The “mysterious grey fog” that descended upon Choa Chu Kang last week is being blamed on people burning incense paper for the Hungry Ghost Festival. Even the NEA was called in to confirm that no smoke plumes were visible by satellite. That’s two years running that CCK has been blanketed with a haze around this time of year. We guess those ghosts just like their food smoked…To judge by the overexcited headlines though, we’re all craving a bit more variety in our weather patterns.

Pop-up stores, pop-up coffee bars, pop-up beer dispensers. The city’s gone pop-up mad. There’s a unit just off Orchard that … oops, no, it’s gone already. It’s now at … oh, forget it, we can’t keep track. We can, however, exclusively reveal that next week there’ll be a pop-up sheep-shearing stall in front of Marina Bay Sands, and the following week a pop-up prison operating out of a taxi parked behind Fort Canning. You heard it here first.What is it with brands and pop-ups these days? It’s like they’ve taken the old Pringles motto “Once You Pop, You Can’t Stop” to heart.

SAGITTARIUS (Nov 22-Dec 21): It's Experiment with Your Self-Image Week—a time when it would be invigorating to shift and play with your identity. During this reinvention phase, you might find you can change yourself on the inside simply by rearranging yourself on the outside. So have fun wearing clothes you've never donned before. Entertain yourself with a new hairstyle. Speak in foreign accents or use words you don't usually utter. Amuse yourself with a variety of novel approaches to walking, laughing, gesticulating, and moving your face.

I enjoy meeting people who try their almighty best to be someone they are not. Why? Because 1) It’s hilarious, 2) They don’t know that it’s hilarious, and 3) I get a chance to work on my poker face—the look of indifference to their struggles of identity. In the nightlife scene, they come in the forms of pseudo DJs, celebrities, entrepreneurs, promoters and even bartenders.

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.

SCORPIO (Oct 23-Nov 21): Technorati, a search engine for blogs, says there are well over 100 million blogs on the Internet, and that figure doesn’t include millions of Chinese language blogs. So self-expression is thriving on a global scale, right? Not exactly. Most blogs—the estimate is 94 percent—have not been updated for at least four months. In accordance with the current astrological indicators, Scorpio, I expect you to do something about this problem. Refresh your blog in the coming week, or consider launching one if you don’t have one. But don’t stop there.

First, let me say this: I’m a simple guy with simple needs. Give me a kopi-o-kosong and I’ll be happy for a couple of hours. But when you’re an editor for a lifestyle magazine and get (mostly unsolicited) gifts thrown at you every now and then for whatever reason (mainly for publicity purposes), your vision of the world gets distorted a little bit. After all, a free cup of espresso from a newly opened boutique café is not quite the same as the 60 cents version that you actually have to pay for from a rundown local mama store, now is it?