mrbrown and the Singapore Twitter war

I have returned from the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas for two weeks now and I can safely say my jet lag is almost over. I am now waking up at 6 a.m. instead of 4 a.m. daily.

As one gets older, one's body does not take kindly to such abuse. One used to be able to jump back into one's routine after being in a timezone that was 18 hours behind. One no longer has that ability. One also starts to refer to oneself in the royal third person.

I am working towards achieving my old timings of sleeping at 4 a.m. and waking at 9 a.m. to go to work. For now, I am still fading at 11 p.m. and talking gibberish to the wife when she asks me important life questions like "How was your day at work?"

Me: "The hamster likes to pee on the fdfhsdkdpfft… zzzzzzzz."

This has produced a slight strain on our relationship as we are unable to finish the movie we started watching a few nights ago.

Speaking of strained, the Internet in Singapore was abuzz with talk about a twitter war between a vulgar and satirical blogger known as Rockson Tan (Twitter: @rocksontan) -- we do not know if Rockson Tan is even his real name -- who blogs at rockson.blogspot.com and a young businessman Mr Ming Shen Cheo (Twitter: @bossming).

Mr Cheo is, however a real person, and is the boss of an Internet company. He also happens to be a leader in the youth wing of the ruling party (Young PAP).

Cheo had bought an autographed copy of MM Lee Kuan Yew's new book for S$10,000 (for charity) and in his interview with the papers, remarked that our founding father was "the equivalent of Nelson Mandela to Singaporeans."

This remark by itself met with some disagreement online and folks were already commenting that the connection was tenuous, at best.

Meanwhile, Rockson waded into the fracas and tweeted:

"Cheo Ming Shen say LKY is equivalent of Nelson Mandela to Singaporeans?!! Who is this c******kia?"

The censored bit was where Rockson used a vulgar word to describe Mr Cheo, roughly translated from the Chinese Hokkien dialect as "Vagina Boy."

Mr Cheo then launched into a rather long protracted series of tweets, seen here:

The flurry of tweets that sparked a 'verbal war.'

"@rocksontan I figure who the f**k are u is a bigger question? Oh wait nobody gives a f**k. So don't bother answering."

"@rocksontan a little birdy told me you live in bukit batok. since you don't want to meet me online, I will wait everyday at 5 pm with a rose"

"@rocksontan at the mrt station. Drop your moniker boy. It brings you more trouble than you know."

"@rocksontan correction. LKY puts slanderous fools like you in jail #WaysLKYislikeMandela."

Mr Cheo also started to dedicate songs to Rockson on Twitter, and that was when I felt things kind of took a creepy homo-erotic turn.

In all, Rockson tweeted about four times, seemingly ignoring the rants and tirade of words from the other party.

Only later did he finally talk about this in detail on his blog:

"Just came back from chionging (partying) at St James Power Station and Lawrence told me the last few days got a lot of people talking about me and the Cheo Ming Shen guy who say Lee Kuan Yew is like Nelson Mandela."

Now I have to warn you that Rockson's blog is full of vulgarity and more importantly, he writes in Singlish, that is, Singaporean English. And last time I checked, Google Translate does not yet do "Singlish" or "Rockson," so you will be forgiven if you do not totally get his brand of English or Hokkien dialect.

Suffice to say that this blogger was either a clueless chap who unwittingly pissed off a well-known entrepreneur and community leader, or he was an anonymous prankster who pulled off one heck of a troll job.

Mr Cheo has since apologized for his online outburst, seen in this report from the mainstream media:

Asiaone: YPAP leader regrets behavior in 'vulgarity war'

So who says Singapore is boring? All this drama online, all in the space of a day. I am certainly watching what I say online these days. For instance, I just bought a new mini-velo bicycle (it is a Raleigh bike in glorious red, with 20-inch wheels) and I was careful to just tweet about it, instead of posting photos of it on Facebook.

This is because the wife hardly reads my tweets but pretty much lives in Facebook, and I don't want to let her know I just added another bicycle to my fairly large stable.

If she knew, I would be in a world of hurt, and I am not talking about the virtual kind. I am sure she doesn't read my columns either, so I should be safe for a while.