Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls

The 2012 Olympics are awarded to London. Detailed reports, by which I mean reporters standing in Raffles City reporting the mood as ``festive,'' have been going on Channel NewsAsia for, it seems, ever now. Maybe we can get back now to David Beckham-spotting and not thinking about the Olympics. The little ads for each of the candidate cities leave me baffled to different degrees -- Moscow's maybe the most, since Moscow is barely in it -- but Madrid's ``2012: We Have a Hope'' just sounded sad and passive-aggressive. New York's nearly obscured the point that it was all Manhattan, except the quick glimpse of Yankee Stadium, which George Steinbrenner and Michael Bloomberg want to get rid of so they can relieve themselves of any lingering popularity. But the ads overall were just long strings of people having fun in cities, I suppose encouraging the notion that the games should be held in some city somewhere. You'd think the President of the International Olympic Committee would be able to afford a letter opener.

I missed in person, but noticed in the news that as another London tourism stunt they decorated the Raffles Place MRT Interchange -- the one where they built a mall I never saw before a few months back -- to look like a London Underground station, and gave out pop-up maps of London and such. With this, and the London 2012 Olympics stuff, and all London's municipal flirting with Singapore is starting to go from being adorable to being a little creepy. Just ask Singapore out on a date already, London. Even if Singapore doesn't like the City of London it may still like London, because nobody understands this whole City versus London thing, and we all think it's a put-on.

Trivia: The Enigma cipher for the German railway system was named Rocket. Source: Hijacking Enigma: The Insider's Tale, Christine Large.

Currently Reading: The Battle for Twelveland, Charles Whiting. Oh my. Top American diagnosticians agreed with [ Dr Stanley P Lovell ] that Hitler's `poor emotional control, his violent passions, his selection of companions like Roehm' indicated that the Führer was on the borderline between male and female. Lovell felt that it might be possible to nudge him to the female side in the hope that `his moustache would fall off and his voice become soprano.'

His plan envisaged smuggling a gardener into his entourage who would doctor the home-grown vegetables for his personal table with female sex hormones. These would upset Hitler's whole hormonal balance and radically affect the direction of the war. These scheme was approved by [ Office of Strategic Services head Colonel William ] Donovan, but Lovell heard no more of it. As he wrote in his account of his backroom operations, Of Spies and Strategems, ``Since [ Hitler ] survived, I can only assume that the gardener took our money and threw the syringes and medications into the nearest thicket. Either that or Hitler had a big turnover in `tasters.'''

Yes, after the first 36 attempts to assassinate Hitler by bomb, poison gas, or sniper failed you should start thinking outside of the box, but maybe you should leave inside the box ``sex reassignment by estrogen-laden zucchini.''