Burmese model Mable Soe gets her teeth whitened for Xmas.

Eee… Why Like That?

That was my initial reaction to seeing those ugly trunks worn by the Singapore waterpolo team in the Asian Games. And after an initial “cooling down period”, I looked at them and went “eee… why like that?” again.

Not for an unnamed Singapore official in Guangzhou. He/she told The New Paper that it looked “obscene”. Next, Carol Tan, the resilience and marketing division director at the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Arts denied any involvement with the design of the trunks.

Ms Tan said: “We would have told them that their design is inappropriate as we want elements of the Flag to be treated with dignity.”

Not their fault.

Quite predictably, when team manager Samuel Wong heard about the complaints, he said: “There was no question of being disrespectful to Singapore or to the national flag. We sincerely apologise if it has offended anyone.”

A remarkable show of national pride, but Mr Wong and Ms Tan can save their apologies for me. I may find the design ugly and funny, but it will take a much bigger and thicker crescent moon to offend me. Apparently, the majority of Singaporeans are perfectly OK with the trunks. Even those who objected to them only had issues with the crescent moon and not with the stars. I’m not sure how small they’ll have to make the crescent moon to please everybody, but the last thing we need is for some puritanical prig to stand up and condemn the harmless trunks. And let’s not make the crescent moon too small or it’ll look paedophilic.

The trunks may look ugly and/or silly, but as a patriotic Singaporean, I’m not even going to say that they are ugly and/or silly. I’m going to say that they look great on our waterpolo team and all my support goes out to them. May they do our country proud and wear it over that unnamed official’s head after the match.