"National Night" in Singapore, says Mentos

It's a viral marketing video fabricated to entice bloggers and news services, but it is funny. Family warning: This video does explain how babies are made. 

In fact, making babies is the entire joke because Singapore, which turns 46 years-old on 9 August 2012, has very publicly been wringing its hands about low birthrates for a while now. Last year after learning that the total fertility rate for 2010 stood at only 1.16 – nowhere near the replacement level of 2.1 – Lee Kuan Yew (Prime Minister of Singapore for its first 25 years) famously warned that an aging Singapore would face Japanese-style stagnation after the burgeoning economic expansion that marked the country's history since independence. Mentos has given the nation's adults a new civic duty.

Update (8 Aug 2012): James Fallows one of our favorite American writers about China and East Asia has picked up on the ad sensation for the Atlantic. Hat tip: The Dish.

US Politics via Singapore

Former House Speaker and Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich. Image via NewsOne.

For anyone who didn't believe the 2012 presidential election in the United States was charging full steam ahead in 2011, votes are now underway in the Republican presidential primary. The next round of voting happens in South Carolina on 21 January, and big money is being spent on behalf of candidates jockeying for the nomination. Some of it comes from Singapore.

The casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, CEO of Las Vegas Sands, the company behind the Marina Bay Sands "integrated resort" in Singapore, has put $5 million (£3.26m) of support behind Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House of Representatives. The billionaire's company faced dire economic times in 2008, but the company's gambling ventures here and elsewhere in Asia have proven massively profitable.

Adelson has been transparently active in both American and Israeli politics for several years, and he undoubtedly will not cap his political spending at just $5 million this year.

More Christmas Decor

Thidwick (YouTube link) the fiber-optic reindeer makes spirits bright along Marina Bay in Singapore.

As a complement to an earlier post about tropical Christmas decorations, check out the silver reindeer sculptures downtown in Singapore. These whimsical cervids are just outside the new Marina Bay Financial Centre (already colloquially MBFC), overlooking the same bay as the casino and the streets that host the Singapore Grand Prix.

I can see there is a silvery, tinsel-ly artistic attempt here, but on second glance the reindeer actually looks like a rabbit with an impossibly spindly neck and legs with an even more impossible silver lichen rinceaux spewing from his head.

Also it's been rainy in Singapore this month. Today it rained for more than twelve hours straight. Viewers might notice some damp, shiny streets.