To all the restaurants implementing bans on young children,I am a delightful four year old who has never so much made a squeak in public. (What’s that? You think this is my mom writing and pretending to be me the way she does with those sickening Christmas cards and creepy Facebook posts? How dare you! It’s really me. “Implementing” was one of the first words I learnt how to say.)Anyway, I’m writing to complain about this disgusting new policy under which you seek to exclude young children from your premises. What gives? You were children once too, remember.

It’s that time of year again. Our hangovers have finally cleared, we’ve grown bored of our presents and 2010 is receding into the distance faster than Jude Law’s hairline. Ordinarily we’d be busy making and breaking resolutions, but truth be told we’re kind of annoyed our iPhones still can’t do that for us. Honestly, it’s the 21st Century. If you can’t outsource life’s important decisions to a machine, then just what have the last few thousand years been in aid of?

Away in a mangerOr at home wearing red,The Singapore LionsLay down as if dead.Oh, jingle bells, jingle bellsJingle all the way,Oh, what fun it is to rideOn an overpriced expressway.Ding dong! merrily on high,On Orchard the tills are ringing,Ding dong!

Boy, do we like our mobile phones. If it’s not a survey revealing that a majority of us now hear them ringing even when they aren’t, it’s a report saying that there’s no longer much of a market for second hand phones, since people only want the latest models.As Tron: Legacy lands at the multiplex, and fear of The Net grips us once more (this time in 3D!) perhaps it’s time to assess whether, as a nation, we’re in danger of becoming too attached to our tech toys, and in the process are losing sight of our humanity. God forbid anyone call Singaporeans robotic!

Don’t worry if you worry that you’re getting too old for ZoukOut. Hey, we scratch our heads every year (and find less hair there than last time when we do) trying to figure out whether it’s finally time to hang up our glowsticks. Besides, there’s a lot to love about being a little bit older every time the event rolls around: For one thing we can now afford a nice hotel room on Sentosa before and after the event (who are we trying to kid; we work in media, but we do have friends who made different career choices and can afford all the rooms on Sentosa they could ever want).

So wearing the national flag across your groin, as our water polo team are wont to do, is a no-no. The crescent moon poking out of their collective crotches in Guangzhou was deemed “inappropriate” by those whose job it is to monitor these things. (“Hilarious” might have been an even more appropriate description, but perhaps it doesn’t strike a sufficiently authoritative tone.) MICA want elements of the flag to be treated with dignity, as opposed to covering our boys’ dignity.Let’s turn to the statute books to see where we stand.

Amid the various stories emerging from the Asian Games in Guangzhou - doped-up athletes (judon’t say?), weightlifters with swine flu, cycling smash-ups - one of the most peculiar is surely that of Singapore’s own Shayna Ng, silver medallist in women’s singles bowling (and later winner of gold in women’s trios). Just before she rolled a crucial ball in the twelfth frame, her teammate New Hui Fen asked if she wanted to go to the toilet.

Never let it be said that we don’t know how to give people great ideas in this city.

An interesting footnote in the news recently about a vending machine in Nanjing that dispenses live, chilled hairy crabs. The company behind this innovation boasts that cutting down on staff costs means more affordable crabs all round.

Amid the recent brouhaha surrounding the clampdown on modified school uniforms, it didn’t escape our attention that this was a perfect metaphor for the state of the nation. People accuse us of being too robotic, too samey, too uniform all the time. And yet here we are saying, “No. Don’t alter that uniform. All must look alike, lah.” Kids wanting to look different is hardly news, and we have some sympathy for the authorities trying to avoid the situation degenerating to the point that kids roll up to school in slippers.