Darwin's book costs the price of a flat

A copy of the most influential book published in the 19th Century was sold a few days ago for £103,250 in London. This first-edition copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species has been kept in a British family’s guest washroom for 40-50 years without anyone realising its value.

The amount is equivalent to S$235,000, enough to buy a small housing flat.

An anonymous telephone bidder purchased the book on the 150th anniversary of the original publication. It is Darwin’s seminal book that shared his theory of evolution with a lay audience.

I also own a copy, not the first edition, but a 2006 edition published by the Folio Society, for which I paid nearly £43 (£34.95 + £8 shipping):



Read more at NS Blog

Don't be idle when out of work

Being out of work is not vacation time. You should be engage in some useful task, even if you're not being paid, such as community voluntary work, a course of study, looking after a baby, or caring for a sick family member.

And when you start applying for a job, state clearly in your resume what you have been doing. There's nothing wrong with being out of work for whatever reason, so don’t apologise.

Prospective employers want to know how you used your time away from the workforce as opposed to why you were unemployed.

So, in your resume, don’t talk so much about the reason for losing your previous job – layoff, company closure, job termination, etc. Instead, highlight the fact that you are using this time period productively to acquire new skills, expand your industry knowledge, engage in worthwhile community service or cultivate your contacts.

Get busy

So, get busy. Search for activities or programmes that will gain you further experience, expertise and knowledge in the industry and profession that you are in (for instance, attending workshops, seminars, trade fairs and networking events).

Read more in NS Portal on the list of structured activities that can brighten up your resume.

The good ol' days were really horrible

Holly Jean, a Singapore blogger, just discovered that "the Internet is Killing Relationships!"

She writes that a part of her would have been happier if she were born a few generations earlier... before mobile phones and the internet.

In those days, relationships used to so much more stable and concrete, she says. "I look at my grandparents and my parents' generation and I see couples who stick together through thick and thin. There wasn't a question of quitting or wandering... there were much less distractions... you loved someone, you got married and that was your life."

Hooray for the good ol' days except that I would rather call it the bad ol' days. Take just one example: As a little kid growing up in Amoy Street, Chinatown in the 1950s, one thing that remains clear in my memory was the toilet system. We didn't have any flushing, all the shit deposited each day was collected in a metal bucket and taken away by labourers known as "night soil carriers".

Relationships were stable but could be brutal. My uncle -- highly educated, articulate, enlightened and intelligent -- had two wives and whenever he lost his temper, he would beat both of them equally. Most women had a raw deal and lived in a kind of information blackhole. They didn't know what was going on around them, and the only social connections they had were with their siblings, close relatives and 2-3 former school mates, and their immediate neighbours.

Men went out to work, and though there were no Internet to link them to everyone else from Timbuctoo to Tioman, they were pretty savvy in finding their own distractions -- cabarets at Great World Amusement Park, brothels at Keong Saik Street, dirty bars along Joo Chiat Road, and gambling and opium dens in every nook and cranny of Chinatown.

Diseases were rampant, from syphillis to TB, and fire broke out regularly in the overcrowded squatter areas.

When I visited the Chinatown areas of Jakarta or Kuala Lumpur, I was reminded of old Singapore, and was thankful that the island today is somewhat cleaner, more hygenic, and above all, the toilets can be flushed (except of course those found in kopitiams).

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