Huh! disneyland??? WTH u toking?? mickey.
U are living in Capitaland ya.
This guy William Gibson wrote about singpore lah......
here i copy paste for you.....
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
By William Gibson <!-- end author --> <!--
begin text -->
"It's like an entire country run by Jeffrey Katzenberg," the
producer had said, "under the motto 'Be happy or I'll kill you.'"
We were sitting in an office a block from Rodeo Drive, on large
black furniture leased with Japanese venture capital.
Now that I'm actually here, the Disneyland metaphor is proving
impossible to shake. For that matter, Rodeo Drive comes frequently
to mind, though the local equivalent feels more like 30 or 40
Beverly Centers put end to end.
;-)
Was it Laurie Anderson who said that VR would never look real until
they learned how to put some dirt in it? Singapore's airport, the
Changi Airtropolis, seemed to possess no more resolution than some
early VPL world. There was no dirt whatsoever; no muss, no furred
fractal edge to things. Outside, the organic, florid as ever in the
tropics, had been gardened into brilliant green, and
all-too-perfect examples of itself. Only the clouds were feathered
with chaos - weird columnar structures towering above the Strait of
China.
The cab driver warned me about littering. He asked where I was
from.
He asked if it was clean there. "Singapore very clean city." One of
those annoying Japanese-style mechanical bells cut in as he
exceeded the speed limit, just to remind us both that he was doing
it. There seemed to be golf courses on either side of the freeway.
. . .
"You come for golf?"
"No."
"Business?"
"Pleasure."
He sucked his teeth. He had his doubts about that one.
Singapore is a relentlessly G-rated experience, micromanaged by a
state that has the look and feel of a very large corporation. If
IBM had ever bothered to actually possess a physical country, that
country might have had a lot in common with Singapore. There's a
certain white-shirted constraint, an absolute humorlessness in the
way Singapore Ltd. operates; conformity here is the prime
directive, and the fuzzier brands of creativity are in extremely
short supply.
The physical past here has almost entirely
vanished.
There is no slack in Singapore. Imagine an Asian version of Zurich
operating as an offshore capsule at the foot of Malaysia; an
affluent microcosm whose citizens inhabit something that feels
like, well, Disneyland. Disneyland with the death
penalty.
But Disneyland wasn't built atop an equally peculiar 19th-century
theme park - something constructed to meet both the romantic
longings and purely mercantile needs of the British Empire. Modern
Singapore was - bits of the Victorian construct, dressed in
spanking-fresh paint, protrude at quaint angles from the
white-flanked glitter of the neo-Gernsbackian metropolis. These few
very deliberate fragments of historical texture serve as a reminder
of just how deliciously odd an entrepot Singapore once was
- a product of Empire kinkier even than Hong Kong.
The sensation of trying to connect psychically with the old
Singapore is rather painful, as though Disneyland's New Orleans
Square had been erected on the site of the actual French Quarter,
obliterating it in the process but leaving in its place a glassy
simulacrum. The facades of the remaining Victorian shop-houses
recall Covent Garden on some impossibly bright London day. I took
several solitary, jet-lagged walks at dawn, when a city's ghosts
tend to be most visible, but there was very little to be seen of
previous realities: Joss stick smouldering in an old brass holder
on the white-painted column of a shop-house; a mirror positioned
above the door of a supplier of electrical goods, set to snare and
deflect the evil that travels in a straight line; a rusty trishaw,
chained to a freshly painted iron railing. The physical past, here,
has almost entirely vanished.
Today's Singapore is far more precisely the result of Lee Kuan
Yew's vision than the Manchester of the East ever was of Sir
Stamford Raffles'.
In 1811, when Temenggong, a local chief, arrived to resettle
Singapura, the Lion City, with a hundred Malays, the jungle had
long since reclaimed the ruins of a 14th-century city once warred
over by Java, Siam, and the Chinese. A mere eight years later came
Sir Stamford Raffles, stepping ashore amid a squirming tangle of
kraits and river pirates, to declare the place a splendid spot on
which to create, from the ground up, a British trading base. It was
Raffles's singular vision to set out the various colonial jewels in
Her Majesty's crown as distinct ethnic quarters: here Arab Street,
here Tanjong Pagar (Chinese), here Serangoon Road (Indian). And
Raffles's theme park boomed for 110 years - a free port, a
Boy's Own fantasy out of Talbot Mundy, with every human
spice of Asia set out on a neatly segmented tray of sturdy British
china: "the Manchester of the East." A very hot ticket
indeed.
This is page one.....got six pages so i dun wan to paste here if
not can cover a whole page here.....
here is the link http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/1.04/gibson.html
