Come along and follow me

Today began with a power outage. This wasn't unexpected; I just forgot when it was exactly. It was some planned shutdown for a few hours to ... uh ... let the physical plant people show off who's in charge. I'm sure it was important, but the effect was cutting off the hot water mid-shower.

But we figured to do something not involving so much walking today, and looked for Sijori Wondergolf, a miniature golf course. This turned out to be on Sentosa Island, the tourist/resort/theme park island, but it's only S$1.00 for the bus ride onto the island, S$2.00 for a bare-bones admission, and S$10.00 for the golf game, so that's a quite reasonable price. We took the International Course, which as promised was most challenging, particularly the ramp holes. Also challenging is this course had no astroturf or grass; it was all cement, often with cracks and in a few spots, missing matches. The effect was that it was very hard to get the ball to stop rolling, particularly near the hole; it usually rolled to the edge of the circular ``green''. We had a little unfortunate incident of being assaulted by every ant in existence on the 17th hole, but the rest was good fun, even if my camera ran out of battery power around the 14th hole. It was a challenging course, even without scenes like windmills or castles; it was just curves, banks, and ramps, and that was hard enough.

When we emerged and washed our legs off (there were a lot of ants on 17) we wandered over to the Merlion, a ten-storey tall concrete lion with the body of a fish, one of the popular symbols of Singapore. The bottom floor is a display of mermaids, sea serpents, B-movie posters for films like Attack of the Crab Monsters and Creature from the Black Lagoon, with the speakers endlessly repeating the ``Voyage of Discovery'' song (``You hear this song?'' ``Yeah ... should I get used to it?'' ``Oh, yeah'') whose lyrics we finally figured out were mostly printed on a few panels along the walk. We got up to the merlion's 60-meter-high head just at sunset. That's the best time, because the colors start at fantastic and get better through to night. So our effort to not spend all day walking around went awry, but it was worthwhile anyway.

Trivia: The (heat) calorie is the quantity of heat that raises the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius -- specifically, from 14.5 to 15.5 degrees Celsius. Source: Life Science Library: Energy, Mitchell Wilson.

Currently Reading: Spaceling, Doris Piserchia.