and poor engineering. For instance, the DC could only house one crew member, and that too in a curled up position. While the Titan had 5 crew members. A luxurious space no doubt. Which, unfortunately came at the expense of the lack of safety features.

And even more interesting, the pressure level in the deep sea is equivalent to three cars pinning down a single finger of the human body. So you can try to imagine (I struggled imagining the pain) the pressure it will have on your whole body.

As best put by people who ventured into the deep sea, that "it is an unforgiving environment". A wave here or a loss of communication or guide elsewhere, would put the crew and the submersible at unimaginable risk.

May God ease the suffering of the families who lost their loved in this unfortunate episode.

-SMN

Singapore's 7-0 loss to Malaysia

 Occasionally blog posts are made up of social commentaries. Often dry, but best written with wry humour.

Today is about my beloved sport football. More precisely, Singapore's 7-0 loss to Malaysia in the SEA games football 2023. This tournament is for players aged under 22. The unfortunate thing was both teams had nothing to play for but pride, since both cannot advance to the next stage regardless of a win for either team.

Fans were not happy. To lose to our causeway rivals by a high margin is downright embarrassing. To be fair to the boys, I believe they gave their all. As it happens in life, perhaps luck was not in their favour. But more so that the boys may have not grown up in the Malaysian Cup era days where Singapore dominance had fans visiting the old national stadium every week. It was truly the best days of Singapore football. The passion of the fans was at its high. 

Present day, with our own Singapore Premier League, fans turn out has been lackluster. How can the boys understand that to not give their all in a game against our rivals is unforgiveable? With keyboard warriors (such as myself), all we do is to complain and criticize at their performance. Rarely, if ever, do we raise the boys up and congratulate them for their performance. In summary, would the boys have played well with better fanfare support and, more importantly, with the understanding of the rivalry between us and Malaysia? Well, I do not know. 

To cut the story short, Singapore football is going downhill. If you have been following ASEAN football, you would know the gap between us and the other nations (TH, VN, MY, ID) is constantly widening (and there are reasons which I personally feel contributed to it - which I will leave for another day's discussion).

So fans are holding FAS accountable (rightly so). FAS has commenced a review to evaluate our football. We will see how that turns out. 

However, one issue that has always bugged me is that FAS occasionally comes up with fancy (and unrealistic goals). Whether they do this with the government's blessing, we do not know. But to have a goal of qualifying for the world cup in something like 16-20 years time says two things, 1) their ignorance of the prowess of other footballing nations in Asia and 2) being out of touch with the state of affairs of our football.

A realistic target would be to be the top four nation in ASEAN and to qualify into the final group stage in the Asian cup. Even countries like TH, VN, ID struggle at the Asian level. Hence it is disappointing that FAS goes on to set goals that are to be achieved, not by the board that sets the goal, but the future footballers. An unnecessary burden the footballers should not carry. 

Anyway, as a fan, I appreciate the difficulty that FAS has but they ought to be answerable as to what they were thinking with the Unleash The Roar project (i.e., qualifying for the world cup).

With that, I end my humourless social commentary.

- SMN